Your best stories or successes with Opendatasoft

What a year it’s been! 🎉

From launching a new platform experience to hosting inspiring events where we shared stories and shaped the future of our product, it’s been an incredible journey.
Community has made it all even easier — helping us connect, share ideas, and collaborate more than ever before. ✨ 

🐑 The day we tracked… sheep in the city

One of the quirkiest datasets ever published on the Opendatasoft platform: the real-time geolocation of sheep roaming through the city of Ghent in Belgium.

Yes — actual sheep, equipped with sensors, whose movements could be followed live on an open data portal!

Proof that data can tell stories both smart and unexpected 🐏

👉 Sheep Tracking in Ghent
 

😅 When infrastructure met presidential spotlight

We still remember that day after the Covid period when the “Frais et Local” website  built on Opendatasoft suddenly went viral after being highlighted by the French President himself.

Traffic exploded within minutes.

A few cold sweats for the infra team… but everything held steady.

Even under presidential pressure 😉

👉 Macron’s post

💙 Data for good: supporting child health worldwide

Among the many projects that made us proud, one that truly touched us was supporting Sanofi’s Foundation S and its program My Child Matters, fighting childhood diseases across the world.

When data helps coordinate efforts to save children’s lives, it reminds us why we build platforms like ours.

👉 Foundation S – My Child Matters portal

🏅 Paris 2024: “We need people we trust 300%”

We’ll never forget that call from the Paris 2024 data team:

“We have official tech sponsors, but beyond logos, we need people we trust 300% to make things work on D-Day. You’re on that list — be ready.”

A few weeks later:

“Okay, team — we’re going with you. You’ll provide and operate the API powering the official Games app.”

An unforgettable moment of trust and teamwork.

🎓 Parcoursup: data that truly matters

Some datasets change lives.

The Parcoursup open data portal is one of them — helping thousands of French high-school students every year make crucial decisions about their future.

It’s also a story of trust: the Ministry of Higher Education chose to work with our young French startup, Opendatasoft, long before “sovereign tech” became a buzzword.

We’ve been proud partners ever since.

👉 Parcoursup Data Portal

💡 The mystery of “Green Floor”

For years, one of our core technical components was nicknamed Green Floor.

Why?

Because when it was developed, the floor of the Opendatasoft office was literally green.

Our devs never miss a chance to add a little creativity — even to code names 💚

💧 When your platform helps detect viruses

Sometimes you discover by chance — through a TV report — that your platform is playing a quiet but critical role in crisis management.

That happened when Veolia and Birdz, our first client, used Opendatasoft to share real-time water quality data — data that also helped detect traces of viruses, including Covid, in wastewater during the pandemic.

A powerful reminder of how data can silently protect public health.

There has been a few projects lately that could go in here!

But since its in this community it would have to be our Local Authority Dashboard (Local Authority Dashboard — Open Data | Northern Powergrid) designed to allow local authority users to pull data from across our portal for their boundary of interest, and multiple areas at once for Combined Authorities.

A good example of the support this community can provide, because ​@thomas.pagotto was essential in bug fixing our multiple area filter, and providing this extra use case for combined authorities (which I did promise my boss we could do so the support was very much appreciated! 🤣)

Thanks Thomas! 

Ah that’s awesome to hear! 😄
Really glad I could help out with the multiple area filter — it was a fun one to crack. Always great seeing the Dashboard come together and actually get some real use!

Appreciate the shoutout, and can’t wait to see what you build next! 🚀

A personal anecdote: shortly after joining, while looking for documentation on the Opendatasoft product (now Huwise), I stumbled upon a mind map listing all the platform's features.

If printed, it would likely have covered an entire wall with microscopic font!

Even after several years at Huwise, I'm still discovering new features today - a testament to how rich and comprehensive this product truly is.

Back in 2014, at the beginning of my data journey I did a Data Journalism internship for the French Media Outlet Rue 89, which at that time was on the rise by proposing interactive web apps and some data journalism projets. 

The project I enjoyed the most : Working with a dataset hosted in the Opendatasoft Open data Portal of Paris that showed the location of all the movie scenes that where shot in Paris from 2002 to 2012. 

With the help of a developper we used this data, enriched it with movie metadata from IMDB (International Movie Database) and created a web application built with Google Fussion Tables, so the user could geolocate in a map the movies scenes shot nearby. 

Sadly, Google deprecated Fussion Tables so the app no longer works, but you can still check the article over here.

Do you want to know which director shoot the most films in Paris during that period ? Which where the best and worst movies filmed ? The answers are over there.

The application was a success, and it became one of the most read article on the site for a few months.

At that time, I never imagined that my career path would cross with Opendatasoft in the future.  But I’m very glad it did.

Back in the very early years of Opendatasoft, I remember the day I was just watching the news on television at home, when suddenly, in the middle of a segment about agriculture and a trade show, I see the platform on a screen, used by the speaker (a customer) to illustrate a point with a map. It was entirely unexpected and blew my mind. It wasn’t a segment about ODS, it was just our product being used by someone, using data to provide insights. It just showed our work doing real impact, exactly the way we intended it to, live on television on one of the biggest french TV channel. At that time we already had customers and knew the product was bringing value to many people, but seeing it live from my couch in the middle of the news was really something huge for some reason.

Also, I was working on these maps at the time, so, in retrospect, I think I would have died on the spot if some bug occurred during the presentation in front of millions of persons. Thankfully it worked!

I’d love to share our experience with the Smart Street Basel project 🚦

The implementation was incredibly fast and exciting: we published sensor data directly on our open data portal 👉 https://data.bs.ch/explore/?q=tags%3D%22smarte+strasse%22 and created visualizations right away – for example, the microsite on parking occupancy: https://data.bs.ch/pages/microsite-parkplaetze/

What made it really special was that we had street signs with QR codes, allowing people to access the visualizations instantly. This made open data truly tangible in everyday life! 💡

The project was a great success – it led to media coverage and presentations at the Swiss Statistics Days 

A great example of how open data, technology, and creativity can come together to create real value for the city and its citizens 💙

Thanks everyone for all these nice and inspiring stories!

Thinking back to the early years of Huwise — especially today, as we celebrate Huwise’s 14th birthday — I’m reminded of how proud we were when we signed our first customers in regions where we hadn’t done any active prospecting.

Two examples come to mind:

• KAPSARC (https://datasource.kapsarc.org/), which operates a massive and popular energy-data portal powered by Huwise.

• SPMS (https://transparencia.sns.gov.pt/), which runs the open data portal for the Ministry of Health in Portugal.

When we asked how they discovered us, the answer was simple: through search engines. Just a few weeks after finding Huwise, their projects were already live in production.

These have become long-lasting relationships — they’ve been customers for nearly 10 years now.