Watch the lecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6vUe-ACaZ8&list=PL6DDzoHu1cx1ozmghXXCgzwHF8Ln8Tlv8 The ODI Labs team work hard to evolve and create state-of-the-art technology tools, standards and techniques to help people work better with open data. But who are they? What excites them? What weird and wonderful things to they get up to in their free time? During this geek fest of all geek fests, ODI Head of Robots Sam Pikesley will bring us lessons from a side-project involving a shed, a solar panel, a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a, in his own words, “massively over-engineered solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist”, and ODI Web Developer Stuart Harrison will show us how he’s created a ‘quantified son’, among other things. About Sam and Stuart Sam Pikesley has over 10 years’ experience as a Linux SysAdmin, and was doing DevOps before he even knew DevOps was a thing. Before becoming Head of Robots at the ODI, he worked for a number of startups including, most recently, Amee, where he helped open up a substantial chunk of environmental data. Stuart Harrison’s background is in local government and the public sector, training first as a journalist, and then working at Lichfield District Council as web developer. During his time at Lichfield, Stuart says he was “a leading light in the world of of open data, starting one of the first local authority data catalogues and building Ratemyplace, one of the first websites to publish local authority food safety inspections, and the first to offer an open API”.