The first “Open Data Hackathon for Municipalities 2019” was held from October 18th to October 19th in Valmiera, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. The 24-hour creative hackathon aimed to raise public and IT entrepreneurial awareness of the potential of open data.
In total, 14 teams participated in the hackathon. The main winner was the team “EduFuture” that offered a solution to evaluate schools in Latvia and to forecast the possible future, taking into account the number of students, exam results, achievements and other important data. Second place was given to the team “Spriditis Club”, which created an interactive map with explanatory data to understand why people move where they do and how to better organize municipalities work around those areas. The third place went to the team "Find Your Doctor" and a search engine for information on available doctors for rare disease patients.
Open data is freely available information that everyone has the right to use to create new products and services. Participants of the hackathon were local government representatives and entrepreneurs, 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 the use of open data.
Hackathon participants were advised by experts and mentors, including geospatial data expert Michal Kepka from the Chezh Republic and local experts Una Krutova and Dāvis Kļaviņš, Open data and technology experts Florian Loretan from Germany and Tuula Löytty from Finland, innovation expert Andrus Kurvits from Estonia, municipal data expert Jānis Kauliņš, etc.
The hackathon was 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, Nordic Council of Ministers Office in Latvia, 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.
