Open Data Day 2021: hackathon - Event Report

Date
Saturday 6 March 2021
Time
10:00 (EEST)
Location
Online, Lithuania (Europe, Middle East & Africa)
Organisers
Dr.Martynas Mockus, Vilnius Legal Hackers

On Saturday 6th March 2021, the eleventh Open Data Day took place with people around the world organising hundreds of events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. Thanks to generous support from key funders, the Open Knowledge Foundation was able to support the running of more than 60 of these events via our mini-grants scheme.

This event received an Open Knowledge Foundation mini-grant thanks to support from Microsoft.

How did your event celebrate open data?

We organised an Open Data Day hackathon opening event and we have created a Discord server for hackathon participants. The hackathon is expected to be held until 22nd of March. We have requests from Mykolas Romeris University to leave the Discord server for students to practice tasks related to open data.

Lessons learned from your event

  1. The hackathon did not attracted participants as expected. We have found, that people were interested (e.g. in FB 70 checked "going"), but the opening ceremony was watched live only by ±20 people. At the moment the opening ceremony has been watched 120 times. However, those who filled the hackathon registration form was less than 10, and we had only one idea presented by participants. Still the hackathon is not closed, registration is open, and mentors are ready to provide assistance till 22nd of March.
  2. The topic "innovate the "death sector"" is not enough fancy for young people. However, it attracted the senior lawyer of Lithuanian Post (the first time in hackathon).
  3. There is not enough open data sources for innovations of cemetery care, data is not structured, not available. However, we have presented the idea based on DBPedia, how to create datasets by using crowdsourcing technologies.
  4. We attracted four speakers to the opening ceremony of the hackathon:
    a) Eimantas Norkūnas - he is open data enthusiast, have developed 3 successful open data based projects and even one project influenced a ban of commercial fishery. Eimantas have shared his experience and explained what data is going to be opened by Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Lithuania.
    b) Ernesta Seiliūtė - she is legal design professional, explained how legal design could help to solve problems, especially by innovating "death sector". She presented valuable examples, and highlighted points, what to take in mind, when we create applications/services for users.
    c) Dr Marius Laurinaitis - presented how GDPR is used to block open data initiatives, discussed legal aspects of working/collecting of data. Presented that it is save to collect data of dead people, but we need not to forget the principle of Honour to the Dead.
    d) Dr Martynas Mockus - presented how crowdsource technologies could be used to create open data sets, also presented problems in "death sector".

Why do you love Open Data Day?

It is an opportunity to promote open data and engage people to open data related activities.

Did you or your team produce any resources (datasets/tools/maps/code/etc) during your Open Data Day celebrations?

We have developed discord server (in lithuanian) with the information needed to solve the hackathon issues. For joining the server, please send request to [email protected]

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