Expedition

To those who joined our 1st School of Data workshop of the year, spending part of last weekend to explore food-related datasets with us - you were an awesome group to work with, thanks for coming! See Hackday results for a list of Data Packages we produced.

Facilitated by Oleg, Heidi and Florian, we started off our latest session with an introduction to Open Food Data, an exciting new program that begins with hackdays on February 10-11.

A brief overview from data literacy to data wrangling followed: we quickly covered the basic ideas, and you can visit the School of Data Online Courses page, as well as search our forum for tutorials and more links to explore. Then, we dived in and came up with a big pile of ideas, everyone sharing their topics and interests.

We divided up into three groups around broader themes - roughly: economics, consumption and sustainability - and worked our way through the ideas generated. A list of relevant datasets emerged through searching open data portals and the World Wide Web.

Datacentral screenshot
Several of these seemed especially promising (in terms of openness, accessibility, usefulness…), so we started creating Data Packages in view of helping hackday teams to get started. You can find these at food.schoolofdata.ch - we will continue building up this resource over the weeks ahead, so please keep sending in your suggestions!

Thanks go to THES/Raum für Bildung for use of the outstanding facilities at Effinger, and to Opendata.ch and Engagement Migros for providing the momentum and food to keep us going :)

If you have any follow up questions or feedback, shoot us a note on our forum thread or via Twitter. If you would like us to run another workshop like this one, even in another city or at your organisation - let’s get in touch. Here are upcoming dates from our calendar:

Have a great start to the year & bon appetit!

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