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Datengartln

Open data, hands-on

The challenge

The City of Munich publishes more than 300 datasets on opendata.muenchen.de, from bicycle counters to the first names of newborns. So far they are little used. Data often has “a rather boring image”, the IT Department wrote in its call for the 2025 Innovation Competition, asking how “new target groups for the use of the City of Munich's open data” could be reached. With our community concept “Datengartl’n” we convinced the expert jury, and on 24 July 2025 Mayor Dominik Krause presented us with the Munich Innovation Award. Dr. Laura Dornheim, head of the IT Department, on the decision: “This innovative project has the potential to show that working with data can be fun.”

Our approach

With “Datengartln” we designed a platform that aims to make the City of Munich's open data holdings easily accessible to a broad audience, from interested laypeople to experienced data analysts, and to unite all players on one platform: data providers, users and recipients.

Catalogue, notebooks and university teaching

In a human-centred design process we first conceived and implemented the platform's basic architecture iteratively: a simple, intuitive way to browse the datasets and, in parallel, the first editorial content: data storytelling in the form of Jupyter notebooks. Topics such as “Nomen est Omen?” (first names) or “O'zapft is!” (30 years of Oktoberfest in numbers) showed by example which stories the city's data holds.

With the Statistical Consulting Lab at the Institute of Statistics at LMU Munich we embedded Datengartln in two teaching formats of the bachelor's programme in statistics, and thus won a further user group for the platform.

From notebook to Schmankerl

With the first notebooks online came the first user feedback, and it surprised us: the content was visited, but considered too long. Representative of the voices from the beta phase: “Too long for my Gen Z brain”. Classic notebooks with code, plots and storytelling text are excellent for in-depth engagement, but they do not fit the fast-paced way information is consumed on the web.

So we developed a second, much more compact format: the Schmankerl, short, visually pointed data snacks that can be consumed in under a minute.

A Schmankerl is a self-contained data visualisation: a pointed statement about one Munich open dataset, carried by an expressive graphic and a short piece of context. Anyone who wants to dig deeper can jump straight from there to the underlying dataset or to in-depth notebooks. We contributed four Schmankerl ourselves, before the challenge:

Schmankerl Challenge

A platform whose content comes exclusively from us does not scale. So as soon as the Schmankerl format was established, we opened it up to the community: with the Schmankerl Challenge we invited citizens and data analysts to submit their own data stories from Munich open data. An expert jury assessed the entries on a review platform built specifically for the purpose.

The range of the 22 entries surprised us. Thematically they stretched from urban development (historical aerial image comparisons, public charging infrastructure, population migration) via social infrastructure (childcare provision, playground density, women's employment), mobility (commuter clock, cycling) and culture (street name etymology, first name statistics) to playful concepts such as a Munich StreetGuesser or Klo & Cloud, a map of public toilets with Wi-Fi reception. Technically too, the whole spectrum was covered: static infographics, interactive Leaflet maps, Vue and React web apps with WMS geoservices, statistical analyses in R and 3D visualisations. The awards were presented at Open Data Day 2026.

This range shows the potential that involving the community unlocks: from the same datasets come perspectives, tools and ways of telling that we would not have arrived at on our own, exactly the innovative power the challenge was looking for. Visit datengartln.de (German) →

Funding

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