The Open Knowledge Foundation’s world-wide community of local groups has been growing rapidly over the last year, and every month we’ve seen new people from more and more countries join the movement. To accommodate this development and add a flexible and versatile structure to the rapid growth we now add a new dimension to the community — the Open Knowledge Foundation Ambassadors.

The Ambassador role is a volunteer position available for those who want to represent the Open Knowledge Foundation in their local region and take the lead in building a local community for open data advocacy and development. Just this week we have inducted the first round of Ambassadors coming from countries in all corners of the world – and are therefore tremendously excited to welcome Prakash Neupane from Nepal, Everton Zanella Alvarenga from Brazil, Ewan Klein from Scotland, Feng Gao and Biao Xie from China and Finnur Magnusson from Iceland into the Local Groups family. And as if that isn’t enough, the next wave of soon-to-be Ambassadors are ready in the pipeline to step up and bring open knowledge on the agenda in new countries all over the world!

New Local Group Brazil – photo by Everton Zanella Alvarenga, CC-BY-SA.

Once inducted, the Ambassadors are equipped with a series of web tools and community resources, and will then be able to organise events and meetups and act as a local evangelists, coordinators and representatives for and in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation. Additionally, they will collaborate with each other as well with the existing thematic Working Groups of the OKF and build a cross-border network to widen the breadth of the projects and concepts they initiate in their local areas.

We are tremendously excited about welcoming these new Ambassadors — both this first group and future ones — and believe that this new brilliant wave of locally-rooted, globally minded individuals and the growing network they will create will truly make a difference in making the world more open.

If you’re reading this and feel that the Ambassador role could be something for you, then read more on the Local Groups page or go straight to the application process.