ODS Awards 2021: discover the winners of the best projects of the year

For the past 10 years, we have helped organizations in 25 countries bring their data projects to life. So far over 2,000 data projects have been created with Opendatasoft to improve people’s lives through data.

By working with our customers, we have seen that successful data-driven organizations are constantly innovating to effectively share their data, improve their services, increase their efficiency, and boost transparency.

At our annual Data on Board conference on the 7th of December Ysée Rogé, ODS VP of Customer Service presented awards to the best data projects of 2021. Choosing winners was not easy given the wide range of value-added data experiences our customers have created this year. Read on to learn more about the winners in each category.

Saint-Louis Metropolitan Area and Jersey City have both won the Adoption Award.

By exploring everything from the main features of the platform to its detailed nuances, the Saint-Louis Metropolitan Area and Jersey City teams have both become self-sufficient on the Opendatasoft platform in a very short time.

The result? Open data portals deployed very quickly, making life easier for their users.

The Saint-Louis Metropolitan Area is a community of 40 municipalities located in the Alsace region. It has a with a population of more than 80,000.

Through more than 30 datasets, the Saint-Louis Metropolitan Area shares information on public finances, regional planning, jobs, mobility, and culture.

With a population of over 247,000 Jersey City is the second largest city in the state of New Jersey, USA.

To improve the daily lives of its residents and visitors, the City’s teams now publish multiple open data portals providing a wide variety of visualizations for:

• Locating bicycle facilities in the city
• Finding street art within the city
• Identifying the location of COVID testing centers
• Getting information on firefighting activities
• Finding information about suppliers employed by Jersey City

The district of Rhein-Kreis Neuss in Germany, which has more than 450,000 residents, has won the Training award.

It has achieved its goal of making information accessible to the general public through its open data portal, which contains more than 70 datasets (administration, finance, city planning, population, education, culture, health, etc.)

In addition, the teams have done a remarkable job of communicating regularly and providing instruction on using the data to monitor community health.

In particular, the city has manually revised both the street directory and local courts information. It set up interactive online forms so that users select the data they need without having to enter it.

With the amount of data available, Opendatasoft has established itself as a key partner for meeting this growing need for information.

St. Gallen, the URSSAF National Fund (formerly ACOSS), and Namur have each won the Engagement Award. Always eager to share how data can be used, they engage their peers with best practice and help, and are key players in the digital transformation.

Considered the nerve center of eastern Switzerland, St. Gallen is the eighth largest city in Switzerland. With a population of around 80,000 it is a true cultural and economic center.

The city shares more than 330 datasets on its open data portal, helping to improve the daily lives of its citizens with information on mobility, health, the economy, and more.

The city’s teams are eager to share this data culture more widely and recently organized a hackathon to kick off dozens of projects, including a waste collection calendar, a visualization of vehicles and bicycles in the city, Smart City projects, a budget visualization, and more.

The URSSAF National Fund (formerly ACOSS) is responsible for managing the cashflow for each of the branches of France’s social security system.

URSSAF regularly shares information through open data including its economic barometer, a network of URSSAF activities and private sector employers and employees, for example.

The data published by URSSAF allows economic players and other stakeholders to optimize their analysis and decision-making and offers users independent access and reuse of its information.

Very active in our ODS Community discussion forum on Slack, URSSAF’s team shares best practices and encourages other data players to deploy innovative projects.

Convinced that it is in the city’s interest to make its data freely available, Namur, the capital of Wallonia, has been promoting innovation and transparency through a portal since 2018.

Since the launch of its portal, Namur has been interested in how its data could help improve mobility and strengthen its aim of being a smart city.

The wide range of datasets available via the portal demonstrates how mature the project has become, with Namur showing how this information can improve the lives of citizens and partners in a sustainable way.

The city of Paris has won the Continuity Award for its team’s perseverance and consistency in its open data project.

Since 2017, Paris has prioritized transparency in the evaluation of public policies.  Updated information and key figures are regularly shared with its citizens, along with analysis of areas such as mobility issues, like cycle traffic.

This work has also allowed a large number of re-users to create their own pages using the Paris Data platform’s API.

There is much more data available on the city’s open data portal, including administration and public finance information, citizenship information, cultural information, mobility information, environment information, and more.

Peclet Technology has won the Quality Award for its efficient support of our customers in Australia.

With the goal of creating citizen-centric smart cities, Peclet Technology supports dozens of public bodies in Australia, using its experience and expertise to make the most of their information through open data.

The Mayenne department in France and Schneider Electric have both won the Efficiency Award. Through their projects, these organizations have improved their internal efficiency and developed new services and skills around data.

