Open Data Day - are you joining in?

On 23 February, organisations around the world will be holding hackathon events to celebrate Open Data Day.

The International Open Data Hackathon is, 'a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments.'

This will be the third Open Data Day, the first two having taken place in December 2010 and December 2011, and it is the brainchild of Canadian David Eaves. Read David's announcement about his year's event on his Open Data Day blog post. In the first year, 60 cities across 5 continents held events. The second year, it spread to 6 continents (having reached Australia). This year, there are events in over 70 cities across the world. You can check out what's happening near you on the Open Data Day Wiki page.

Here are just a few examples of the types of events taking place this weekend across Europe...

The Open Knowledge Foundation (which now also manages the Open Data Day website) is running an Open Data Day event in Amsterdam, together with the Waag Society. They invite you to join their 'School of Data' team on a 'data expedition into the world of tax havens', and to join in with work on the Open Data Census.

In Scotland, Edinburgh University will work with the Open Knowledge Foundation to explore links between local communities and businesses, software develoeprs and organisations that collect, store and provide data, in a event they say is 'a wee bit different' and that welcomes non-technical people too.

In Warsaw, the European Public Sector Information Platform (ePSI) is holding three days of intensive open data activities, culminating in a hackday at which developers will work on, amongst other things, making public transport timetables available to all, and creating a map of Warsaw showing places that the city would like to rent to NGOs (non-governmental organisations).

Let us know what you're doing for Open Data Day by adding a comment to this blog.

It might be only an annual event at the moment, but we'd like to think that one day every day will be an open data day! And since we're on the subject, here's our Linked Open Data video for those who haven't seen it yet.

Linked Open Data - What is it? from Europeana on Vimeo.