Open Knowledge Community Stories

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The Municipality of Thessaloniki in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Greece and the Research Unit URENIO invite the city’s developers to participate in an application development marathon (hackathon) in order to improve the operations of the municipality and the city (http://hackathess.eu/). Continuing the success story known as "Apps for Greece" (“1st event Applications for Thessaloniki”), the organizers invite contestants to exploit the potential of technology and to develop web and mobile applications, which will improve the quality of life in the city.

 The hackathon participants are asked to focus on any of the critical issues that will improve the functioning of the city: transportation, energy, nutrition, water, buildings, infrastructure, governance, etc. You can create web or mobile applications in the language and platform of your choice. The jury, made ​​up of members of the Municipality of Thessaloniki, Academics, Researchers and Entrepreneurs, will evaluate the participants. 

Description 

What will happen: Application development marathon (Hachathon) for Thessaloniki.

Who should attend: Programmers and software designers who live or work in the area of ​​Thessaloniki in groups of one to three people.

Where: The open co-working space “Coho”, Nap. Zervas, 10, Thessaloniki.

When: The contest will be held on the 29 and 30 November 2014. The awards will be given on December 4, 2014.

Schedule: 29-30 / 11/2014

 10:00 to 11:00: Organizers Presentations

11:00 to 17:00 (Sunday): Application development Marathon

17:00 to 19:00: Presentation of applications to the jury

19: 00 to 21:00: Presentation of applications on startup Europe

21:00: Announcement of the results

04/12/2014

20:00: Award winners

We offer: Short presentations of the contest’s basic guidelines, which will help you get started. Meals, snacks, soft drinks and coffee to keep you alert, and breakfast on Sunday morning. Wireless Internet access.

You must bring: Your laptop, creativity, passion, skills and ideas. Also, a cooperative attitude and team spirit as you will be member of a team.

Subject: All teams participating in the competition have to work on a problem faced by citizens of Thessaloniki. The problems will be chosen from a list provided by the organizers. Problems not in the list can also be selected by the participants, as long as they are related to the hackathon’s theme.

Prizes:

1st Prize: 3.000 €

2nd Prize: 2.000 €

3rd Prize: 1.000 €

Jury:The Jury will consist of members of the Municipality of Thessaloniki, Academics, Researchers and Entrepreneurs. The members of the jury will be announced soon.

 Evaluation criteria:

 There are three key criteria against which applications will be assessed:

Quality concept: The application is novel and innovative.

Development concept: The application is functional, it works without major problems, it is well designed, and it can be offered to real users with minor improvements.

Possible outcomes: The implementation, once offered to citizens can help them in solving a significant administrative, social, environmental or economic issue in the city.

 Registration:

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Library (AUTH) in cooperation with Open Knowledge Greece invites you to the event "Open Access Week 2014" to be held on 21rst October at the Amphitheatre of the Central Library.

Time: October 21, 2014 from 11am to 1:30pm

Location: Amphitheatre of the Central Library Street: AUTh Campus City/Town: Thessaloniki Website or Map: http://maps.auth.gr/?lang=en&… Event Type: informational

Program 

11.00 Opening

11.30 Open Access Button Alexandra Giannopoulou, Lawyer and PhDc of Université Paris II Panthéon Assas, member of the OAB (via Skype)

11.45 The Open Data in the Knowledge Society Dr. Charalmapos Bratsas, President of the Open Knowledge Greece, School of Mathematics AUTH

12.15 Open Research Health Data Management  Dr. Panagiotis Bamidis, Assist. Professor of Medical Education Informatics, Medical Physics Laboratory, Medical School, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Open Knowledge Greece Founding Member, Advisory Board Member of the Open Knowledge International.

12.45 Open Access Library Services in AuTH

S.Alexandridou, N.Grigoriadou, E.Emmanouilidou, S.Zapounidou, N.Kaliakouda, V.Karkanis, F.Lioliou, D.Papadaki, Librarians of AUTH Central Library

13.00 Strategies to Publish in Research Projects and Open Access Sophia Zapounidou, Librarian service website

Our local group (Open Knowledge - Philippines) will have a meet-up entitled "Talk Data to me" on 28 Oct 2014, 7pm at Bo's Coffee, Glorietta 5 Makati City. This will be the second meet-up after the Maker's Festival 2014 held last 14-15 Sep 2014 at Glorietta 5 atrium.

