A Digital Society Award 2025 in ‘Innovation’ for the data-driven UiTwisselingsplatform!
3 December 2025 – The Department of Culture, Youth & Media (CJM), together with publiq and ACA Group, has won the Digital Society Award 2025 in the category ‘Innovation’. And we’re very proud of that! 🏆
What makes this extra special: it’s not the first time this project has been honoured. In 2023, we already won the Digitaal Vlaanderen Award together for the same foundation. This new recognition confirms that the chosen vision and technological approach continue to convince.
Innovative solutions with real impact require vision and perseverance. Together with all stakeholders, we continue to build the Youth and Culture Building Block, powered by AI chatbots, Vibe Coding and advanced data applications.
— Peter Jans, Cloud and Innovation Architect & Business Unit Manager at ACA Group
Culture, but smarter
The award-winning project centres on a data-driven exchange platform that connects cultural players across Flanders. No fragmented information, no silos, no duplicate work: one platform that brings data together, creates insights and enables new digital services.
For citizens, this makes it possible to:
• receive a more personalised cultural offer,
• get near real-time information about events, locations and availability,
• access an overview of all available infrastructure on jeugdmaps.be,
… and for all involved organisations, no longer enter the same data five times.
Why data mesh is worth gold here
The platform is built on a data mesh architecture, cloud-native and on AWS, and that proved to be the right choice. Not one central team managing all data, but a shared framework in which each organisation can provide, share and reuse its own data products.
This solution enables:
• faster innovation,
• fewer dependencies,
• everyone who can and wants to can independently share and query data,
• secure and scalable data exchange,
• lower costs for the entire sector,
• and a solid, future-proof foundation.
In short: it’s exactly what the cultural sector needed.
This platform forms the backbone of the cultural sector. It enables organisations to share data and innovate in a data-driven way without having to build complex infrastructure themselves. By automating that complexity in a shared self-service platform, we lower the threshold for data-driven collaboration.
— Tom De Wolf, Data Mesh Expert and Platform Architect at ACA Group
Collaboration that truly works
CJM selected publiq and ACA Group to bring this story to life. Thanks to our experience with data mesh, cloud-native technology, Kubernetes and the AWS public cloud, we were able to help build a platform that is not only technically strong, but also user-friendly and future-proof.
This award is a wonderful milestone, but certainly not an endpoint. Together with CJM and publiq, we continue building a cultural sector that works smarter, collaborates better, provides more insights, and stands closer to its audience.
The future of culture and participation will be strengthened even further by digital innovation (and we’re only at the beginning)!