The first half of 2016 was a very busy one for the Open Knowledge Swiss chapter, Opendata.ch. Just between April to June the chapter had 3 Hackathons, 15 talks, 3 meetups and 10 workshops. In this blog post we highlight some of these activities to update the Open Knowledge Community about our chapter’s work.
Main projects
Our directors worked on relaunching the federal Open Government Data portal and its new online handbook. We gathered and published datasets and ran workshops in support of various hackdays – and we migrated and improved our web infrastructure with better support of the open Transport API (handling up to 1.7 Mio requests per day!).
Main events
We held our annual conference in June, ran energy-themed hackdays in April and ran an OpenGLAM hackathon in July. Additionally, we supported two smaller regional hackathons in the spring, and a meetup on occasion of Open Data Day.
Challenges
Like other organisations in this space, our main challenge is redefining our manifesto and restructuring our operations to become a smoother running chapter that is more responsive to the needs of our members and community. This restructuring continues to be a challenge that we are learning from – and need to learn more about.
Successes
Our media presence and public identity continues to be stronger than ever. We are involved in a wide range of political and inter-organizational activities in support of diverse areas of openness, and in general we are finding that our collective voice is stronger and our messages better received everywhere we go.
Governance
We have had several retreats with the board to discuss changes in the governance and to welcome new directors: Catherine Pugin (ta-swiss.ch, datastory.ch), Martin Grandjean (martingrandjean.ch) and Alexandre Cotting (hevs.ch)
We are primarily working on a better overall organizational structure to support our community and working groups: starting and igniting new initiatives will be the next step. Among them will be the launch of business-oriented advocacy group called “Swiss Data Alliance”.
Looking ahead
We will soon announce a national program on food data, which includes hackdays and a funded follow-up/incubation phase for prototypes produced. And we are busy setting up a hackathon at the end of September with international scope and support called Hack for Ageing Well. Follow #H4AW for more info.
We are excited about upcoming cross-border events like #H4AW and Jugend Hackt, opening doors to development and research collaborations. Reach out through the Open Knowledge forums and we’ll do our best to connect you into the Swiss community!
Tech dude in creative district Switzerland, co-kickstarter of the Swiss Open Data Initiative and organizer of local Open Government Data events and projects. Member of the Open Knowledge Foundation's Working Group on Open Legislation and Local Group for Switzerland. Follow @loleg
