Once again, Barcelona City Council is organising the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge, now in its fourth year. The aim of this competition is to bring the benefits of open data closer and to promote its use in the city's educational centres.

What does the challenge consist of? This year there are new changes!

Like last year's edition, this is a competition for the city's students to develop real projects of analysis and/or interpretation, based on the use of datasets included in the Open Data BCN portal.

The main objective of this initiative is for students to acquire a critical vision when proposing improvements related to the city and its citizens, while discovering the potential and usefulness of open data.

Un año más, el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona vuelve a organizar el Reto Barcelona Dades Obertes, que cumple ya su cuarta edición. Este concurso tiene como finalidad acercar los beneficios de los datos abiertos y promover su uso en los centros educativos de la ciudad.

What are the differences from the previous edition?

The exceptional circumstances we are currently experiencing mean that the Barcelona Dades Obertes 2021 Challenge has to be adapted to a new context that is committed to digitisation. Therefore, this will be the modality chosen both for the training of the teaching staff and for the presentation of the students' work.

Another novelty is that this year other open datasets can also be used, in addition to those published on the Open Data BCN portal.

Who can participate?

The competition is aimed at students in the 3rd and 4th year of ESO, as well as students in training courses at schools in the city of Barcelona.

In addition, those teachers can take advantage of a specific training plan on open data that focuses on learning general open data concepts, the Open Data BCN portal and tools for processing and representing data.

Procedure and deadlines for submission of applications

Participating schools must submit a single project chosen from all those prepared by their students. This will represent them and will be evaluated by the competition jury, according to the established criteria.

The deadline for the presentation of the works will open on 12 April 2021 and will end on 30 April 2021. The finalist projects will be announced on 18 May 2021.

The representatives of the 10 best projects will also be invited to the award ceremony to be held from 24 to 30 May 2021.

Discover some of the finalist projects of the 2020 edition

Those centres that wish to participate can draw inspiration from the work presented in previous years. In the first edition, which dates from 2018, the project "La cohesió social va per barris" (Social cohesion goes by neighbourhoods) was highlighted. This project analysed the social cohesion indices (SCI) of the different neighbourhoods of the city, thus allowing a comparison of inequalities. In the second edition, the first prize went to "La gentrificació als barris a Barcelona" (Gentrification in the neighbourhoods in Barcelona), which showed the process of urban transformation caused by strategic speculative actions.

The third edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes 2020 Challenge was held virtually because of the exceptional circumstances present at that time. In this case there was no winning project, but rather, as it was a unique edition, all the projects were considered finalists just for the fact of participating. All were evaluated by the jury of experts, whose assessment can be seen in this link.

How can I participate?

Although the deadline for submitting entries will not open until next year - 12 April 2021, as mentioned above -, several centres have already registered to participate in the specific training plan for open data of the Barcelona Open Data Challenge Fourth edition 2021. Registration for the training remains open and is being carried out via the Barcelona Education Consortium. Likewise, the centres can present a project to the competition without previous attendance to the training as it is not an obligatory requirement.

You can follow all the information about the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge on twitter under hashtag #OpenDataBCN. Also, if you have any doubt or question you can contact the organization through this form.