Rotterdam, 15 March 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

The Rotterdam Open Data initiative in well known harbor city in the Netherlands, has been under way for some time now. What started out as the initiative of a couple of teachers at the Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences with their students, meanwhile also actively involves businesses and the city government. Recently the city of Rotterdam, which currently employs a 'project manager open data', kicked off a project with 200+ students to build applications on top of government data in Rotterdam.

How to bring students together informally early evening and challenge them to make things with open data? With free beer and pizza! 'ROD voor z'n raap' is a series of informal get-togethers of students and teachers and others in the city interested in open government data. With beer and pizza present, a short keynote introduction is given, after which ideas are gathered on re-using Rotterdam data. Then follows a round of working on those ideas, and presenting the concepts at the end. The best concept gets a symbolic prize.

Last Tuesday the first of these informal events took place. Coder Stefan de Konink talked about the OpenOV project, using real time location data of public transport to build a basis for multi-modal trip planning. Four concepts for new apps were created during the session: a concept to detect the illegal growing of weed, one to judge quality of homes for rent or sale, a concept to use CCTV in the city to real time determine how busy it is in town, and extending an existing app 'Bridgie' (a route planner that knows if Rotterdam bridges are open or closed) with additional info such as parking capacity and traffic density.

Sebastiaan ter Burg made the video impression above.