The Prototype Fund fosters inclusion, transparency and democratic control
We are excited to announce the six projects selected by the Prototype Fund jury. We are looking forward to supporting them to strengthen political participation in Swiss democracy!
- With baloti, people without voting rights can learn and experience Swiss direct democracy through mockup referendum votes in ten languages.
- businessresponsibility.ch strengthens transparency and democratic control over the human rights performance of Swiss companies, based on the new non-financial reporting obligation.
- Forum for Inclusion makes people without voting rights more visible in Swiss democracy by providing them with a platform to voice their opinions on popular votes.
- ImpACT collects and links open data on Swiss democracy with the interests of citizens and shows them how they can effectively participate in it.
- With VelObserver, residents can rate bicycle infrastructure and continuously check its planned expansion.
- With VoteLog, civil society organizations can assess the voting behavior of parliamentarians. The ratings are visualized and help to form public opinion.
At the same time, we are sad that we cannot support the other inspiring ideas submitted to the Prototype Fund. The jurors took the difficult decision after a critical, engaged and long discussion and we thank them for their time and continued efforts. We also thank the other applicants for giving the jury such an impressive range of projects to choose from and wish them the best of luck in developing their projects.
During the prototyping phase, we will try our best to create valuable opportunities to network and exchange ideas for example at the Demo Day, taking place on 24 February 2022 in Bern. There, the six projects will present their prototypes and share their experience.
Energy & Climate Hack
There’s no need to emphasize the need for action and innovation against climate change.
Transport, production, from habitat to consumption… around 70 % of global CO2 emissions are linked to the activities in cities.
The Energy & Climate Hack will take place in the city of Berne on August 31st and September 1st 2021, as a parallel event to the Decarbonizing Cities Conference. This hackathon throws a bridge between common issues and needs across borders and will bring together students from the United Kingdom and Switzerland as well as experts,hackers and people aspiring to make a difference. The multidisciplinary teams will look at smarter urban living through the lenses of energy efficiency and research for better decision making.
The beauty of this event is not only that it will allow us to explore new solutions, but also that it exemplifies how bottom-up locally embedded initiatives tackle global issues and how these proposals, tested at a local scale, can help our society beyond their original purpose.
This event is organised in collaboration with Swisspower and the British Embassy in Berne. It is open and free of charge, like all our other hackdays.
Please register until the August 17th 2021 and take part: you too can help shape the cities of the future!Find out more on http://www.energyclimatehack.ch/
Annual Report 2020
In this annual report, we present the impact strategy and recent activities of Opendata.ch. This document serves our members and community as an overview of our goals and operations and helps to track our impact during the year 2020.
For the first time, our annual report is structured in accordance with the Social Reporting Standard (SRS 2014). With this new format, we aim to reflect, structure and report on our work in a transparent manner.
We’re more than happy to hear your feedback and learn how we might improve the structure next year.
GLAMhack 2021 – Creative and Fun Hacking
The 7th edition of the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon, carried out as an online event and organized with the help of the ETHZ Library, took place from April 16th to 17th. Over the span of two days, 17 new projects using cultural data were created. With about 75 active participants, the online event was a full success.
While we were sad that this year’s GLAMhack once again couldn’t be in person, the excitement of the GLAM community about the yearly Hackathon remained undeterred. The mood, atmosphere, and collaborative spirit surpassed our (already high) expectations. It was great to see many familiar faces from past hackathons and many new ones. The results of this year’s hackathon are presented below:
helvetiX: An XR guide to Helvetia aims at providing an immersive Virtual Reality guide for any Roman merchant or legionary when travelling to ancient Helvetia. (In Latin, of course.) The project is based on the Peutinger Map, an illustrated itinerarium (ancient Roman road map) showing the layout of the cursus publicus, the road network of the Roman Empire.
The Collection Chatbot: Silverfish is an interactive chatbot which guides you through the collection of the Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (Foundation for Art, Culture and History) and recommends objects based on user input. This creates a narration-driven experience of the collection. You can try the prototype on Telegram: https://t.me/SilverFishGlamBot
Another project dealt with The spatial evolvement of a Museums’ collection. The project maps the places of origins of the Museum der Kulturen Basel’s collection and thus gives an overview of the collecting habits of the museum over the past 121 years: https://hackathon21.netlify.app/
A walk through Zurich around 1910 lets you experience a stroll along Langstrasse based on the pictures of photographer Friedrich Ruef-Hirt (1873-1927). You can watch the video of the stroll online.
