Saturday, March 3 is International Open Data Day, and the local community from Opendata.ch will use the occasion to have a get-together in Geneva and Berne. Interactive displays will showcase the freshest, coolest open data projects, space for working on new ones, drinks and snacks will be available at our child-and-adult-friendly central location. Calls to other cities and countries celebrating the occasion will be organized, and we will use the opportunity to connect people and plan future events.
Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. For the seventh time in history, groups from around the world will create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
It’s been a grey and cold week so far, but things are looking a little better for Saturday. Here’s the latest SVG forecast, generated at meteoschweiz.admin.ch - the images don’t work because the server still doesn’t support HTTPS (!?) … the afternoon is supposed to be cloudy with sunny breaks:
Since not everyone might want to spend the whole time in the lab, I am thinking of some outdoors activities e.g. in the nearby Monbijou or Kocherpark. Of course, our plan is still to meet in Bern in Effinger at 14:00.
Take a look at some of the activities being planned elsewhere to mark the occasion:
On popular demand, a CSV of all the Open Data Day events is up at the old Datahub, and I did a bit of quick exploration to see how we stand. Except for Columbia, which listed more participants than the funding gap of the Canadian health care system most events that reported their participant counts were in the 30-100 participant range (median: 50, mean: 96), which made us one of the smaller gatherings.
Schools of Data were behind events in New York City, where a whole week of open data activities was kicked off …
And the School of Data in Kyrgyzstan who ran a seriously awesome hackathon …
Through School of Data channels, I heard about events like this humanitarian mapping sprint in Myanmar ending on Open Data Day:
Almost 1/4 (90) of the events mentioned maps or mapping in their description, and around 1/10 (40) seemed to have some kind of hackathon involved - like this meticulously prepared (and nationally supported) event in British Columbia, Canada:
The most fun, meanwhile, seemed to be happening in Nepal:
If you haven’t already, check out my blog post of our Open Data Day meetup, and let’s connect if you have ideas for next time! Next on our agenda is GeoBeer #20 closely followed by Open Data Beer in Zürich on April 12.
One of the most thought provoking Swiss data analyses last year.