Brief Report | 17. February 2023

3D Hackathon 2022 - Creating New Dimensions, September 24 - October 24, 2022, Berlin, Germany

By Dr. des. Katja Sternitzke and Dr. des. Katja Sternitzke

First Cross-NFDI Hackathon

As part of its community engagement, NFDI4Culture hosted the first nationwide 3D hackathon on open research data in the fall of 2022, together with NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4Objects, and AG3D. This was the first Cross-NFDI Hackathon, jointly planned and prepared by our nine-person orga team across disciplines.

3D data and data in the making

Institutions from the communities of all participating NFDI consortia and NFDI initiatives were called upon to make their diverse data assets available under an open license. Our call was answered by 27 cultural institutions, museums, archives, and university collections from across Germany, who submitted 34 colorful, multimodal, and multidisciplinary datasets. Those who wanted to could take advantage of our offered prepare-your-data workshops as a data provider the introduction to the format hackathon and the requirements for the data in advance. The research data repository Radar4Culture assisted us in providing the datasets for the 3D Hackathon.

Kick-off on September 24 and 25, 2022 at the State Library Berlin

At the end of September, the time had finally come and the 3D Hackathon celebrated its Kick-off in the large halls of the Berlin State Library in the Potsdamer Straße building. Participating hackers included national and international cultural practitioners, 3D designers, coders, and hackathon enthusiasts. Over the course of a weekend, the data providers presented their data sets, workshops were held, and initial ideas were formed among the participating hackers. From these, a dozen enthusiastic teams and projects crystallized by the end of the kick-off weekend and even in the weeks after to develop new solutions with new approaches from the provided image files, 3D data, and metadata. Four weeks of intensive development work followed by a creative collaboration of data providers and coders.

The final on October 24, 2022, at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

At the final in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin on October 24, 2022, ten teams presented their developments, including a virtual underground mining experience, a 3D postcard editor, an app to display stereographs in 3D, and an escape game for beetles. Our four-member jury awarded prizes to the most successful applications and everyone celebrated the conclusion of our first Cross-NFDI Hackathon into the evening.

Conclusion

The exciting part: Trying out creative approaches and novel solutions, and the multidisciplinary mix of datasets generated new, often unexpected angles and potentially alternative ways of communicating knowledge in the hands of the participants for the data-providing research, science, and cultural institutions. We are sure that this will not be the last Cross-NFDI Hackathon.

You can read all about the 3D Hackathon, the data sets, our judges and applications, and the winners at https://creating-new-dimensions.org/.