Data Activists Demand: Mr. Blatter, Tear Down This Wall!

At the first International Sports Hackdays in Basel, Sierre and Milan, over 120 developers and designers, journalists and scientists, professionals and amateurs came together to prototype new approaches to make creative use of sports data. They built new types of hardware, new interfaces for fitness equipment and spectator apps, analysed Tour de France performances and FC Basel’s tactics, sport education policies, infrastructures and much more – and brought the spirit of open innovation and creative technology use to the field of sports.

Desktop of a participant, sketching and prototyping a Tour de France data visualization.

Project Secondlamp is visualizing the intensity and tendency of a football match with the color and brightness of two light bulbs.

While open government data has become an established force for transparency, efficiency and innovation in the public sector, the world of sports stands at a beginning: even though there’s so much passion, even though there’s so much potential, sports data often remain in the closed coffers of functionaries. Last weekend, the International Sports Hackdays were just one successful play to change this game, just one step towards opening up sports to data, and sports data to the world. Therefore: Mr. Blatter, tear down this wall, make FIFA’s data available to all!

Martin Rumo, Embedded Computer Scientist at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Sports in Magglingen explained the situation: “In elite sport, we collect more and more data every day, but to make it used and useful, we must build bridges between developers, designers and data scientists and the world of sports.”

With experts for athletic data from leading companies such as Deltatre or Technogym or from Switzerland’s National Sports Centre, with data visualization experts from companies such as Tuxtax or Interactive Things as well as academics, hackers and makers from leading local tech firms, the event attracted talents hardly ever brought together, a set of interdisciplinary innovators that proved to be extraordinarily productive – in building bridges, but also in making actual progress.

Plot helping to visualize and analyze the career of a road bicycle racer, using data from the Tour de France.

Sensors connected to a fooseball table, collecting data and corelating it to historic pro soccer matches – to make connections like “you’re playing like Liverpool-Basel today”.

The fascinating projects developed by the creative industry volunteers included hardware projects, software projects and data visualizations. They concentrated mainly on football (Secondlamp, second-screen match app BlitzPoll, ..), cycling (such as deep, historical analyses of Tour de France performances). The prototypes covered both personal apps like Sportee or BeatIt and the organizational level, e.g for the financial analysis of state-funded sport promotion as done in OptiSports or, specifically for Switzerland, the tool called Spörtle. In all cases, the approaches taken were extraordinarily inventive and of amazing quality: the creativity and innovation that could be experienced in these two days in Milan, Sierre and Basel was very impressive indeed.

The data sources used at the event are all available on datahub.io, a central open data repository. These datasets include crowdsourced data, data extracted from public websites as well official data releases made available to a broader audience for the very first time. For the future and the credibility of the big sports it will be crucial to define data policies that acknowledge the role of open data for society and the economy. To foster and facilitate the open publication and productive use of open sports data, the internatioal Open Knowledge organization is working on creating an official sports data working group.

For more information contact Hannes Gassert (event in Basel, coordination), Antoine Logean (event in Sierre) or Carlo Toccaceli Blasi (event in Milan).

Supporting Partners:

Media:

• Twitter: #hacksports
• Facebook: Photo album
• Open Data: Wenn sich Hacker einen Sport aus dem Sport machen, Netzwoche, 2014/05/27
• Training up to Open Data, blog.utou.ch, 2014/05/25