The Open Knowledge Foundation is happy to announce that dozens of organisations from all over the world have been awarded mini-grants to support the running of events that celebrate Open Data Day on Saturday 7th March 2020.

Thanks to the generous support of this year’s mini-grant funders – Datopian, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Hivos, the Latin American Open Data Initiative (ILDA), Mapbox, Open Contracting Partnership and Resource Watch – the Open Knowledge Foundation will be giving out a total of 67 mini-grants to the organisations listed below in order to help them run great events on or around Open Data Day.

We received 246 mini-grant applications this year and were greatly impressed by the quality of the events being organised all over the world.

Learn more about Open Data Day, discover events taking place and find out how to get technical assistance or connect with the global open data community by checking out the information at the bottom of this blogpost.

Here are the organisations whose Open Data Day events will be supported by mini-grants divided up by the tracks their events are devoted to:

Environmental data

• Escuela de Fiscales’ event in Argentina will promote the use of open data for the training, dissemination and development of civic activism in the preservation of the environment in the community
• Nigeria’s Adamawa Agricultural Development Programme will sensitise fishery stakeholders – especially fishermen –  on the importance of stock taking to prevent overfishing in our water bodies and how to update the fisheries database using open data
• Afonte Jornalismo de Dados (Afonte Data Journalism) in Brazil will provide awareness about environmental politics and empower the community to use public and open data
• The Department of Agriculture at the Asuogyaman District Assembly in Ghana will host local farming organisations to create awareness on the need for data to be open and to show the effect of climate change on agriculture and related livelihoods using rainfall data 
• An Open Data Day event planned at Tangaza University College in Kenya will discuss how to tackle climate change challenges with data
• The University of Dodoma in Tanzania will invite girls from a local school to a geospatial open data networking event to instill environmental thinking among young girls
• The Open Internet for Democracy team and Creative Commons Venezuela chapter will join forces to train a group of environmental journalists about open and reliable data sources they can use to develop stories
• iWatch Africa will host a forum in Ghana to leveraging the power of public domain satellite and drone imagery to track deforestation and water pollution in West Africa
• Ghana’s Africa Open Data and Internet Research Foundation will run a hackathon on how local communities can use open data for sustainable development especially to improve sanitation issues
• Sustenta in Mexico will share knowledge about sustainable development, climate change and sustainability
• Grafoscopio / HackBo (Colombia) will bring together two citizen science communities working on air quality issues and reproducible research, data activism, visualisation and storytelling
• Youth for Environmental Development (Malawi) will inspire university students to take action and contribute to environmental protection through mapping
• WikiRate from Germany will engage the public in the research and collection of open data about how companies are impacting climate change
• Liga de Defensa del Medio Ambiente (LIDEMA) from Bolivia plan to identify open data sources that can help address socio-environmental conflicts
• The Open Cities Lab team in South Africa will create an open and accessible space for community scientists to meet, network and collaborate on an air quality project
• Costa Rica’s ACCESA will help attendants identify and visualise new and unexpected relationships and connections between land-use and territorial planning, on the one hand, and climate change and decarbonisation
• Young Volunteers for the Environment from Togo will promote the use of open data in environmental protection
• Técnicas Rudas will collectively explore Mexico’s mandated public data on construction projects and their environmental impacts

Tracking public money flows

• Spotlight for Transparency and Accountability Initiative in Nigeria will host an event to increase understanding of and access to local budget data
• EldoHub will hold a hackathon to develop tools and systems which can facilitate county governments’ involvement in Kenya’s transparency, accountability and public participation
• FollowTheMoney Kaduna will use contracting data including responses to FOI letters and on the spot assessment of projects and infrastructures across communities in Kaduna state, Nigeria
• The Alliance of Independent Journalists in Bandung, Indonesia will use open contracting data to encourage collaboration among civil society groups to access and monitor public budgets
• Afroleadership in Cameroon will organise a training on the analysis of budget data by civil society using open data
• The event run by Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST Malawi) will call for greater transparency and accountability in public budget management the through Open Contracting for Infrastructure Data Standard
• Somalia’s Bareedo Platform will encourage uptake of local public contracting data
• The Perkumpulan Inisiatif in Indonesia plan to host a youth open budget hack clinic building on the principles of public participation in fiscal policy from the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency
• Dataphyte in Nigeria will support change agents to track and use budget, procurement and revenue data to demand accountability
• The Collective of Journalists for Peace and Freedom of Expression from Mexico will design a workshop to explain all the contracts of the City Council of Mazatlan, Sinaloa
• Diálogos will visualise the volume of public procurement of the main ministries of the Government of Guatemala 
• The 1991 Open Data Incubator will facilitate a workshop and discussions to share the experiences of many parties working with or producing open data in Ukraine
• LEAD University in Costa Rica will organise an event for data science students to meet public officials behind the National Public Procurement Portal
• Russia’s Infoculture will hold a conference on open data and information transparency
• The Kikandwa Rural Communities Development Organisation showcase the Uganda Budget Information website and how to use it to report, track and monitor public funds
• The Centre for Information, Peace and Security in Africa will work with journalists in Tanzania to promote openness in public contract in terms of transparency and integrity on public expenditures and value for public money
• Bolivia’s CONSTRUIR Foundation will organise a data camp to advocate for more and better public contracting data
• Ojoconmipisto in Guatemala will teach students and journalists how to investigate and tell stories from public budget and contracting data
• Sluggish Hackers will use their event to investigate how to track public money flows from the National Assembly or local assemblies in South Korea