1971 and all that – Women’s Right to Vote in Switzerland analyzed relevant newspaper articles to see how the discourse around women’s suffrage changed over time.
Deploy Looted-Art Detector is an evolution of the Looted-Art Detector created at GLAMhack 2020 which helps find looted art in art collections. You can try it out here: https://artdata.pythonanywhere.com
Another project from last year which was further developed was Culture In-Time 2. Using linked open data the project lets you discover past and future events.
The team around Nachtschicht 21 a 3D, Virtual Reality & Art Exhibition created a VR space with contemporary artworks by young swiss artists to accompany the gallery exhibition.
Wikidata Tutorial Factory is a website featuring Wikidata tutorials for heritage institutions. During the hackathon several tutorial scripts as well as tutorials in four languages were created.
Another project working with Wikidata and other Wiki projects was the WikiCommons metadata analysis tool which compares the metadata of the source system of a GLAM institution (e. g. E-Pics Image Archive Online) and Wikimedia Commons and lists the differences.
Archived-Data-Driver helps understand data by creating a tool that could run on open data providers’ servers, but also on a local computer, which automatically generates an overview of the files, images and along with some summary statistics.
The Pellaton Experience is a project to map over sixteen hours of interviews with dance historian Ursula Pelleton in a non-linear way and to enrich it with supplementary information.
The St. Galler Globus is another project that wants to enrich existing material with digital solutions to make the Globus’ narratives and historical context accessible to a broader audience interested in “Scientainment”.
By Making digitised scores audible, one project made digital scores available in e-rara and other databases more accessible by creating audio files to not only read them, but also listen to them.
Another project using e-rara worked on making formulas in old scientific titles more readable and searchable. e-rara: Recognizing mathematical Formulas and Tables helps OCR (optical character recognition) to also transcribe the formulas.
heARTful – Art & Emotions lets people judge the emotions of people portrayed in paintings. The project also lets you see how other people judge the painting and gives additional information about the paintings and their authors.
The scene lives! The demoscene that is. An open dataset of demoscene production was created to showcase demoscene works from the beginning to current times.
These projects are at various stages of development, ranging from sketches to fully-fledged prototypes; we are curious to learn about their future development and are looking forward to next year’s GLAMhack.
Let’s Hack
Spring is waking us up from our winter-lockdown-sleep and our minds are ready for action. Join us for one (or more) of our hackdays. Whether you’re interested in culture, tourism, journalism, energy, climate, farming, or sports, or if you’re just a fan of open data, we have a hackathon planned for you.
HSLU Open Data Tourism Hackdays – Wed. 28th to Thu. 29th of April
During this event, the tourism industry takes the chance to tackle its structural issues and to recognize unexploited potentials. We would be delighted to see you there and build upon the findings of the past years. So please take part! The challenge presentations & Team building session took place on Wednesday 21st of April at 17.00, see the Challenge pitches here and Sign up now!
The Rethink Journalism Hackathon – Fri. 7th to Sat. 8th of May (online)
Over the past decades, journalism has been continuously reinventing itself. Small and innovative media establishments charge into battle for attention and users. Come and join us in the quest to stimulate and promote progressive journalism. Help us in the fight against fake news and hate speech. Be part in overturning information monopolies and join to re-shape the future of journalism. Sign up now!
The “Energy & Climate Hacks” – Tue. 31st August to Wed. 1st of September 2021.
Cities are responsible for 70% of the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions and they play a central role when it comes to efforts on global decarbonisation and pushing forward the local energy transition. In the lead-up to the global climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, a two-day hackathon will bring together young talents, pioneers, innovators, and companies from Switzerland and the UK to tackle these important challenges. Sign up now!.
….Save the dates
– The Open Farming Hackdays 2021 will take place from Fri. 3rd to Sat. 4th of September 2021
– The Open Energy Data Hackdays 2021 are announced from Fri. 24th to Sat. 25th of September 2021
– The Smart City/Region Lab – Lenzburg – 2021 is very likely to take place in October 2021
– The HSLU – Open Data Sports Hackdays are scheduled from Fri. 26th to Sat. 27th of November 2021
And…the one you missed…:
GLAMhack 2021 hosted by the ETH Library in Zurich – Fri. 16th to Sat. 17th of April (online)
Once a year, the GLAMhack experiments how cultural data and content can be used for research purposes, for web and mobile apps, in the context of Wikipedia, for artistic re-mixes, or for other forms of re-use. This year, our hackathon will take place online. There will be an onboarding session on 9 April (evening) and an opening event with presentations, workshops, and a poetry slam performance on April 15th. Sign up now!
