Eight jury picked teams pitched their projects to the OFC-gala audience for a public vote, resulting in two Open Data Finnish Champions 2015.

This year’s Open Finland Challenge competition wasn’t short of surprises. The public vote ended in a tie and after momentary confusion, the grand prize was split into two. The competition’s coordinator, Teemu Ropponen, initially suggested a re-vote but in the spirit of open decision-making the audience upheld the initial results.

Consequently, the winners, Katja Ratamäki from meal planning app Miils and both makers of the refugee visualisation, Ville Saarinen and Juho Ojala, lit up the stage with their beaming smiles at Bio Rex movie theatre in Helsinki. The third place was bagged by Aalto University’s Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) and their Semantic Finlex project. This pioneering service provides the Finnish Legislation as open data, so that other web services and application developers can utilise it in machine-readable format. This hasn’t been done before.

Record-breaking number of projects

Altogether, there were 163 submitted projects in Open Finland Challenge this year, which easily tops its predecessor, the Apps4Finland competition. Prizes were awarded in five different categories. The City of Helsinki was a challenge partner in the competition’s Public Services category.

“Delightfully, there were lots of submissions in this category”, according to a thankful competition jury member, Tanja Lahti, from Helsinki Region Infoshare.

Many project submissions utilised open data from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. For Example, finalist #HelsinkiPäätökset-Android-app fetches City of Helsinki decision-making data from the Open Ahjo-API. The Residential Parking in Helsinki -project by Antti Rantala fit perfectly in the challenge set by the City of Helsinki. The project demonstrates how the application process for residential parking permits in Helsinki can be improved and digitalised, hence brought into the digital age. The concept plan utilises municipal APIs and automatically urges residential parking permit holders to move their cars out of the way of planned street works.

Collectively, the competition distributed almost 60 000 euros to all winners. Half of the prize money was awarded earlier during regional competitions. During the Open Finland Challenge gala (3.12.), alongside the main prize, over twenty, one-thousand euro prizes were awarded to participants in different categories. The novelty in this year’s competition was introducing a pitching round for the finalists. The eight finalists were given a four minute time slot each to pitch their projects, before a public vote determined the winner of the 5 000 euros main prize.

Translated by Kaarlo Uutela