Evento
The Junta de Castilla y León has launched their third edition of the open data contest. Its objective is "to recognize the development of projects that use datasets from the Open Data portal of the Junta de Castilla y León". In short, it look for boosting open data and re-users community in Castilla y León.
On this occasion, 3 categories have been established:
- Ideas Category: Ideas to create a study, service, website or application for mobile devices, using datasets from the Open Data portal of the Junta de Castilla y León. It give an opportunity to those people or entities that, without having the technical capacity, the resources or the time to implement a project with open data, do have the idea.
- Products and Services Category: Projects that are accessible to all citizens via the internet through a url. These projects must consist of studies, services, websites or applications for mobile devices, using datasets from the Open Data portal of the Junta de Castilla y León.
- Educational Resource Category: Creation of new and innovative open educational resources (published with Creative Commons licenses) using data sets from the Open Data portal of the Junta de Castilla y León to help teaching in the classroom.
A jury, made up of representatives of the Autonomous Administration and the sponsoring company, GMV, will choose the eight winners based on a series of criteria, such as its usefulness, originality or public value. Three prizes will be awarded to the Ideas Category, three to the Products and Services Category, and two to the Educational Resources Category made by educational centers. In the first two categories (Ideas and Products and Services) an award will be reserved for students enrolled in the courses 2017-2018 or 2018-2019.
The prizes will consist of an economic endowment (12,000 euros to be distributed) and individualized advice on business development, provided by the Business Development Area of the Institute for Business Competitiveness of Castilla y León (ICE):
- Ideas Category: First prize: € 2,000 / Second prize: € 1,000 / Prize for students: € 1,000.
- Products and Services Category: First prize: € 3,000 / Second prize: € 1,500 / Prize for students: € 2,000.
- Educational Resource Category: First prize: 1,000 euros in technological material / Second prize: 500 euros in technological material.
The candidatures can be presented at the electronic headquarters of the Regional Government of Castilla y León: Open Data Contest of the Community of Castilla y León (2018). The contest is open to both natural and legal persons, with the exception of public administrations and those individuals or legal entities that have participated directly or indirectly in the call. The deadline to submit the projects is from December 21, 2018, to February 10, 2019.
Evento
In 2018, the cities of Barcelona and Kobe celebrate 25 years of twinning agreement, and to commemorate it, both municipalities have launched the World Data Viz Challenge 2018 Barcelona-Kobe.
Promoting policy improvements through data visualizations
A similar challenges have been launched in each city: participants will have to generate visualizations based on open data to show the challenges of an intelligent city, which can be useful to optimize public policies. In the case of Barcelona, it will be necessary to use at least one of the more than 440 datasets included in Open Data BCN. These datasets are classified into five major themes: city and services, territory, population, administration and economy and business.
A group of experts will select the 10 best datavizs or infographics. These datavizs will be presented at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2018, on November 14. This international event has been held in Barcelona since 2011, with the aim of promoting innovation and identifying opportunities to create smart cities that respond to the needs of citizens.
Pre-registration is open until October 26
Any citizen can participate. It is only necessary to have "the skills and capabilities to understand, analyze and visualize open data”
Those interested in joining the World Data Viz Challenge 2018 Barcelona-Kobe must pre-register before October 26, by filling out this form. The deadline to submit the visualizations will be from October 2 to November 2 through this other form. The works, which may be presented in Catalan, Spanish or English, must be carried out by a maximum of two people. You can consult the full terms of participation in this link.
With this challenge, the Barcelona City Council seeks to encourage the use of open data from smart cities and tools and techniques for analyzing data and visualizations. In addition, the contest will also serve to develop the critical thinking of citizens, who are a fundamental piece to promote policies that improve our environment.
Evento
The Barcelona’s city council organizes, for the second consecutive year, the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge, a contest aimed at promoting the knowledge and use of open data in the schools of Barcelona city. This year's edition is organized, like the previous year, with the collaboration of Consorci d'Educació de Barcelona and Centro de Recursos Pedagógicos Específicos de Soporte a la Innovación y la Recerca Educativa (CESIRE); and Barcelona Activa S.A. were added.
