Open data hackathon planned for Valmiera

Take note – story published 4 years ago

The first “Open Data Hackathon for Municipalities 2019” will be held from October 18th to October 19th in the northern Latvian city of Valmiera. The 24-hour creative hackathon aims to raise public and IT entrepreneurial awareness of the potential of open data, organizers say.

"Open data is freely available information that everyone has the right to use to create new products and services. Participants of the hackathon are invited to create innovative apps useful to municipalities, their residents, businesses or tourists, using Latvia's Open Data Portal data sets," according to publicity material.

"We invite local government representatives and entrepreneurs to apply for the hackathon, as well as software developers, statisticians, data analysts and researchers, journalists, data community activists, visualization experts, students and others interested in creative and technological business ideas based on use of open data," organizers say.

Participation is free of charge. The working languages of the event are Latvian and English.

Janis Treijs, Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), invited local governments to be active and open data sets, saying: “Latvian municipalities have interesting, important public data, and we have not fully understood the potential of these data until now. We hope that during the hackathon, we will be able to see the open data in action by combining municipal datasets with those held by the state, as well as adding separate datasets of our supporters from the private sector.”

Hackathon participants will be advised by experts and mentors, including geospatial data expert Michal Kepka (Czech Republic), Open data and technology expert Florian Loretan, VR expert Mareks Zirdziņš, data vizualization expert Nika Aleksejeva, open data experts Mkus Jēkabsons and Toms Ceļmillers as well as other experts will be on hand to help.

The winning team will receive EUR 1000 from Tieto Latvia, 2nd place – EUR 750 euro from HERE Technologies and 3rd place – EUR 500 from eazyBI.

More information and registration (until October 14) is avilable at: https://www.lata.org.lv/atverto-datu-hakatons-2019?lang=en

The Open Data Hackathon for Municipalieties will take place at Valmiera, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Terbatas Street 10. The hackathon is organized by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development in cooperation with the Latvian Open Technologies Association. Partners and sponsors of the event – Valmiera Development Agency, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Central Statistical Bureau, Ministry of Health, Plan 4 All project, Tieto Latvia, HERE, eazyBI, Data School, Valmiera and Jelgava municipalities, Kuldiga and Cesis region municipalities, Wunder, Riga Technical University, Vividly, Augmented Urbans project, Valmiera Theater, Aldaris, Tiamo Group, Coca-Cola HBC, Linux Center.

 

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