Last weekend saw the awards ceremony marking the end of the first German culture hackathon, ‘Coding da Vinci’. 16 cultural institutions had made their data available to programmers, designers and gamers, who spent ten weeks working with the content under open licence. On Sunday, prior to the awards ceremony, they presented their ideas and applications to the public.

The results were more than convincing: in front of a crowd of 150 enthusiasts in the Jewish Museum 17 teams showed off an impressive variety of works revealing a high degree of technical maturity.

Many teams developed apps for playing and learning within the family, experimenting with the sounds of musical instruments from past centuries and adopting foolproof ways of getting up in the morning. Another large group of projects produced websites that used storytelling, interactive visualisations and map applications to reveal new connections between the cultural material. Some teams even presented hardware systems, augmented-reality applications and programming tools for the developer community.

For the participating teams it was particularly important to venture outside their familiar technical circles and strike up conversations with the ‘other world’ of individual institutions. Claus Höfele, one of the winners, was very positive about the hackathon: ‘At last we’re in touch with the museums!’

The museum people themselves were impressed with the sheer variety and usefulness of applications based on open-source cultural content. Commenting on the list of works banned by the National Socialists, which four teams had focused on, one of the hackathon enthusiasts, Wolfgang Both, said: ‘At long last the list has been put on view. I feel proud and quite moved. We now know that 19,000 books were on the list.’

The Jury (Gabriele Beger, SUB Hamburg, Anja Jentzsch, OKFN, Thorsten Koch, digiS, Uwe Müller, DDB, Lydia Pintscher, WMDE) awarded prizes for selected projects spanning five categories:

•     Most Technical:         ‘Old Berlin: the history of a city’s development’
  • Claus Höfele
•     Most Useful:              ‘insight -19xx: a list of damaging and undesirable
  
  • (Liste der von den Nationalsozialisten verbotenen Werke)
  • Daniel Burckhardt, Dierk Eichel, Michael Hintersonnleitner,
  • Frederike Kaltheuner, Jeremy Lewis, Jonas Parnow,
  • Kristin Sprechert, Kai Teuber, Clemens Wilding
•     Best Design:              ‘Ethno Band’
  
  • Thomas Fett
•     Funniest Hack:          ‘Cyberbeetle’
  
  • Kati Hyyppä, Tomi Hyyppä
•     Out of Competition: ‘zzZwitscherwecker’
  
  • Anne Weißschädel, Simon Könneke, Christoph Hornig,
  • Anne Stephanie Weber, David Gomez