From May 25^th to 29^th, Utrecht will be gathering a Nobel Prize winner, a cyber-war expert, a hyperloop dreamer, a technology strategist for NASA and thousands of proud-to-be geeks, aspiring entrepreneurs and enthusiastic start-uppers, focusing on Open Source innovation, creativity, science and digital entertainment.

The 4th edition of Campus Party Europe, to be held in the Netherlands, will be full of unmissable talks, profitable workshops and absorbing challenges. In the spirit of this great technological experience, ever growing since 1997, having a look at the 5 days, a 24h non-stop agenda and trying to figure out a schedule for the week there could be like figuring out a complex puzzle. Although that would be some task that the Campuseros are well accustomed to facing and solving  in the best manner possible, here goes a useful list of not-to-be-missed highlights among the program and from the side of FIWARE:

On Thursday 26th, as part of the Workshops Digital Entertainment program, two workshops will be focusing on FIWARE technologies and assets:

• Monetize your APIs or make them available as Open Data (11-12 AM). Focusing on the CKAN platform as part of the FIWARE architecture for open data, the workshop will delve into the CKAN extensions that allow the management of not only static historic data but real-time context information too. Also, the whole FIWARE Business API Ecosystem will be overviewed. The recent collaborative framework between TM Forum and FIWARE has empowered such use of the FIWARE technologies in order to produce, consume and monetize data.
• Development of Context-Aware Applications with FIWARE (3-5 PM). Orion is an implementation of the FIWARE Context Broker and part of the GE catalog. Being Open Source and at any developer´s free disposal, it allows you to model, manage and gather context information at a large scale, easily enabling the development of context-aware applications. This workshop will emphasize the value of such tools in order to produce smart apps and will review its evolution (from implementing NGSI v1 API to the recent NGSI v2). A practical demonstration will be used to consume real-time data from the city of Utrecht.

Also on Thursday, all the Campus Party participants interested in joining the FIWARE open ecosystem and growing to profit by being a part of it, are invited to attend this talk at the Innovation Stage:

• FIWARE. Open APIs for Open Minds (6-7PM), by José Manuel Cantera Fonseca –Web, Mobile and IoT Technologies specialist at Telefónica I+D–. This talk will present FIWARE as an open platform aimed at the creation of innovative digital applications and services and the APIs and backend infrastructure components it is providing to enable app developers to quickly and cost-effectively create new portable & interoperable solutions and context-aware applications. It will also address FIWARE as a growing and innovative community that is engaging entrepreneurs, developers, public entities and users from all around the world, not only within the Smart City focus, but also on the Industry, Agriculture and other business areas, as well as IoT and Big Data advancements.

On Friday 27th and as part of the Workshop Entrepreneurship program, another workshop around FIWARE will take place:

• Intro to FIWARE Lab – Workshop (8-9 PM). Intended to be a starting point for developers around the possibilities brought by FIWARE enablers and the FIWARE Lab, this workshop will be particularly useful for the participants of Hackacity Utrecht & Amersfoort, but is also open to others. The Lab is the non-commercial environment where the research and development activities based on FIWARE technologies take place. Also, several cities are already connected to the FIWARE Lab in order to export and exploit their open data in this Cloud environment.

The Hackcity Utrecht Amersfoort is the other focal point from our side: challenges are often the best way to contact and establish a link between colleagues through team-working towards a common goal. The Campus Party employs challenges not only to link the teams, but also as a way to find solutions for large problems and building the future together. Hackacity is a hackathon that started in Porto on 2015. It is aimed to test Big Data provided by cities and municipalities and to promote its use to co-create solutions that will have an impact in the community.

Also on Friday 27th, starting from 6pm at the Creativity / Social Impact Stage, the Dutch version of the Hackacity will take place during the Campus Party this year. For 24 hours, participants will get together and using an Open Source platform as FIWARE is, they will be developing the solutions that the citizens are demanding. Utrecht Region and municipality of Amersfoort are joining Hackacity 2016 and are looking to solve specific challenges of their heavily populated station areas that are undergoing a transition to become an example for Healthy Urban Living. Therefore participants will be asked to develop a concept that uses reliable data from those sources, that make good use of the FIWARE enablers to solve specific challenges of the focus areas and that is also scalable to other situations.

Free Campusero tickets are available for people who will participate in the Hackacity event, including 5 days of unlimited access to the Campus Party, plus festival sleeping accommodation.
The best pitches resulting from the hackaton will have the chance to win expert technical and business advice, gain media exposure and also win prizes in cash!