Our agenda is to confirm the membership and assigning key people to hold working groups. In addition, we will initiate the planning session for the upcoming activities of OKPH in 2015. In relation to our projects, the Open LGU-Full Disclosure Policy will look into openspending platform. Another project of Bantay.ph headed by Happy Feraren (School of Data Fellow) is the collection and analysis of Civil Service Commission (CSC) call center data and bring it forward to a more effective public-driven feedback mechanism and public participation. We will also activate our membership to participate in populating the Open Data Census - datasets from the Philippines.

With the generous funding and tremendous support from the World Bank, Open Data China and Lab for Digital and Mobile Governance, Fudan University successfully held the first ever "Open Data in China" Workshop on 21 Oct. This workshop brought government officials from 7 different open data initiatives in China, 6 representatives from demand side, and 5 international and regional open data experts into together to share their experience, challenges, concerns and ideas on open data development in China.

We feel really honor that we can have Mrs Amparo Ballivian from the World Bank and Mr Joel Gurin from the GovLab, NYU as our keynote speakers. Their talks on latest evidence on open data for economic growth and social innovation really inspire Chinese Gov audience to understand the concept and why they should do it. 

We also feel really glad that this time we can have 7 government representatives which feature: Shanghai initiative, Beijing Initiative, Wuhan Initiative and NanHai District (under the Foshan City, GuangDong Province) Initiative . 

On demand side, we also had 6 representatives from academic, urban planning, media, NGO, design, private sector highlighting how open data can bring new change in their sector and what they did in this field. 

In the end of the day, we had a session on building open data ecosystem. Bruce Haupt from Open Houston shared the story of building up partnership between city gov and community in Houston, Joel Gurin talked about the experience of designing and organizing the first open data roundtable with US department of Commerce, and TH Schee from Code for Tomorrow presented their own works in Taiwan to show how grass-root community can boost open data innovation.  Dr Zheng also shared his research on open data ecosystem and then the session was wrapped up by Feng Gao's talk on Open Data China Community. 

Do you want to be involved in developing new smart services? Do you want to take part in inspiring seminars on digitization and open data? Then you should sign up for the Gothenburg event during the Nordic Open Data Week 2015. It is free and you can compete for great prizes.

On May 30, 2015 the City of Gothenburg is organizing, together with SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden and the Social Media Club Gothenburg, a full day on open data. During the day there will be seminars on innovation, open data and digital services. In addition to the seminars, there is a hackathon, where you will be able to develop ideas with those data sets available, along with other participants. The event is supported by VINNOVA.

The competition focuses on solving the challenges emanating from the three sustainability pillars, socially, economically and an ecologically sustainable society. Compete individually or in teams. You can start developing your contribution as soon as you have registered. On May 30, all participants gathers for the on-site development of ideas through visualization of prototypes and suggestions. The ideas will be demonstrated for the audience and the winner is decided by the end of the day.

– My hope is that we can get to see all sorts of exciting creations, why not a horn saluting us Gothenburgers when we fall below our levels of air pollution, says Ronald Caous, leading Gothenburg digital development.

Serdar Temiz, doctoral candidate in open data at KTH and chairman of Open Knowledge Sweden, is one of the keynote speakers.

For registration and  more information please click here

Tras el lanzamiento de la iniciativa en diciembre de 2014, en marzo de 2015 se dio inicio a la primera edición del Programa OEA para la Promoción de Gobiernos Abiertos en las Américas. En esta ocasión, a través de un competitivo proceso de selección, 24 participantes de 16 países de las Américas fueron elegidos para formar parte de la primera generación de fellows del Programa. 

Los 24 participantes comenzaron el recorrido del Programa participando durante dos semanas de un curso virtual sobre Estrategias para el Gobierno Abierto en las Américas. Esta instancia sirvió como primer contacto entre los participantes y fue el preámbulo del primer seminario, celebrado entre los días 22 y 28 de marzo en Osprey Point, Maryland, y Washington, DC. Durante una semana, los fellows se reunieron a debatir sobre los temas más relevantes del Gobierno Abierto en la región, intercambiaron ideas y experiencias, participaron de talleres de teambuilding y liderazgo, y participaron de eventos de networking con expertos internacionales de reconocidas organizaciones que trabajan en el campo del Gobierno Abierto. 

Además, en el primer seminario los participantes conformaron equipos que trabajarán en proyectos conjuntos para plantear soluciones innovadoras a algunos de los desafíos que el paradigma del Gobierno Abierto plantea en la región. Los fellows volverán a reunirse en el segundo seminario del Programa, que tendrá lugar en octubre en México y culminará en la Cumbre de la Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto 2015. 

