Visual access to the City of Bern’s 2012 budget thanks to the Bern Open Data Hackday

At the end of April, the first Bern Open Data Hackday took place at the University of Bern. For one afternoon, the roughly 40 participants programmed applications to visualise Open Government Data. Among other things, the finances of the City of Bern were put under the microscope.

The forty or so participants had at their disposal, among other things, data from the City of Bern’s 2012 budget and geodata from the Canton of Bern. These are some of the visualisations and applications that the teams began to develop at the hackday:

  • Budget 2012 City of Bern
    Inspired by the visualisation of Obama’s 2013 budget proposal created by the New York Times, the net expenditure in the City of Bern’s 2012 budget was visualised broken down by department and product group.
  • Mys Quartier
    The application “Mys Quartier”, Bernese German for “My neighbourhood”, aims one day to let its users find the City of Bern neighbourhood that suits them best on the basis of various search criteria.
  • Can I have a swim
    The idea behind this application is to let swimming and bathing enthusiasts know quickly and easily how warm or cold the rivers in the Canton of Bern are at the moment.
  • Bake Open Data
    To make the meaning and purpose of the Open Data Hackday tangible to the senses, especially for non-developers, this cake visualises nutrition data provided by the Federal Statistical Office, among others.
  • Wear Open Data
    The T-shirt for the hackday participants likewise visualises Federal Statistical Office data on the permanent resident population by canton.

All projects are – to the best of our knowledge and belief – documented in the wiki. The organisers thank all participants and the sponsors Puzzle ITC, Netcetera, basis06 as well as the experts of the Canton and City of Bern for their support, and look forward to the next steps towards more data democracy in Switzerland.

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