Election day in Switzerland is coming up this fall, and we’ll put politics and election data at the centre of the next MAKE.Opendata.ch hackathon. Designers, programmers, journalists, specialists and citizens of all backgrounds will be working on useful app ideas, interesting visualizations and new datasets for the Federal Elections during this two day workshop.

The Federal Elections Hackday will be held on September 4 and 5, 2015, at two venues in parallel: the offices of Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ) in Zurich and Le Temps in Lausanne. Developers, designers, hacks and hackers will be working with open data on the subject of politics and elections. Participation is free of charge. The hackdays start on Friday, 4th of September, at 9 o’clock and end with final presentations the next day at 16 o’clock.

Registration is now open for the Lausanne and Zurich sites! Please get a free ticket as soon as you know for sure that you are going to take part. Update: we are now SOLD OUT - if plans change and you are not able to join us for the hackathon, then please cancel your registration (Zürich / Lausanne) using the email you got from Eventbrite, so your ticket can be automatically transferred - thanks.

Follow our hashtag #makeopendata on Twitter and, of course, visit your trusted national media outlet for all the top stories.

See list of open datasets shared with us by the journalistic community.

elections-tagged projects will appear here during the hackdays. To publish your own project page, log in, pick a title, and go here: project

Zurich: NZZ, Falkenstrasse 11, Haupteingang, Foyer 1-3 | OSM | Google

Lausanne: Le Temps, Pont Bessières 3 | OSM | Google (NB: the Le Temps newsroom is located on the second floor. Access to the building from Pont Bessières or Rue Saint-Martin.)

We needs you to share your (especially politics/democracy related) data, your programming skills, and your ideas, so:

Come and experience the Hackdays!

Join us in September for two days of fun, innovation and digital brainstorming. It is great if you are a programmer or working in media or involved in politics, and you are ready to help with your skills, and we are also looking for non-technical people across all domains. Start a project, tag it with election, and announce it here!

Share your suggestions for data

Maybe you are aware of interesting data and topics? In preparation for the hackdays we are putting together a list of open datasets. We encourage you to contribute to it by adding new items. Please feel free to leave us a note on the forum with your requests!

Also see Zürich schedule.

Friday, September 4th

• 9:00 Registration, Coffee and Croissants
• 9:30 Welcoming speech by Stéphane Benoît-Godet and Gaël Hürlimann, Editors in Chief Le Temps
• 9.40 Welcoming speech by Mehdi Atmani (Le Temps) and Jérôme Tréboux (Datastory)
• 10:00 Teaming up, exchanging ideas
• 12:00 Skype Call with Zurich (Alexandra Kohler (NZZ) and Mehdi Atmani (Le Temps))
• 13:00 Lunch break
• 14:00 Hacking
• 18:00 Apéro
• 20:00 End of first day

Saturday, September 5th

• 9:00 Registration, Coffee and Croissants
• 9:30 Welcoming words by Mehdi Atmani (Le Temps)
• 9:45 Teaming up (again), integrating new people
• 12:00 Lunch break
• 16:00 Presentation of final projects
• 17:00 End of Election Hackdays and Apéro

Friday, September 4th

• 9:00 Registration, Coffee and Croissants
• 9:30 Welcoming speech by Alexandra Kohler, NZZ
• 9:40 Welcoming speech by Hannes Gassert, Open Data Switzerland
• 9:50 Presenting datasets (Hannes Gassert, Christian Greiner, Statistik Stadt Zürich, Georg Lutz, political scientist and head of the election survey “Selects”)
• 10:20 Presentation “Monitoring and analyzing political activity in social media”, David Garcia, ETH Zürich
• 10:30 Teaming up, exchanging Ideas
• 12:00 Lausanne - Zurich Skype Call (Alexandra Kohler, NZZ and Mehdi Atmani, Le Temps)
• 13:00 Lunch break
• 14:00 Hacking

Midnight End of first day

Saturday, September 5th

• 9:00 o'clock Registration, Coffee and Croissants
• 9:30 Welcoming words by Alexandra Kohler and Christian Stettler, NZZ
• 10:00 Teaming up (again), integrating new people
• 10:30 Visit of Balthasar Glättli
• 13:00 Lunch break
• 15:00 Presentation of final projects
• 16:00 End of Election Hackdays

You can contact the organization team for both Lausanne and Zurich at election-hackdays@opendata.ch

• Alexandra Kohler, @koa_87
• Sylke Gruhnwald
• Mehdi Atmani
• Hannes Gassert
• Christian Stettler
• Yann “shalf” Heurtaux, yann.heurtaux@opendata.ch, 078 845 9266, @shalf