During 2012, and as part of the 'Connecting Society to Culture Programme', Europeana will invite developers and designers to showcase the possibilities of using the Europeana API to develop marketable applications. The kick-off of this programme, Hack4Europe! 2012, will be at the Europeana Awareness event "Culture for digital innovation" on 9 May 2012 in Brussels.

Hack4Europe! 2012 road show will include 5 hackathons in 5 different countries organised by Europeana and selected Europeana Awareness partners between 9 May and 21 June (http://pro.europeana.eu/hack4europe-2012).

Hack4Europe 2012 Copenhagen is being coordinated by Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center in cooperation with IT University of Copenhagen. The event will take place on 10 and 11 May 2012 at IT University in Copenhagen.

Hack4Europe 2012 Warsaw is being coordinated by National Audiovisual Institute in cooperation with Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center. The event will take place on 26 and 27 May 2012 at National Audiovisual Institute in Warsaw.

Also in this series:

• Hack4Europe!Germany, 5-6 June, Berlin, organised by the Europeana Collections 1914-1918
• Hack4Europe! Belgium, 13-15 June 2012, Leuven, organised by Europeana

Hackathons are contests for software developers, and Hack4Europe! series is focused on Europeana API and creative reuse of the data aggregated by Europeana. Participants will be encouraged to try out their ideas for creative reuse of the Europeana content and build prototypes showcasing the social and business value of open cultural data. The suggested (but not obligatory) themes are:

• Going mobile: Applications that bring Europeana to the mobile devices be they smartphones or tablets! Take advantage of geo-data and geo-awareness.
• Mashing-up: Mash-up with other APIs and combine and enrich Europeana content with other free content from e.g. Wikipedia.
• Social curation: Applications that allow users to curate Europeana content a share it with the world and each others on social platforms.
• User annotations: Applications that let users enrich Europeana objects with comments, tags, links to external sources, or links to other Europeana objects. This can be in the form of a game.
• World War One: Special attention will be on applications built to showcase the human interest side of world war one based on the material collected during the Europeana collection days.

You can find out more about prototypes developed during previous hackathons on this website:

http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/hackathon-prototypes

Best prototypes will be awarded prizes in the four categories:

• best commercial viability
• greatest social impact
• most innovative
• developers' pick (voted by hackathon participants)

Winners from the individual hackathons will be then further evaluated and one finalist per category will be invited and awarded a special prize during the Digital Agenda Assembly on 21-22 June in Brussels.

If you would like to participate in one of these hackathons, please check out the details and register for:

Copenhagen: http://hack4europe2012-cph.eventbrite.com/

Warsaw: http://hack4europe2012-waw.eventbrite.com/

Leuven: http://hack4europe2012leuven.eventbrite.com/