International Open Data day falls on 21 February and there will be a range of practical ways people can help out within an Australian context.
Open Data Day 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 open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.
The quote above is taken from http://opendataday.org. As you can see there are a range of activities related to the day and if you’d like to know more about Open Data Day activities worldwide then please head over to http://opendataday.org to take a look.
After collecting ideas from the Open Knowledge community in Australia, the following options are provided as an initial list of things people can get involved in. We’re sure there will be lots of other things going on so please feel free to add your own activities via comments on this post.
Help to update the Australian Open Data Census
Stephen Gates has been working on the establishment of a regional open data census that follows the same guidelines as the international census. By helping with the newly established regional census you’ll be contributing to the establishment of an open data index for Australian States and Territories. For an picture of what this looks like you can see the global index.
On 21 February you should be able to start providing assessments via http://australia.census.okfn.org. As the census is designed to measure the openness of key data published by Australia’s state and territory governments all you need to do to complete an assessment is to first identify a relevant open dataset and then answer a few questions about it. Assessments go through a review process by editors before the completed open data index is published.
Code for Australia Open Data Day in Sydney
Code for Australia is holding an event to commemorate International Open Data Day (register here). This will coincide with Code for America’s CodeAcross, a global event to activate cities and make stuff happen.
They’ve picked a theme: Principles of a 21st Century Government. What are they, how do they look in practice and how will we make them a reality is what they want workshop and prototype with you. They want to make a plan on how government, industry and the community can work together and solve civic problems that affect us all.
This is an event for everyone.
Urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organisers and anyone with a passion to make their city a better place.
Expect to get to know the latest ways government is using data, hear the experience of working in the US government and opportunities to make your ideas a reality.
CKAN SDK Sprint in Canberra
Link Digital will be releasing a PHP and a .NET CKAN SDK on GitHub. These SDKs will be available from 21 February for testing, feedback and further development. Any suggestions for additional languages people would like to see SDKs developed for are welcome so please feel free to leave a comment below.
If you are based in Canberra and want to come along to support the sprint then please let the folks at Link know via an email to info at linkdigital dot com dot au.
CKAN is an open source project that provides web application software which is suitable for the establishment of open data catalogues. Learn more at http://ckan.org.