Hack4Europe: passion, coding and great ideas

Europeana hack days marked one of our important June highlights. Together with our local partners Collections Trust, Museu Picasso, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Swedish National Heritage Board we organized 4 hackathons in Poznan, Barcelona, London and Stockholm in the week 7 - 11 June. We welcomed 85 developers with diverse background and expertise from all over Europe. The majority of them works in the private sector (ICT, creative industries); however, cultural heritage institutions such as Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) and open data communities such as Wikipedia were also well represented. [slickr-flickr tag="hackblog"] The developers had access to 19 million objects in the Europeana collections and, for the first time, to the 3 million records available under the CC0 license comprising Europeana Open Data pilot. The 60+ hours of intense coding and experiments resulted in 48 prototypes showcasing mobile apps, apps with social and gaming component, apps for content curation and visualization, and integration with Wikipedia. At each hackathon we granted awards in the categories commercial potential, social impact and innovation. Also, the developers voted for their peers and decided which application will be honored with the special Audience award. Finally, we announced four Hack4Europe finalists representing the best prototypes in each category:

• App with greatest commercial potential: Art4Europe (Poznan event)
• App with greatest social impact: Casual Curator (London event)
• Most innovative app: Time Mash (Stockholm event)
• Audience award: Timebook (Barcelona event)

They were invited to the Digital Agenda Assembly on 16 -17 June in Brussels and awarded special prizes by the EU Vice-President and Commissioner for Digital Agenda for Europe Neelie Kroes. [slickr-flickr tag="hackblog2"] In the next weeks we will tell you more about our winners at each hack event and explain how these new applications can be useful for you. Start with a short introduction tour into the four finalist apps!