The French department of Mayenne has created management dashboards for its internal teams to monitor the “health” of the region. These dashboards are also viewed every month by the president and community officials.

With these resources, which have replaced most of its email and paper documents, it covers all the region’s areas of interest (including solidarity and autonomy) and internal efficiency  (finances, human resources).

Thanks to this approach, the department’s teams have considerably reduced time taken on many tasks. Now, a document that used to take a week to prepare is produced in just half a day.

Schneider Electric is a specialist and world leader in digital energy solutions and automation for energy efficiency and sustainability.

Schneider Electric very quickly recognized the value of being a data-driven organization. That’s why it created and published its “Exchange” portal, creating an ecosystem of partners and bringing together data from all stakeholders.

Users can thus learn about digital products and service providers, or they can even discuss common issues with their peers through open communities.

Lamie Mutuelle, Agence ORE and Enedis have all won the Personalization Award for their efforts to personalize data visualizations. 

Lamie Mutuelle is a national supplementary health insurance organization. With more than 70 years of experience, it offers mutual health insurance for active workers, non-salaried workers, and retirees.

The organization chose Opendatasoft to improve its internal and external data sharing, access, and dissemination through data visualizations.

Lamie Mutuelle consolidated a significant amount of its data before creating personalized dashboards for its users. The ODS platform will soon be used to populate the CRM and its member area.

Agence ORE is an alliance of all electricity and gas distributors in France that facilitates the provision of comprehensive data services related to energy.

It launched its open data platform in April 2018 to publish all multi-energy and multi-manager regulatory datasets covering electricity and natural gas distribution.

On the Agence ORE portal, there are also many data visualizations linked to the consumption and production of electricity or gas, the mapping of networks and infrastructures, and more.

In 2015, Enedis became the first European distributor to publish aggregated energy data as open data. Since then, it has been deepening its approach to help everyone involved in the energy transition.

Whether it is data around consumption and production, an overview of the electricity network or renewable energies, this information is useful to organizations and people as varied as local authorities, service providers, companies involved in electric mobility, associations, electricity market players, researchers or even citizens. It is particularly useful to help better understand the energy transition, its challenges and its implications.

Elia has won the Autonomy Award thanks to its teams being able to learn the platform very quickly and create value from their data.

Elia operates Belgium’s high voltage electricity transmission network. It now shares a lot of data on its open data portal, including information related to transmission, balancing, production data, congestion management, and more.

Elia’s teams have been able to reuse the ODS resources made available to our customers to improve their skills and ensure full adherence to the group’s new data practices.

The Orléans Metropolitan Area has won the Diversity Award for its innovative data experiences.

Orleans is the capital of the Center-Val de Loire region and has a population of more than 115,000. On its portal, the city shares data related to areas as varied as mobility, the economy, real estate and the environment.

With Orléans, Opendatasoft has now become part of the museum! The city has added an interactive map of the Orleans Museum for Biodiversity and the Environment, which allows people to view their areas of interest. The city is also bringing data into its gardens, where visitors can use QR codes to find out more about nearby plants. It has also set up a portal to identify the city’s associations, an initiative created during the COVID pandemic that is now able to continue thanks to its data strategy.

The SNCF Group, UK Power Networks, and the Junta de Castilla y León have all won the Ambassadors Award for their ability to join forces with their users and stakeholders around data.

Beyond the creation of their portals, the SNCF Group, UK Power Networks, and the Junta de Castilla y León are taking concrete actions to share their information and their data culture with the goal of expanding access and increasing reuse.

SNCF Réseau, part of the French national railway operator, shares data with all its employees to improve internal project management (such as through service mapping and operational analysis).

The organization also provides lots of tools for monitoring wildlife services, as well as maintenance and/or works services.

UK Power Networks is the leading electricity supplier in the United Kingdom and is at the forefront of open data in the energy sector, anticipating upcoming regulatory requirements through information sharing.

With Opendatasoft, the organization makes its data intelligible so that end users can easily reuse it.

UK Power Networks is continuously working on improving its open data platform and finding innovative solutions for interacting with users and collecting their feedback.

The Junta de Castilla y León is the governing and administrative body of the Spanish autonomous community of Castile and León and serves as the executive branch and regulatory authority.

On its open data portal, the organization publishes lots of data to improve the daily lives of its citizens, including around water quality, historic building opening hours, job vacancies and public health.

Congratulations again to the winners of Opendatasoft’s 2021 Awards – and to all our customers who continually innovate to provide better data experiences to their employees, customers, and citizens.