Ambitious goals have been set to reduce the global energy consumption during the upcoming years. We currently gravely lag behind in the process to reach these goals and surprisingly enough, despite all the public attention this issue has received, we don’t even have proper access to essential information about energy consumption and production. This information either arrives too late, has not been processed to an understandable format or is simply kept secret. It’s time for us to change this!

We hope that this hackathon event will connect the people who share an interest in this topic and will lead to more energy information be available as open data. This would open the potential for any skilled group of individuals to create their own applications or visualizations that can hopefully make an impact in the society.

The potential of open energy data was recently highlighted in Apps4Finland competition in December 2012. The winner of the Idea Category was the proposal to create an open API (application programming interface) to consumers’ energy consumption data. The winner of the Data Category for public sector institutions was the solar and geo energy map created by the City of Espoo.

In addition to exploring openly available data sets, the hackathon will also collect example data sets of energy information that is currently not yet accessible for application developers (such as consumers’ energy consumption data).

The participants are welcome to propose specific themes or projects to work on, either via the sign-up form or via the themes / data sets / ideas Etherpad page.

Energy Hackathon will be the kick-off event for the OKF Finland Open Sustainability Working Group.

Join the event and get your hands dirty with energy data!   REEEP's Thesaurus & Knowledge Manager Denise Recheis will be speaking at the event.