The contest is aimed at students who are preferentially in the 3rd and 4th grades of ESO and from formative cycles, prioritizing public centers, through their teaching staff. By analyzing the environment, students will develop real projects that can help improve the city. With this objective, they must use the information published in the Open Data BCN website, which currently has more than 440 data sets on topics as diverse as housing, population, environment, accident, complaints, transport, culture and leisure, trade or science and technology, among others.
Every centre will participate only with one project. All proposals will be evaluated by leading university professors and professionals from open data world. The 10 projects with the best score will be presented at a public act, where students will have to defend their proposal in front of the jury and audience.
In addition, teachers from participating centers can enroll in a specific Training Plan about open data. The objective is to learn about data available in Open Data BCN and the analysis and visualization tools used for its treatment. In this way, teachers will be able to train and support the students to develop their projects.
The bases are already published and those centers that want to participate must fill the following document and make registration before October 1st. The students will develop the projects until the month of March. The final presentation act will take place on April 30, 2018.
Great success in the first edition
The first edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge was held during the 2017-2018 academic year. The project, which was conceived as a pilot, was a great success, and this has led to this second edition.
The presented projects addressed various topics, such as the analysis of traffic accidents, the location of free wifi points or housing access. Although it was not easy to make a decision due to the high quality of all the works, the Institut Ferran Tallada won the first prize thanks to its project La cohesió social va per barris, where social cohesion indexes from different neighborhoods of the city were analysed, allowing a comparison of inequalities.
The award was a guided tour in the Media-TIC building, the hub of Barcelona's economic and innovation strategy, as well as a personalized data analysis workshop.
Open data as a training mechanism
With this initiative, Barcelona’s city council takes a step further in the introduction of knowledge and use of open data in the educational field, as other projects such as Escuelas Comciencia are also doing.
The use of open data in education allows students to work with real information, and understand what the actual results and benefits are on aspects that affect their daily activity, which contributes to foster critical thinking and citizen awareness. In this way, it contributes to develop their citizens’ spirit, and their implication in the social and economic reality that take place around them.
Evento
The Basque Government organizes two open data competitions with the help of the Provincial Councils of Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa and the city councils of Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastián and Vitoria-Gasteiz. The objective is to promote the culture of reuse information generated by the local public administrations. For this reason, the projects must use at least one of the datasets belonging to the following catalogs: Open Data Euskadi, Gipuzkoa Irekia, Bilbao Open Data, Open Data Vitoria-Gasteiz, Open data of the City of Donostia-San Sebastián and Open Data Bizkaia.
The registration period begins on May 22th. You can register on the website of each of the contests, free of charge, until June 30.
Next, we tell you the main characteristic of each contests.
Ideas contest
The ideas contest seeks innovative ideas to create a service, study, web application or mobile application, using some of the aforementioned open datasets. The two best ideas will be awarded 4,000 and 2,000 euros respectively.
This contest is aimed at students, professionals, companies or organizations from all sectors. To participate, it is not necessary to have technical knowledge, but an idea of what could be achieved using open data.
Application contest
On the contrary, the application contest focuses on real projects that provide any type of service, study, web application or mobile application, using the open datasets previously indicated. In this case, the economic endowment is 8,000 euros, to be divided between the first and the second classified (5,000 and 3,000 respectively). Due to they are real projects, in this case programming knowledge will be necessary.
Both in the ideas contest and the applications contest, the projects will be selected based on a series of criteria, such as its usefulness - taking into account the magnitude of the problem it solves and the number of potential users -, its potential to generate business and obtain profitability, its social value or its innovative character, among other factors.
The commitment of the regional and local administrations in favor of the reuse of open data is driving an increasing number of meetings of this type, where technology and open data are combined to create solutions that add value to society.
Join in and participate!