Training up to Open Data

This weekend we held the first International Sports (Open Data) Hackdays together with the Opendata.ch association and friends in the Open Knowledge network. Two days of intense data wrangling, spectacular visualizing and app-building on an unusual topic (for a geek crowd), one that concerns every fan, athlete and player. Sports can be anywhere, from a cultural backdrop easing international tensions to lowering our blood pressure after a stressful day. We had a look at sports data from governments, football clubs and associations, paper scorecards of devoted observers, and outputs from local position measurement technology used by sports scientists. For background and links to some of the open data used, see this blog post.

Our Basel participants – kind enough not to red card me out after the Internet went down, per IRC logs, for about the 14th time – were an energetic and focused bunch, wonderfully catered for in a unique location (thanks to sponsors). In the closing presentations with Sierre and Milan leading the way in a three-way video call, you could really hear people’s enthusiasm for what they were doing and sharing. The results are collecting on our wiki. Here are some tasters, linked to the projects:

In addition to these events, last week was the closing presentation of the first class of students taking a course in Open Government Data (in German) at the University of Bern. I was fortunate to have the chance to meet some of these teams towards the beginning. They succeeded in their journey and strengthened the local interest community with their development efforts and interactions with experts. Applause to professor Matthias Stürmer for putting the knowledge and experience into the right hands: