EU Datathon 2020

The EU Datathon 2020 is an annual open data competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union in close collaboration with the European Commission Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy. The current edition of the EU Datathon is the result of merging two separated initiatives: EU Regions hackathon #ideas4EU and the EU Datathon.

This year, participants were asked to tackle four different challenges:

• Challenge 1: ‘A European Green Deal’
• Challenge 2: ‘An economy that works for people’
• Challenge 3: ‘A new push for European democracy’
• Challenge 4: ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’

The total prize fund for the winning teams is EUR 100 000. Twelve winning teams (i.e. three teams per challenge) will be shortlisted and announced on 29 May. The winning teams are invited to develop their application and present it on 13-15 October during the 18th European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels. To prepare for the event, the EU Datathon team organised webinars about open data usage with presenters from different open data portals. The webinars address different topics regarding open data, such as media and data monitoring and data about COVID-19. The European Data Portal has also published a webinar on the use of open datasets in business ideas and projects descriptions for the challenges.

Call for proposals was due until 3 May 2020. In the proposals, participants were asked to state how open data is used in their project description. Also, given the current pandemic, the usage of open data on COVID-19 was encouraged. Thereby, the EU Datathon team suggests that COVID-19 open data can be linked with publications, life sciences and authoritative data sources.

Looking for more open data related news or more information on the EU Datathon? Visit the EDP news archive and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Interested in learning more about COVID-19 and open data? Visit our EDP for COVID-19 page.