Open Data Day 2013 – Urban Data Challenge Zurich, Geneva, San Francisco

The past year has shown that open data is gathering momentum all over the world, with new open data catalogues in Europe, North America and Africa and more and more publicly available data from organisations such as the World Bank. On 23 February, citizens around the world will meet to see what can be done with this data.

In Zurich, the Opendata.ch association, the Swiss chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation, is not organising an actual hackday on this day, but a meetup. Our friends at Dock18, Institute for Media Cultures of the World, are making their premises in the Rote Fabrik available to us. All open data enthusiasts, as well as complete newcomers, are warmly invited to drop by and, over a beer, learn more about open data, ask questions and meet members of the Swiss community.

Urban Data Challenge – Take part in the data visualisation competition

What is the rhythm of your city? San Francisco, Geneva and Zurich are opening up their traffic data. Buses, trams, bicycles, pedestrians and cars make cities pulse, and growing urbanisation poses a number of challenges for cities: improving traffic and mobility is one of them. This is exactly where the population comes in. Thanks to technical progress and the trend towards open data and open source, individuals can actively help to find solutions.

The Urban Data Challenge invites data experts, programmers, developers, designers and artists – in short, creative minds around the globe – to take on these challenges and, by 31 March, present creative data visualisations that show how people move around in the three participating cities. The winners chosen by a jury can look forward to attractive prizes such as flights to one of the three cities and financial support from Fusepool, the European / Swiss data pool, to develop an app from their project. All information at urbandatachallenge.org

The programme on 23 February in Zurich
We meet at dock18.ch, in the Rote Fabrik. The programme:

19:00 – Welcome, introductions, what is “open data”?
19:15 – Introduction to the Urban Data Challenge: available data etc.
19:25 – Presentation of a project a team is working on
19:40 – Questions, discussion
20:15 – Livestream of the hackathon in San Francisco: interview with Chris Pagnilinan, SFMTA, Public Transportation Departement in San Francisco
20:30 – Questions, discussion, apéro
21:00 – End of the official programme

Come and see us – even spontaneously and halfway through. So that we can roughly estimate how many drinks and nibbles to provide, we would ask you, if possible, to register briefly on Techup.

The Urban Data Challenge is co-organised by swissnexsanfrancisco.org, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the Lift Conference, and opendata.ch.