Readers of my blog may have noticed I've been on the frontlines of the Open Data movement since early last year. It's been a great ride, and I feel like we're at the precipice right now of either launching full-speed ahead into making digital transparency at the grassroots an important force in Switzerland - or watch the interest fizzle out as people go back to work, life, and community involvement as usual. Find out how we fared in our latest attempt to stir things up at the grassroots!

Soon after we began planning our Zurich/Geneva hackathon, Dr. Matthias Stürmer - an open source governance expert, State Councellor for Bern, board member at OpenData.ch, highly respected fellow geek resident and a friend since we met up a few years back at Oxford's first TransferSummit - proposed to get a smaller scale hackathon going in Bern to fire up our local community. I was enthusiastic about the idea, even though the timing to get it organized was tight, especially as we had two other events to run in the same month. So we launched an appeal to leaders of the Swiss capitol's open source and data journalism community, in the form of a lunchtime presentation (also see my slides) together with our society President André Golliez at Puzzle ITC, and a meeting during which we pitched the concept and expressed our interest in getting support. This we got: unanimously and generously.

The date - a Friday afternoon - and place - University of Bern - was set, we got eager help from our supporters, and about 40 registrations came in on our website (English version) with a fairly distribution of skills, predominantly in the area of Web development and around 25% were management/government/data experts. Only 4 women and 5 designers were able to attend, and we have an active discussion ongoing within the Open Data Initiative on how to better reach out and make the event more inclusive - please share any thoughts/ideas!

Since the timing was short, we kept to a pretty barebones schedule - a minimum of presentation, a maximum of hacking. Participants found out about each other and some of the available data (primarily the Bern city budget for 2012 and geographical data from the Canton of Bern, on top of all the other data in our open data wiki) about a week in advance, and several of the teams actually formed and started working ahead of the event. The atmosphere was extremely focused and productive, and I'll let the results speak for themselves - note that on Sunday as I write this many of the projects are still being polished in time for our press release. The demo links may be down, but you'll get an impression of the scope and scale of effort from their wiki pages:

• Bern Budget 2012 datavis - inspired by the beautiful New York Times visualizations of Obama's plans for the USA, this project uses interactive bubble charts to dive into Bern's city budget
• Mys Quartier - an interactive city guide based on OpenStreetMap and Bern GeoPortal data to let residents find out which part of town suits them and their families best
• Smartvote Kandidaten - infographics about political candidates based on one of Switzerland's most pervasive political tracking platforms
• Classify your politician (wiki TBD) - continuing where our earlier Parlamentarian Tag Clouds left off, this project lets you drag sliders of political scales and find your ideal politician
• Wassertemperaturen von Flussen - a neat attempt to create a single interface to the temperature of all the rivers in the canton of Bern and visualize their near-real-time data
• Wildruhezonen - this team of devoted hikers wants to create an app that alerts you when you're walking off-piste and about to enter a wildlife protected area
• Bake Open Data - to make the event more inclusive to non-programmers, we baked a real cake that visualized statistics from the Swiss open data portal and everyone got a slice for dessert 
• Wear Open Data - I rendered some datavis to splash out together with our fancy new Opendata.ch logo on the chest and back of every participant of the hackday

The reactions from the participants and experts was very positive - everyone said the atmosphere pumped them up and they got really involved in the data hacking. One of the criticisms was that we didn't get the teams mixed up quickly enough to the liking of one participant who was, like, go go go from the start! It's true that keeping the pace and getting teams formed is the most important responsibility and challenge for a hackathon organizer. We promise to keep improving and get ready to run even more exciting and productive events down the road.

We were fortunate to get positive coverage from the local press - for any readers who don't speak German, I've included links to a Google translation:

• Sie wollen Daten für das Volk «veredeln» (DerBund.ch) DE>EN
• Hacker spielen mit Finanzdaten (Berner Zeitung, TagesAnzeiger) DE>EN

Many thanks to our sponsors - Puzzle ITC, Netcetera, basis06 - and experts from the Canton and City of Bern for helping us give Bern's Open Data community a serious kickstart. We had a great time, we're continuing to hack the data, and we are keen to move from talking about open data to setting it in action at the service of our community. See you next time! 

Update: a few more links from the community, including a post on the Swiss Open Data Initiative and basis06 blogs, and a photo gallery:

• Visueller Zugang zum Stadtberner Budget 2012 dank Berner Open Data Hackday (Opendata.ch)
• Der erste Make­O­pen­Data Hack­day in Bern (basis06.ch)
• Photo gallery - Erster Open Data Hackday Bern (Picasa)