Sam Machin

Back in 2018 I got involved in an arts project called Pick Me Up and Hold Me Tight, by ZU-UK. The goal was to raise awareness of male suicide by making all 34,000 UK pay phones ring at 11am on New Years Day. Initially I backed their crowd funder as it seemed like a good cause and also I was curious how they were going to make that many phone calls technically. This is the story of how I ended up as the technical lead on the project and what we did to make a lot of phone calls in a very short space of time.

This will be a hands on workshop on how to build your own app on our phone system to play audio, make calls and connect to other things. (like your badge) We'll be using the low-code tool Node-RED so you don't need to be a developer, but a basic understanding of APIs would help. You will need a laptop, everything is done in a web browser, iPads/Tablets are OK but its quite tedious to use on a touch screen. Suitable for children under 14 if helped by an adult.