Written by TJ Dimacali GMA News July 13, 2015 7:20pm

See More - http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/521370/scitech/science/int-l-tie-up-seeks-to-boost-pinoy-data-journalism-skills

On Monday, July 13, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) and the UK- based Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) launched Data Journalism PH 2015, an intensive three-day workshop aimed at boosting local capacity to create stories from raw data.

The launch event in Quezon City was attended by reporters and staff of various major Philippine news outlets and blogs.

Unreliable paper government

PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas underscored the storytelling potential of data-driven journalism, particularly in an age of social media and cloud computing—barring hurdles to “liberating” the data for public consumption.

“The potential for stories is there, but the data regime in the Philippines is based largely on hard copies. A lot of information is still on paper—it’s unreliable, inaccessible, and not so open,” she explained.

“A large portion of our population is tech-savvy. Unfortunately, a large portion of our government isn’t,” admitted Department of Budget Management (DBM) Usec. Bon Moya, who also heads the Open Data Task Force behind the government’s open-data Data.gov.ph initiative.

According to independent site InternetLiveStats.com, in 2014 alone, the Philippines registered an Internet penetration rate of almost 40 percent, with 39.4 million Internet users out of a population of just over 100 million. The country follows behind its neighbors Malaysia and Vietnam, which boast penetration rates of 40 percent and 43 percent, respectively.

Moreover, it is hoped that greater public awareness of data journalism will enable greater transparency and accountability from government.

“The Philippines has an incredible opportunity here. The move for freedom of information is a chance to leapfrog other countries in terms of transparency. But transparency is just a means to an end, which is accountability,” said OKF data expert Sam Leon.

Stories behind numbers

But for that to happen, it is important to develop basic data skills among journalists, bloggers, and other public watchdogs—many of whom might feel intimidated by the need to work with numbers.

“Kailangan bawasan ang takot sa numero. It’s not all about math. The challenge is to find the stories behind the numbers. Numbers are only significant if we can draw meaningful stories from them,” said Commission on Audit (COA) Commissioner Heidi Mendoza, who also spoke at the event.

Wrapping up the launch event, World Bank economist Rogier van den Brink likened the Philippine situation in terms of pushing for public accountability to that of the early United States.

“This has happened before,” he said. “The present Philippine experience echoes that of the US in the 1800’s, when ‘muckraker’ journalists formed coalitions with civil servants to expose problems in a government that was highly corrupt.”

The intensive workshop runs from July 13 to July 15, covering the basics of how to acquire data (including the process of “scraping” data to convert it into machine-readable format); data analysis; and data visualization.

Open Knowledge Sweden is pleased to announce its latest project, the Open Knowledge Awards: Open knowledge is knowledge, often in the form of data, available for everyone to freely use, reuse and redistribute without any sorts of restrictions. Open Knowledge Sweden envisions enlightened societies where everyone has access to key information in order to make daily or life changing choices with the help of relevant information, where authorities, institutions, businesses and other entities are fully transparent and at the same time, using open knowledge to increase innovation and efficiency on finding solutions. Open Knowledge should be a mainstream concept and a natural part of our everyday lives.

The Open Knowledge Awards will help raise awareness on how society, including authorities, businesses, organizations and other entities can benefit from open knowledge. OK Awards covers categories such as transparency, entrepreneurship, open science, region/municipality and business initiative. Each award will put a quality mark and recognize the work of organizations, companies and authorities towards transparency and open knowledge.

The award winners will set an example of how businesses and organizations have best used open knowledge for innovative solutions, how authorities have been more transparent with the use of open knowledge and how public figures have used their influence for change in that direction, both cultural and legal.

  On December 2, 2016 Industrial Marketing and Entrepreneurship (IME) Division will host first of its kind (OKA) in Sweden in collaboration with Open Knowledge Sweden (OKS), the Swedish NGO which is one of chapters of global Open Knowledge Foundation. OKA aim to provide recognition to the organizations and individuals that works towards open knowledge.

Wikimedia  Sweden is one of the sponsors of the event and will be represented by Anna Troberg,CEO of Wikimedia Sweden. Candidate nomination was crowd-sourced and finalists for each of 6 categories were selected  from these nominations. Terrence Brown from Indek and Serdar Temiz from  OKS/Indek shares jury membership with  Annika Lidne (CEO & co-founder of Dramatify), Peter Krantz (CIO of National Library of Sweden ) and Jessica Jederberg Wodmar, (well known speaker and communication expert from Jcwkommunikation.se). Jessica Jederberg Wodmar and Terrence Brown will also be moderators of the event. Asmen Gul is project manager of Open Knowledge Awards.