Saturday, March 3 is International Open Data Day, and the local community from Opendata.ch took the occasion to have a get-together in the capitol. We had interactive displays, project presentations and space for working on new ones; drinks and snacks at a child-and-adult-friendly central location. Brief summary reposted from my blog:
On Saturday we got together at the Effinger underground lab, ducking out of the snowstorm to hang up our coats and warm up to workstations and tablets running with open data projects, hot drinks and snacks. Led by @andreasamsler, one group discussed the sociopolitical and business landscape, talked about the Fun and Profit of Open Data, and brainstormed improved ways of building up the network in Switzerland. Plans were discussed for this year’s annual Opendata.ch conference and work going on in various channels. One result was an updated community calendar:
In the Makers corner, we booted up Raspberry Pi’s, converted elevation models to 3D printed “tangible statistics”, worked on smart+open city initiatives, and collected sensor data on open networks - producing a CSV recording of our ambient sound levels.
The third and quietest group was busy polishing their applications and data visualisations, getting ready to release early, and release often. We converged after a good hour to hear @mmmathew present his project water-fountains.org, an open data story in the making, and something you should try out now and follow as it develops!
@rosacastilloPhD walked us through a compelling climate data analysis and visualisation, from the deep end of filtering meteorological tables, to bias-challenging insights and publication formats.
And we got introduced by @novisadvenis to the awesome Powercoders IT academy. We traded stories of how to start a project with serious impact (YouTube), and shared life and data lessons (GitHub) in connecting to people and technology.
To round it off we collected takeaways from everyone in a spreadsheet. The complete data seen in the tweet below is shared in a CSV file here: opendataday2018-ch-bern.csv