Tourism in Switzerland is an important economic engine and key to many Swiss incomes. Our members represent local companies, leading institutions and industry organizations in Switzerland’s tourism field.
Who are we?
We are students currently seeking our master’s degree in Applied Information and Data Science at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts.
We are eager to join forces with YOU and all the other developers, designers, economists, engineers, travel enthusiasts and special sauces out there.
Join us now on the 29.11 - 30.11.2019!
Be prepared for an inspirational location in Lucerne, plenty of brainfood, exciting datasets, a motivated crowd and diverse know-how and knowledge from all around the world. For more information and free registration click here ->
Slides from my presentation at HSLU this morning are available here. We talked about the Internet data economy, how to run a good hackathon, and an introduction to how we use Frictionless Data standards for publishing open data. As we did in preparation for the first hackdays, we plan to collect data sources on dribdat and create as many Data Packages as we can. Here are some useful resources if you’d like to help:
Some initial challenges have been posted, and the team is looking for more open datasets to promote for the upcoming hackdays. Drop us a line if you’ve got something to share!
OKAY! We kicked things off yesterday on location at Laboratorium Lucerne, and in a dedicated Slack set up by the org team. 12 really interesting challenges were presented, making clear the motivation of the experts, a number of whom were really getting into the spirit of opening data for the good of the public - and the trade, of course. The projects in the order of their final pitches:
A humble recap
At first I thought it was a pity that nobody took on the Fair Price Initiative challenge, but the activist spirit of Visitor’s tax - the first project presented - more than made up for it. Likewise, I thought that the unanswered Data quality challenge had obvious appeal. I liked all the presentations (sadly missing the last one due to having to leave on time), though it’s hard to be partial when you’re rooting for your team …and if you didn’t have a team, what were you doing at the Hackdays?
This team did a great job adding more open data to Water Fountains, and we chatted throughout the hackathon. This initiative is exemplary in that it addresses an important issue, is well anchored in the local community, has boatloads of sophisticated tech behind it, while being very accessible to novices and even non-technical contributors.
Quite an interesting presentation about open geodata pipelines and attention to quality. I liked the solution that was being advocated, and the fact that the team was very clear about architectural and stability issues that are the basis of any high quality app. Lots to learn.
And of course I had a lot of fun with this team, pushing the envelope of open data urbanism.
We researched the field with guidance from a well informed expert (and a pile of scientific papers), dived into several challenging and complementary open data sources, discussed ethical and privacy implications of the data at length, looked into crowdsourcing (open hardware and open development) possibilities, did a lot of storming and forming, hacked together a machine learning project with a lot of math and correlation/causation debate, and produced a very basic app that can be used to present the case to a non-technical audience. You can find our presentation here. Kudos to the team, especially to the two guys who came all the way from central Germany only to support the hackathon …something about a niche sector of Swiss tourism in the air
Congratulations to all the teams! Check out all the results at the usual location.
It is always awesome to see so much commit-ment and raw motivation in the room. Check out the recap post at opendata.ch. Now that we are all well rested after the hackathon weekend, there is lots more open source and open data hacking to do in the month of December. Our local communities do virtual events, which you can easily get involved in:
As for open tourism data, we will work on ensuring your results help the topic gain traction in Switzerland and beyond. Keep posting updates so we can boost any of the projects from last weekend. Let us know if you need tips on hosting, funding, technology and MOAR DATA
As announced in the wrap up, our next big Hackdays will be taking place in Aargau this spring. Browse this forum for more announcements and activities. Peace out
All the juicy details can be 
