Hack the Arctic: transforming data into solutions as a community

A recurring question among research projects is how to optimize the use data that already exists and to identify its stakeholder’s needs, particularly in effort to bring services to a wider community outside academia. We propose a hackathon to allow the collaboration between civil, educational, business and governmental actors to address environmental challenges with the use of environment scientific data from international projects.

Hack the Arctic is co-organized by the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR)/University of Helsinki, the Integrated Carbon Observation System Research Infrastructure (ICOS-ERIC) Headoffice, and the Environmental Research Infrastructures (ENVRI) Community. The hackathon event aims to enhance the usage and impact of environmental research data by and for society. The 48 hr event will gather multi-disciplinary teams through a public call to make use of existing environmental data from a network of research projects to develop services addressing the needs of different end-users. The participating teams will be mentored by researchers and data scientist in the use of the data. A panel of judges comprising of science mentors, innovation specialists and government sector actors will assess the implementation of the final pilot products at the end of the event.

We present Hack the Arctic as an up-and-coming alternative to expand the usage and visibility of research data and to make it widely accessible to a broader (nonacademic) audience by offering mentorship from data and scientific experts under one roof.