Open mapping

• Exegetic Analytics in South Africa will expose the South African R community to a range of resources for working with open spatial data
• OpenMap Development Tanzania will spread awareness on the usefulness of open data for development among participants through workshops, trainings, break-out sessions and a mapathon 
• Spain’s TuTela Learning Network will map the housing situation of migrant women in Granada
• ODI Leeds in the UK will host a data surgery to assist attendees with their data, converting the data into GeoJSON files and mapping it
• Girolabs from Paraguay will show initiatives using and producing open data
• Open Knowledge Belgium will use open data to build a map visualising the streets names of Hasselt by gender
• BloGoma, Lumumba Lab and Collectif24 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will using open mapping solutions to increase young people’s knowledge of free local HIV-related services
• OpenStreetMap Kenya and Map Kibera will empower young people in Kibera Slum, (Africa’s largest urban slum) with skills in open mapping
• The University of Pretoria in South Africa will develop a complete map of minibus taxi routes in Mamelodi East with the local knowledge of school learners
• Brazil’s Federal University of Bahia wants to popularise open data mapping systems, especially OpenStreetMap, among undergraduate students and young people from vulnerable areas of Salvador
• Youth Innovation Lab in Nepal will showcase crowdsourced streetlights data for Kathmandu collected by digital volunteers to influence policy for the maintenance of streetlights
• Transparência Hackday Portugal / Open Knowledge Portugal will host a morning of hacking and learning, followed by an afternoon of quick talks and networking

Data for equal development

• Footprints Bridge International will focus on how open data can help create jobs for rural youth and women in Ghana
• The Bangladesh chapter of Creative Commons will host a mini conference to discuss the benefits of open source projects and open government data in the country
• Nigeria’s National Institute for Freshwater Fisheries Research is developing an event to sensitise agricultural stakeholders on the need and benefits of data for equal development
• MapBeks will organise a mapping party in the Philippines to highlight HIV facilities and LGBT-friendly spaces on OpenStreetMap
• Khumbo Bangala Chirembo is a librarian at the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi. He will host a workshop for other librarians to raise awareness of open data and its benefits
• Mexico’s Future Lab aims to give visibility to women and the LGBT community in local decision making within government, business and civil society using open data
• Zimbabwe Library Association’s Open Data Day event will highlight the importance of open data in promoting and supporting the girl child as well as raising the negative effects of gender-based violence against women and the role that libraries can play in providing current awareness to communities
• Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will help young and female agricultural entrepreneurs explore how they can use open data to create new businesses
• Datasketch in Colombia will organise a series of lightning talks from social entrepreneurs and journalists to share their work using open data
• Youths in Technology and Development Uganda plan to share innovative data tools and a FAIR open data road map to measure progress against the SDGs in the country
• Mexico’s Ligalab will open a space for local speakers to present their open data projects and for the community to gather and engage with local issues towards equal development
• The Association SUUDU ANDAL in Burkina Faso plan to emphasise the importance of open data for development and accountability during their event
• Argentina’s Fundación Conocimiento Abierto will run a Data Camp on gender and diversity before spending the next few months developing local apps using open data
• NaimLab Peru are organising an event for undergraduate students to share the open data work being done by local and national organisations
• YWCA Honduras’ event will host a focus group for local women from middle and low income backgrounds to discuss and generate data on female migration in Honduras
• We Are Capable Data for Good Namibia (WACDGN) will train young Namibians in using data science skills for sustainable development projects
• Tutator from Bolivia will use their event to understand the impact of open data in the livelihood of the beneficiaries of social services

About Open Data Day

Open Data Day is the annual event where we gather to reach out to new people and build new solutions to issues in our communities using open data. The tenth Open Data Day will take place on Saturday 7th March 2020.

If you have started planning your Open Data Day event already, please add it to the global map on the Open Data Day website using this form. 

You can also connect with others and spread the word about Open Data Day using the #OpenDataDay or #ODD2020 hashtags. Alternatively you can join the Google Group to ask for advice or share tips.

To get inspired with ideas for events, you can read about some of the great events which took place on Open Data Day 2019 in our wrap-up blog post.

Technical support

As well as sponsoring the mini-grant scheme, Datopian will be providing technical support on Open Data Day 2020. Discover key resources on how to publish any data you’re working with via datahub.io and how to reach out to the Datopian team for assistance via Gitter by reading their Open Data Day blogpost.

Need more information?

If you have any questions, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing network@okfn.org or on Twitter via @OKFN. There’s also the Open Data Day Google Group where you can connect with others interested in taking part.