Successful Smart Regio Lab Lenzburg Seetal 2025

From Friday to Saturday, 21 to 22 March 2025, the Smart Regio Lab Lenzburg Seetal took place for the second time at the Bleicherain school building in Lenzburg. The two-day event was convened by the City of Lenzburg and Lebensraum Lenzburg Seetal. They were supported organisationally and technically by Opendata.ch.

Thanks to the ongoing process of digital transformation, ever larger amounts of data are becoming available to the public administration. These data (Open Government Data) could feed exciting analysis options and make work easier for the administration, but also power applications and developments for the benefit of the common good (public value). There is no shortage of ideas for using these data. Without the necessary programming skills and appropriate tools, however, it is very difficult for laypeople and experts from the administration and local businesses to assess the feasibility of desirable products and tools.

This is where the Smart Regio Lab came in. As part of a hackathon, volunteer participants worked on five challenges formulated by the City of Lenzburg and the Lebensraum Lenzburg Seetal association. They worked in interdisciplinary teams made up of programmers, designers and subject-matter experts. With the help of open source tools, they developed concepts, initial approaches to solutions and even innovative prototypes for these current, real-world challenges from the digital sphere.

The City of Lenzburg, for example, would like to make the many sensor data (air and water quality, traffic data, etc.) collected in the city area available to the public. Bringing these data together in a “dashboard” (a digital overview) was accordingly one of the challenges for the hackathon.

Another exciting challenge was developing a mobile phone app in which forestry service staff out in the forest district could record upcoming tasks with georeferences on a digital map, prioritise them and later export them to the existing geographic information system (GIS) at the push of a button – a digital notebook on the smartphone, as it were, without having to boot up a PC in the middle of the forest.

For the first time, two workshops also took place in parallel with the hackathon. Led by Mayor Daniel Mosimann and City Councillor Beatrice Taubert respectively, representatives from politics, the administration, business and research worked intensively on the topics “Revitalising the old town and ring zone” and “Health in old age”.

André Golliez, President of the Swiss Data Alliance, guided participants through the good 30 hours of work at the Smart Regio Lab. The teams mostly pursued conceptual approaches, as became clear at the final presentations late on Saturday afternoon. Manuel Bruder, Head of Digital Transformation in Lenzburg, who was jointly responsible for the event on the city’s side, was more than satisfied: “All the teams did a great job! We have made important progress on every topic. We can build on that.”