Our next Data Expedition is taking place as part of a Saturday event in Zürich organised by the association Digitale Gesellschaft, a non-profit organization in Switzerland whose purpose is to preserve and promote a free, open and sustainable digital society. It is particularly committed to the protection and defence of fundamental and human rights in the digital space, as well as questions of consumer protection. Among its services, the association operates several Tor servers, and organizes events like the annual Winterkongress. Details, the full program and tickets for the event are here:
In einer Datenexpedition kannst Du lernen, mit frei verfügbaren “offenen Daten” zu arbeiten und große Mengen an Informationen aus legalen, authentischen Quellen zu sammeln. Überlege dir Fragen, die du an Themen, welche dir wichtig sind, stellen möchtest. Wir führen dann gemeinsam Recherchen auf Datenportalen und Suchmaschinen durch, führen dich in die Petitionierung und das Crowdsourcing (on- und offline) von Daten ein. Der Verein Opendata.ch veranstaltet Hackathons und Expeditionen in der ganzen Schweiz, wir suchen nach relativ aktuellen Datenquellen mit Potenzial für neue Anwendungen, die so frei wie möglich von Einschränkungen und Zugänglichkeitsfragen sind - im Idealfall nach der Open Definition. Aus den besten Daten, die wir gemeinsam entdecken, wollen wir hochwertige Datenpakete und/oder Online-Tools/Visualisierungen erstellen, die für die breite Öffentlichkeit zugänglich sind.
(ENGLISH) In a Data Expedition, you can learn to work with open data and collect vast amounts of information from legal, authentic sources. Think about some questions you would like to ask, issues you care about. We will run searches on data portals and search engines together, introduce you to petitioning for data and crowdsourcing on- and offline. The association Opendata.ch runs hackathons and expeditions throughout Switzerland, and we are looking for sources of data which are relatively up to date, with potential for new applications, and which are as free as possible of restrictions and accessibility issues - in the ideal case, open according to the Open Definition. From the best data we discover together, we aim to create high quality Data Packages and online tools accesible for the general public.
Quick reminder: the workshop described above is happening this weekend.
We just had a couple of terrific Open Energy Hackdays … and things are ramping up for the Open Education Hackdays in March as well as a special public event we’re about to announce.
What kind of ‚hot topics‘ will our digital society want to dive into on Saturday?
Karl der Grosse provided a wonderful setting for our Data Expedition, and the talks and ambiance of the #Winterkongress provided ample sparks to fuel the fire.
In the 30 minute brainstorming round which followed my introduction, we used the School of Data pipeline as a way of structuring community effort in improving data literacy and contributing to open data sources. The following topics for further exploration were suggested:
Data for calculating energy characteristics of cars (air resistance, rolling friction, engine efficiency)
Water temperature of rivers in real time
Land usage and ownership rights (town, municipality, canton, country)
Public money in relation to public transport (e.g. how much tax money goes to SBB’s Public Service)
Points of interest in Switzerland and whether they are dependent on tourism
Catalogue of discussion topics of young people in social media
Relationships between burnout/depression and employment status or industry
Thank you to the ~30 people who came to listen to the presentation and the 15 who participated in the workshop that followed upstairs, to all the volunteers, organizers and fellow attendees. Please add any feedback or questions via this forum, Etherpad, on social media: open source or closed.
