Last weekend, the City of Brno, together with the groups Czechitas and BrnoAI, organised the first city hackathon. This is an event where programmers often work intensively on a given project in collaboration with graphic and web designers. In this case, it was a hackathon using the city’s open data from the data.brno.cz portal. The goal was to develop applications that would improve the lives of Brno inhabitants or help the development of the city. Photo credit: Brno City Municipality
Brno, April 13 (BD) – The Brno hackathon involved 50 participants working in 12 teams of two to five people. The opening ceremony took place at 9am on Saturday 9 April in the premises of CTP Czechitas House on Škrobárenská, and the competition itself started at 10am, ending 24 hours later on Sunday. The teams then presented their applications, ideas, solutions or prototypes to the jury and the other participants.
The evaluation jury was composed of five respected experts in their respective professions: Jan Černocký (specialist in artificial intelligence and speech technologies from FIT BUT), Jan Boček (data journalist from iROZHLAS), Martin Cígler (Chairman of the Board and CEO, Solitea, a. s.), Matěj Karolyi (software specialist at Oracle NetSuite) and Oliver Pospíšil (Secretary of the Brno City Council).
“The winning DataSentics team presented a proposal that extends the possibilities of using the special car driving through Brno to monitor cars parked in resident parking zones. The team designed and programmed a process whereby the cameras can detect and report overflowing bins. In the future, the use could be much broader, for example, reporting potholes, destroyed furniture, fallen trees and so on,” said Tomáš Koláčný (Piráti), 2nd Deputy Mayor of Brno.
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”542″ gal_title=”BRNO ART WEEK”]“The purpose of the hackathon was to look for solutions that will advance the city’s development and/or help the city’s citizens. That is why the city will try to make the most of all the ideas from the other projects of the competition teams,” said Koláčný. Photo credit: Brno City Municipality
The three top-placed teams received financial awards. The winner received CZK 20,000, the second-placed team CZK 15,000, and the third CZK 10,000. Oliver Pospíšil, Secretary of the Brno City Council, presented the awards to the winning teams. “If the hackathon proves successful, the city intends to repeat the event in the future,” he said.
Descriptions and prototypes of the projects from the hackathon will be available on data.brno.cz, which also supplied most of the data for the individual projects.
