Several Swedish governmental authorities organized a summit on March 14 - 15 to promote the development of applications and services using national open data. Called Hack for Sweden, the event was hosted at the Environmental Protection Agency in Stockholm.
Hack for Sweden aimed at providing an open platform for students, developers, data journalists, and national authorities, according to a statement on the event website. Twenty national authorities provided Hack For Sweden with open datasets; including the Environmental Protection Agency, the national agency in charge of statistics, SGU (Geological data), SMHI (weather, air, water, climate, etc.) and the national authority for agriculture, for example. The goal was to stimulate the use and re-use of open data and, obviously, to create an active community. These authorities are allowed to help entrants and support them in using data.
Develop the best by combining multi-source data
To participate in Hack for Sweden, applicants must use data from at least one participating authority. But, as stated in the website of the event, it is recommended to combine data from several agencies. The data were made available on the website. The challenge is to develop services and applications in 24 hours.
The winner of this second edition of Hack for Sweden was an alert application, which provides information on emergencies or disasters in a municipality or at the regional level by SMS, email or via social networks. There is also a function whereby people can comment and submit new entries to augment the application.
Another winning project www.dödsorsak.se/ uses open data to map the causes of deaths by region, gender and age. The special jury prize for the best technical quality was awarded to the service Fråga Sverige. This web service is a research and analysis tool for all open data published by public authorities in the country. The data are also displayed in the form of graphs.