On the occasion of the Open Data International Day celebrated on 22nd February, the GEOIDEA.ro team together with the Coalition for Open Data and the governmental Departament of Online Service and Design, organized a two-day hackathon. The general scope of the event was to raise awareness around the new Open Data governmental portal (here) that holds at this time about 130 datasets from about 30 public bodies. Programmers, activists, journalists and anyone interested in open data were welcomed to come together, to plan and build applications using open data from the portal. There were 24 ideas initially listed on the project page of the hackathon. The number of participants was of about 60.

Even though, not all projects were finalized or others were merged, the size of the event and the interest of the participants offered an important overview on the enthusiasm that open data triggers in the Romanian society.

A crucial aspect of the Open Data Hackathon was given by offering the informal environment where representatives from the Romanian Government, responsible for the OGP implementation in Romania and representative of the civil society to come into contact. Besides all ideas proposed and applications developed, another significant result of the Open Data Hackathon was a document that aggregated suggestions, recommendations, questions regarding the datasets already published on the portal. Discussions between governmental officials and civil society members related to the document were already initiated during the closing session of the codefest. The document can be viewed here (only in Romanian).

For more details of the event, please check the event website (only in Romanian).