The Hack4Malta hackhaton held on March 29 promoted the principle of ‘open data’ – the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control for the benefit of the citizen.

The initiative was taken by the Department of Intelligent Computer Systems within the Faculty of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) at the University of Malta, in collaboration with the Local Councils’ Association, and supported by the Homer Med program project.

The scope behind this event was to increase awareness about open data and more importantly to bring together IT students and developers, but possibly also other individuals from other professions, and motivate them to use open data to drive their innovative ideas and encourage them to create a start-up.

The organisers said there was huge economic potential behind the themes of innovation, open data and the app economy. Hack4Malta manages to effectively integrate these three important components, thus providing added value.

Five teams participated in the hackathon with each team working on their ideas during the day with the support of a number of mentors from the IT and entrepreneurship professions to refine and polish these ideas. In the afternoon, each team had to present their idea to a panel of judges who awarded the winning ideas based on a set of criteria that included the innovative element behind the idea, the effective use of open data, the usefulness behind the idea, the communication skills of the participants and of course the produced prototype or mock-up.

Team TravelMate, composed from Nigel Grech, Emmanuel Buttigieg and Matthias Pace from the University of Malta won first prize, which includes a fully-paid trip to Turin to participate in Homer’s annual general meeting. The winning team will have the opportunity to present their application in front of all of Homer’s partners and to compete with other winners of Hack4Med.

The EU is hugely excited about the immense potential and economic value that can be exploited from open data which is one of the main themes in their Digital Agenda initiative.

The government’s Digital Malta initiative also makes specific references to the importance of this area both from a civic as well as from an economic perspective.

www.opendatamalta.com