This post was written by Adolfo Anton Bravo from OK Spain.

Open Data Day in Spain is not something exceptional anymore. Five years after the first Open Data Day was born in Canada, nine Spanish cities have adopted in 2016 this celebration by organizing various local events It is not a coincidence that Spain will host the next International Open Data Conference 2016 in october, given the good health of its data communities, in spite of the fact of its poor results shown in the Open Data Index. Open Data in Spain is definitely a growing seed.

Alicante, Barcelona –with two events–, Bilbao, Girona, Granada, Madrid, Pamplona, Valencia, and Zaragoza were the cities that held activities to celebrate Open Data Day.

Open Knowledge Spain took part in the organization of the event in Madrid, and created a website to announce all of the activities that were going to be held in Spain, including the International Open Data  Conference, that its Call for Proposals had just been opened for applications.

Overview of the events

In alphabetical order, Barcelona celebrated Open Data Day twice.  apps4citizen organized a gathering where people deliberated about the importance of personal data, transparency, the knowledge acquisition process, or the various results that may be reached from the interpretation of data. A week later, Procomuns.net organized a data visualization contest on Commons Collaborative Economies in the P2P value project.

In Bilbao, the event run by  MoreLab DeustoTech-Internet, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto, and the Bilbao city council. The group focused on the scope of the movement in general, and in specific, linked open data.  The participants split into working groups with the objective to design and implement fast and easy applications that link and use open data.

The Girona Municipal Archive and the Center for Research and Image Distribution organized the event in Girona; their theme revolved around the documentary heritage data that included 125 archives and collections, 31 inventories, and 75 catalogues.

In Granada, the Free Software Office at the University of Granada organised a hackathon with eight candidate projects from March 4 to March 7. The projected looked at various topics, from traffic to gender bias.

The Medialab-Prado data journalism group, Open Knowledge Spain, and Open Data Institute (ODI) Madrid, organised a hackathon where three teams from different background such as   developers, journalists, programmers, statisticians, and citizens worked to open data in different aspects of open data: city light pollution, asbestos, and glass parliaments.

Pamplona took the opportunity to present the open technological platform FIWARE, an initiative for developers or entrepreneurs to use open data for innovative applications.FINODEX is the first European accelerator that is already funding projects that reuse open data with FIWARE technology.

The first OpenDatathon ETSINF – UPV took place in Valencia and was organised by  It was organised by the Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, MUGI, the Master’s degree in Information Management, and the DataUPV Group.   16 teams participated,, with the objective of supporting, promoting and disseminating the use of open data, especially among the members of the university. It was supported by the Department of Transparency, Social Responsibility, Participation and Cooperation at the Valencia Regional Government, Inndea Foundation, Cátedra Ciudad de Valencia at UPV, and the private companies BigML and Everis.

The Zaragoza city council is well known  for  its support to open data. The city mission is to provide open, accessible and useful data to its citizens. For example, all the information about bills is open and can be found on the city website. In this regard, they are not only talking about open data but also transparency and municipal policies on open data.

Finally, on March 17, the University of Alicante organized a meeting  with participants from the Department of Transparency at the Valencia Regional Government, the Open Data Institute Madrid (ODI), the data research data opening network Maredata, and an initiative that promotes the University of Alicante startup ecosystem, ua:emprende.  The Open Data Meeting 2016 consisted of a series of lectures about the current condition of open data in Spain,  and emphasized that public sector information (PSI) reuse means an opportunity for entrepreneurship and the impact it generates in the field of of transparency and accountability. and some of its participants are. The event concluded  with the #UAbierta for open data entrepreneurship award ceremony