Towards IODC16

(Originally published in blog.okfn.org)

Open Data Day in Spain is not something exceptional anymore. Five years after the first Open Data Day was born in Canada, nine Spanish cities have adopted in 2016 this celebration by organizing various local events It is not a coincidence that Spain will host the next International Open Data Conference 2016 in october, given the good health of its data communities, in spite of the fact of its poor results shown in the Open Data Index. Open Data in Spain is definitely a growing seed.

Alicante, Barcelona –with two events–, Bilbao, Girona, Granada, Madrid, Pamplona, Valencia, and Zaragoza were the cities that held activities to celebrate Open Data Day.

Open Knowledge Spain took part in the organization of the event in Madrid, and created a website to announce all of the activities that were going to be held in Spain, including the International Open Data Conference, that its Call for Proposals had just been opened for applications.

Overview of the events

In alphabetical order of cities, the University of Alicante organized Alicante/Alacant’s Open Data Day on March 17. They celebrated a meeting with participants from the Department of Transparency at the Valencia Regional Government (where Alicante belongs to), the Madrid Open Data Institute (ODI Madrid), the data research and data opening network Maredata (Universitat Politécnica de València), and an initiative that promotes the University of Alicante startup ecosystem, ua:emprende.

Barcelona celebrated Open Data Day with a gathering organised by apps4citizen where people deliberated about the importance of personal data, transparency, the knowledge acquisition process, or the various results that may be reached from the interpretation of data. A week later, Procomuns.net organized a data visualization contest on Commons Collaborative Economies in the P2P value project.

In Bilbao, the event run by MoreLab DeustoTech-Internet, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto, and the Bilbao city council. The group focused on the scope of the movement in general, and in specific, linked open data. The participants split into working groups with the objective to design and implement fast and easy applications that link and use open data.

The Girona the Municipal Archive and the Center for Research and Image Distribution organized the event in Girona; their theme revolved around the documentary heritage data that included 125 archives and collections, 31 inventories, and 75 catalogues.

In Granada, the Free Software Office at the University of Granada organised a hackathon with eight candidate projects from March 4 to March 7. The projected looked at various topics, from traffic to gender bias.

In Madrid, the data journalism group, Open Knowledge Spain, and Madrid Open Data Institute (ODI Madrid), organised a hackathon where three teams from different background such as developers, journalists, programmers, statisticians, and citizens worked to open data in different aspects of open data: city light pollution, asbestos, and glass parliaments.

Pamplona/Iruña took the opportunity to present the open technological platform FIWARE, an initiative for developers or entrepreneurs to use open data for innovative applications. FINODEX is the first European accelerator that is already funding projects that reuse open data with FIWARE technology.

In Valencia the first OpenDatathon ETSINF – UPV was organised by the Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, MUGI, the Master’s degree in Information Management, and the DataUPV Group. 16 teams participated, with the objective of supporting, promoting and disseminating the use of open data, especially among the members of the university. It was supported by the Department of Transparency, Social Responsibility, Participation and Cooperation at the Valencia Regional Government, Inndea Foundation, Cátedra Ciudad de Valencia at UPV, and the private companies BigML and Everis.

From A to Z, Zaragoza’s city council is well known for its long term support to Open Data. The city mission is to provide open, accessible and useful data to its citizens. For example, all the information about bills is open and may be found on the city Open Data website. In this regard, they are not only talking about Open Data but also about Transparency and municipal policies on Open Data.

The Open Data Day celebration in 2016 has consisted of a series of lectures about the current condition of open data in Spain, and emphasized that public sector information (PSI) reuse means an opportunity for entrepreneurship and the impact it generates in the field of of transparency and accountability. and some of its participants are.