At the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), last week I taught the concepts of open data and history of Swiss initiatives to a class of computer science students up in their campus at the foot of a mountain in Sierre.
Kind thanks to Prof. Alexandre Cotting for the invitation, for his many contributions to the open data movement, and dedicated support of the region’s hackathon scene.
As they were already introduced to the basics, we dived into the motivations of crowdsourcing projects like FixMyStreet or OpenSpending, and how online platforms and portals and community work together to build actionable data sources. I went into a bit of detail about the School of Data, how it promotes data literacy in various settings, and explained the Data Expedition format for future use by the students.
My notes and links can be found here: https://hackmd.io/s/BkQLfR0WX