Hack4Europe! is a series of hack days organised by the Europeana Foundation and its partners Collections Trust, Picasso Museum, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Swedish National Heritage Board. The hackathon roadshow will be held simultaneously in 4 locations (London, Barcelona, Poznan and Stockholm) in the week of 6 - 10 June and provide an exciting environment to explore the potential of open cultural data for social and economic growth in Europe. 

Each hackathon will bring together up to 35 developers from the host country and the surrounding area. They will have access to the diverse and rich Europeana collections containing over 18 million records, Europeana Search API (incl. a test key and technical documentation) and Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot datasets which currently comprise about 3 million Europeana records available under a CC0 license.

Participants will be encouraged to try out their ideas for creative reuse of the Europeana content and build applications showcasing the social and business value of open cultural data. Best prototypes will be awarded prizes during the hack days and four finalists will be invited to the Digital Agenda Assembly on 16 -17 June in Brussels where EU Commissioner Ms. Neelie Kroes will award the winners during a special ceremony.

Developers must register in advance and by Tuesday 31st May 2011. Depending on the demand for the event, organisers will decide on the final delegate list and send a confirmation letter to the selected ones 1^st June 2011, along with further details of the event and API access.  Attendees will be selected to ensure an appropriate coverage of sectors, skills and interest in development themes.  Please note that places may be limited to a maximum of 2 attendees per organisation/company

The venue has been kindly provided by partners The British Library: The Chaucer Meeting Room, The British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London. 

Development themes to consider for this event include: 

Open Data/Content/Communities

Mashups of Europeana metadata and content with Wikipedia/Wikimedia resources, OpenStreetMap, Project Gutenberg, The Internet Archive, The Open Library, International Musc Score Library Project, Musopen,  Data.Gov.UK etc. 

Commercial/Growth 

Content and Collection Management Systems
Europeana API as components in the dominating general content management systems and specialised collection management systems for the GLAM-sector or eLearning sector. Examples:  Drupal, Joomla, CollectiveAccess, Omeka, Aleph, etc. 

Mobile incl. Augmented Reality
(Geo-location aware) mobile services building on the Europeana API, such as packaging and contextualisation of content, mash-ups with check-in services, augmented reality overlays, guide trails combined with QR-codes etc. 

Cultural tourism
Inclusion of Europeana content in booking services, guides etc. 

Gaming
Using Europeana content and/or the API in educational, historical games, etc.

Publishing

Feeds for e-book catalogues/e-readers. 

Search and discover sites linked to merchandising
Services where well designed search and discovery leads traffic to GLAMs which offer (paid for) e.g. print on demand and other reproduction services. 

Social inclusion 

Accessibility
Services built on the API where content can be displayed with designs focussing on children, elderly, visually impaired people; or where content is presented through voice synthesis; or where searches are triggered by voice commands. 

Multi-lingual
Appplications that mash-up with other APIs to provide query translation or create multi-lingual labels for Europeana metadata.

Join the Google Group now to introduce yourself to participants across Europe, discuss ideas about creative API applications, send your questions and form teams!

http://groups.google.com/group/europeanahackathons

Europeana will cover the attendance costs (travel, accommodation and subsistence allowances) for all confirmed participants according to the Europeana reimbursement rules.

Prizes

Europeana will also offer prizes on the day under the following categories: 

• Most commercial potential 
• Most social impact
• Most innovative 
• Voted ‘best’ by attendees

Additionally the UK event has partnered with ‘IC tomorrow’, a Technology Strategy Board (TSB) programme, to offer a special prize to further develop the app with the most commercial potential, via a trial on the IC tomorrow platform. 

Schedule for the Day