Exciting new data uses are bound to emerge whenever developers, data specialists and visualisation experts come into contact with people interested in the fields of energy. And this is just what happened during the first hackathon that Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts hosted with the Opendata.ch association at Grimseltor in Innertkirchen and the Friends of Nature centre in Mont Crosin. Daniel Studer, municipal councillor of Meiringen and member of Opendata.ch, welcomed the flock of creative minds and explained how the event relates to the regional energy sector. As one of the most important energy clusters in Switzerland, the Haslital has a strong interest in the findings from freely available data.
During an introductory round, moderator Marcel Altherr, co-head of Data Worlds at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, collected a range of project ideas. The most promising ones were then allocated to teams, which organised themselves quickly in order to delve into the topics. The challenge was to identify specific examples of how to extract value from data, a task that fits nicely with Data Worlds' interdisciplinary goal of developing innovative and sustainable forms of data use.
The results of the Energy hackathon are clearly something to be proud of. The project teams presented a broad range of data uses, including an outline of the ownership situation of various power plants, the merger of different energy database, a visualisation of the Energy Strategy 2050, all the way to an energy app for use at home.
Data Worlds is planning a further Hackathon with topics from the fields of health, sports, and tourism, and the co-heads of Data Worlds, Andreas Brandenberg and Marcel Altherr, would also welcome topics from other fields. Feel free to contact us at datenwelten@hslu.ch.
