This day casted light on open data as the ‘fuel’ to be reused for shaping Europe’s digital future. Challenges and benefits of reusing data and making it interoperable were discussed along with other related topics.

The thematic sessions were divided as follows: 

• Thematic session 1: Creating open data ecosystems. Open data has demonstrated to be the key element of innovation to shape our digital future. In order to unleash its potential, governments need to implement open data policies to ensure trustworthy data-sharing. In order to support this, this session proposed insights on how projects that contribute to the open data policy. 
• Thematic session 2: Data for people. In the digital transformation, citizens play an essential role in this process. This thematic session highlighted the importance of citizen engagement and projects with a special user-oriented approach. 
• Thematic session 3: Facilitating data reuse. In order to ensure open data, there has to be acceptance and implementation of some principles and strategies. In this session, we focused on the enabling factors as FAIR principles of data, data literacy, and other projects to ensure interoperability. 

Going from open data towards data visualisation, this day highlighted the importance of communicating data efficiently to convey the right message. It brought best practices and techniques to build data narratives and ensure to better serve citizens.

The thematic sessions were divided as follows:

• Thematic session 1: From open data to data visualisation. This session served as a bridge between open data and data visualisation, focusing on the importance of openness in building a powerful dataviz. 

• Thematic session 2: Serving citizens with dataviz. Based around best practices and innovative techniques, this session focused on how to better engage citizens in the process and how to serve them better. 

• Thematic session 3: Using dataviz for policymaking. In this session, we focused on how data visualisation can support the decision-making cycle, with special focus on the EU public sector. 

Fighting youth unemployment, improving the sustainability of the food system, bringing EU decision-making closer to citizens, these are some of the ambitions put forward by the teams of application developers selected to compete in the finals of this year´s edition of the open data competition. 

At this event, the 9 shortlisted teams pitched their apps to the jury who decided the final ranking of the winning teams in each category. The thematic challenges were introduced by an expert panel and the event closed with an award ceremony. To find out more about the annual EU open data competition, visit the EU Datathon website.