A Clear View of Public Finance Data: make.opendata.ch Hackdays in March in Bern and Sierre

We are organising the fourth national make.opendata.ch Hackdays together with the University of Bern and the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais on 22 and 23 March 2013 on the topic of finance and procurement. On the evening before, politicians and finance experts from the administration will discuss the possibilities and limits of open budget data in Bern.

Caption: The City of Bern’s budget freed from its paper and PDF shackles.

On Friday and Saturday, 22 and 23 March 2013, the national Hackdays on finance and procurement will take place at the University of Bern and simultaneously at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais in Sierre. Besides the fun of working together with financial figures, the goals of these Hackdays are revealing visualisations and innovative combinations of data. More than 100 participants are expected.

On the evening before, Thursday 21 March 2013, politicians and finance specialists will critically examine the topic “Possibilities and limits of visualised financial data” in a panel discussion at the University of Bern. Both the panel discussion and the Hackdays are free of charge. Designers, software developers and, in particular, people with ideas can register for the Hackdays now: http://make.opendata.ch

Call for public financial data

Authorities and other public and private organisations are called upon to make their financial and procurement data available in machine-readable formats (XML, CSV, Excel if need be) for these fourth Switzerland-wide make.opendata.ch Hackdays. Those interested can contact Opendata.ch board member Matthias Stürmer (matthias.stuermer@opendata.ch). Representatives of the Canton of Bern and the cities of Zurich and Bern have already agreed to make their financial data available for the Hackdays.

The City of Bern leads the way

The foundation for the already well-known, impressive visualisation of the City of Bern’s budget was laid at the first Bern Open Data Hackday last April. The visualisation can be found at http://bern.budget.opendata.ch. With a few adjustments, the application can also be fed with the financial data of other cities, cantons and the Confederation.

Background and registration – http://make.opendata.ch

Contact Bern – matthias.stuermer@opendata.ch, +41 76 368 81 65
Contact Sierre – antoine.logean@opendata.ch, +41 79 351 84 82