Forum, Innovations, Internet, Latvia, Technology

Open data is freely available information that everyone has the right to use to create new products and services. Participants of the hackathon are invited to create innovative apps useful to municipalities, their residents, businesses or tourists, using Latvia's Open Data Portal data sets.

Hackathon organizers invite local government representatives and entrepreneurs to apply for the hackathon, as well as 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 use of open data. More information and registration (until October 14): https://www.lata.org.lv/atverto-datu-hakatons-2019?lang=en Participation is free of charge. The working languages of the event are Latvian and English.

Hackathon will be a unique opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds who do not meet on a daily basis – representatives of municipalities, opinion leaders and technology experts.

"Let's implement the principle of data openness – “Everything is open, exceptions need to be justified," this is stated in the Government Declaration. In order to become an open data country, we need to demonstrate and prove the utility of data opening. Hackathon is a great way to show the benefits of using open data. We invite municipalities to get involved – both publishing data for the hackathon and in the hackathon itself, gaining new experiences and ideas on how to make the municipality work more open, accessible and understandable, ” says Mikus Jēkabsons, a specialist in the Public Services Department at the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development.

Janis Treijs, Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), invites local governments to be active and open data sets: “Latvian municipalities have interesting, important public data, and we have not fully understood the potential of these data until now. We hope that during the hackathon, we will be able to see the open data in action by combining municipal datasets with those held by the state, as well as adding separate datasets of our supporters from the private sector. ”

Hackathon participants will be advised by experts and mentors, including geospatial data expert Michal Kepka (Chezh Republic), Open data and technology expert Florian Loretan, VR expert Mareks Zirdziņš, data vizualization expert Nika Aleksejeva, open data experts Mkus Jēkabsons and Toms Ceļmillers as well as other experts.

Winning team will receive EUR 1000 from Tieto Latvia, 2nd place – EUR 750 euro from HERE Technologies and 3rd place – EUR 500 from eazyBI.

The Open Data Hackathon for Municipalities will take place at Valmiera, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Terbatas Street 10. The hackathon is 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, 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.