Today you can choose from hundreds of apps to help you track and visualise your sport activities, your budget, etc. These apps help you to stay more healthy, or have more money, or in other words improve your personal sustainability.
What about your energy use?
The Green Button initiative has the aim to bring the energy data from the providers to their customers. With a standardised format and protocol for data exchange, there is space for building new services and apps for visualising your energy use.
Want to be the next RunKeeper for energy – join the Green Button Hackathon!
Green Button Hackathon is the latest event in the series of Green Hackathons, design and coding events for a sustainable future.
Where: R1, Drottning Kristinas väg 51, KTH Main Campus, Stockholm
When: 13-14 September
Whom: Designer, coder, energy enthusiasts, anybody…
Some pictures from the hackathon:
Theme and Data
As inspiration for the hackathon you can consider the following scenario:
Saving energy for social good
The maximal energy (and thus money) saving that an individual household can make might not be enough of incentive for everybody to change their energy behaviour. What if there was a group initiative which individuals could join that would use the group’s aggregated saving for a social good. It could be anything from supporting local activities (like equipment for schools) to donations to global charity organisations.
What kind of solutions can you build for this? How do you solve the challenge of attracting the people and keeping them engaged/informed? How do you use their data?
Data
Green Button Data
As the title says, the main focus of the hackathon is using Green Button standard. Green Button was started couple of years ago as initiative in the United States, with the aim of providing uniformed format and protocol for exchanging utility data. Since then it has been adopted by many utility providers and various services (apps) have already been built on top of it. This allows end users (energy consumers) to become more aware and in better control of their energy use.
To get started check out the Green Button Homepage. There you will find the basic information as well as many useful links, the main ones are summarise here:
- Green Button Developer Sanbox with Sample Data and API Testbed
- Green Button Developer Guide
- Green Button Ontario Resources – collection of more sample data and examples from Ontario, Canada
Energimolnet
Green Button has not yet been implemented in Sweden, but there is still hope in getting actual data. The company called Energimolnet, based in Gothenburg, has been working on providing similar service. They provide a unified API to access the energy data from various Swedish energy providers (each of whom have a different systems and data access capabilities). We got access to their brand new API and some test data, so feel free to use it for your solutions:
Other useful resources
- Eprice – spot market prices for various EU countries/regions
- Endev.js – simple JavaScript library for working with web data sources
- AMEE – environmental and energy data for UK companies
- Open Energy Information – a collection of various energy datasets, apps and communities
- Open Stockholm Data – various open data from Stockholm
Schedule
Day 1 – 13th September09:00 Registration |
Day 2 – 14th September09:00 Call for help |
Get in touch
Organisers
Filip Kis – Developer, Entrepreneur and PhD researcher in User Interface Development
Cristian Bogdan – Hacker and Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction
Hanna Hasselqvist – Designer and PhD researcher in Interaction Design
Omar Shafqat – PhD researcher in Energy Technology
Björn E. Palm – Professor in Energy Technology
Contact
email: fkis@kth.se
tel: +46 (0) 72 935 42 18
twitter: @greenhackathon