Rewired State, NixonMcInnes and Cogapp work together to help young hackers in and around Brighton

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NixonMcInnes and Cogapp have joined forces to support Rewired State, organisers of hack days. They are hosting a Brighton outpost during this year’s Young Rewired State hack week. Young Rewired State works with companies around the country for one week each year to provide mentors and a space for young web developers to get together and build web apps, visualisations and projects using open government data.

NixonMcInnes and Cogapp are looking for young web developers and designers between the ages of 13 and 18 to join them in their Brighton offices for the first week of August. They will get a chance to work as a team and build some incredible applications, get real world experience of working on the web and have the chance to be mentored by professionals. At the end of the week all the teams from around the country will meet up at a Festival of Code hosted at the Custard Factory, Birmingham’s revolutionary new arts and media quarter. There, they will camp over with other like-minded young people and present their projects to their peers and a panel of judges from the press, government and industry - including supermodel, actress and social business entrepreneur Lily Cole.

Teams from Brighton have achieved great success in the past, with one team winning the ‘The Government Should REALLY Do That’ category in 2011 for MyNHS - a way for patients to connect to their GP and surgeries more easily - and ‘Best In Show’ in 2010 for SocialLibrary - a social network for library users. The project aims to help kids achieve even greater success this year.

As well as asking young people to get involved, Cogapp and NixonMcInnes are looking for local web developers and designers to help mentor the participants throughout the week.

Emma Mulqueeny, director and co-founder of Rewired State, said:
“Our primary focus is to find, foster and challenge the young children and teenagers who are driven to teach themselves how to code. We offer them the support that is missing from schools and colleges by providing mentors, broadening their horizons and introducing them to a network of like-minded peers.

“The Festival of Code week is especially important as it allows the kids to realise that, as a geek, they are not alone and that coding is an important, promising and often lucrative career”.