Together with several civil servants of my home city we’ve been busy getting open government data on the agenda locally. We did a session during last month’s Open Innovation Festival, and are now trying to move it forward with a few other people we met up with because of that.
In September or October this year we will organize a local Open Data event.
On a Saturday we will have an event with two streams. One to present basic insights and experiences with open data, and to discuss issues open data creates for both governments and data re-users. And a second stream to actually create concepts and applications based on local open government data. In the run-up we will make sure that a number of interesting data sets will be available.
The week after that Saturday, groups of students from the local university for applied sciences (Saxion) will work for a week on applications that use open government data, earnig study credits. At the end of that week everything that was made will be presented.
We know from Canadian cities like Vancouver that open government data is a very powerful thing on the local level. It is where data is directly connected to your living environment. With this event we hope to demonstrate the potential of open data, raise the awareness about open data with local government, as well as create value for our city by building working applications.
Open Data Enschede is organized as a private initiative by Patrick Reijnders, Peter Breukers and Lars Fehse (Municipality of Enschede), Heinze Havinga (student in Enschede), and me.
Are you interested in this event in any way? Do let me know!