Open Knowledge Greece Summer 2016 Update

This blog post is part of our summer series featuring updates from chapters across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the team of Open Knowledge Greece.

Open Knowledge Greece consists of a dynamic team of community members who are interested in open data, linked data technologies, and coding and who do their best to apply scientific results into everyday community activities. The chapter also occupies staff positions, specifically four (4) temporary employees and at least six (6) ad-hoc appointments, among which include programmers and journalists.

The last few months have been a period rich in activities where the chapter has achieved great results. The main success has been the high participation of the chapter in the OGP Greek Action Plan negotiation, by organizing workshops and events targeting the commitment of the government to open data initiatives. First of all, OK Greece was present at the event in which the progress report by Openwise was presented and the discussion of the new action plan initiated.

Furthermore, OK Greece co-organized the event “Open Government: Participate, Propose and Be Heard! Conformation of the Third National Action Plan 2016-2018”, a successful event where proposals for the third action plan were made by citizens and different stakeholders. This event was very important for promoting and strengthening open governance and open data. Alongside the event OK Greece submitted its own commitments, three (3) of which have been incorporated into the new action plan: the organization of the School of Data for public servants, as well as, of the Open Data Index for cities and local administrations and the operation of a platform for Linked, Open and Participatory Budgets

Other events and activities of OK Greece include:

The consultation of the Greek Ministry of Education on open data issues.
The co-organisation of the 1st Data Workshop “Data Driven World” in order to introduce data to people from different sectors, active participation in the event “Investigative Data Journalism: Learning by doing- The Football Tax in Greece”.

Moreover, the chapter is implementing the Openbudgets.eu project funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission, which aims to develop a platform for supporting financial transparency for the public sector. In this project, OK Greece has undertaken the development of the platform integration and the implementation of the interface and visualizations.

In the scientific domain, the chapter has achieved important publications in journals and conferences (e.g. Journal of biomedical semantics, Journal of Smart Cities, Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, Semantics Conference, Nordic Data Journalism Conference NODA16)

The Future

The fall and winter 2016-2017 is expected to be fruitful in events and collaborations as well. The new website of Open Knowledge Greece is about to be launched, the GitHub Open Knowledge Greece is becoming strongly active , and other initiatives are commencing aiming to attract new members in the open knowledge community. In parallel, the chapter endeavors to attain funding from additional research and innovation projects, as there are not fixed incomes and most activities are currently performed on a voluntary basis.

Finally, OK Greece is getting ready to host major global events for Open Knowledge communities, and the team will be very happy to welcome friends, colleagues, co-workers in Greece!