Open Data Day is an international call for celebration of open data. Organizations all over the world are encouraged to coordinate and host events this week between March 2-8, enabling participation from their local communities to use open data. Led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), the Open Data Day theme this year is “ Open Data for Advancing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”, referencing the United Nations SDGs.
Events for Open Data Day hosted in Canada included an Open Data Pub Night in Vancouver and in Toronto hosted by the Canadian Open Data Society as well as their March Open Call. HackForge hosted an Active Transportation Catalog and Wishlist event in Windsor, and this year also saw the return of HackQC for its sixth edition hosted in Shawinigan.
If you’re a resident of Edmonton, it’s not too late to participate in Open Data Day! The City of Edmonton’s Open Data Portal is hosting a Metadata-thon until March 8th at midnight MST, where every metadata improvement suggestion you submit enters you into a draw for a 50CAD city of Edmonton gift card.
Did you miss Open Data Day this year? You can start planning what you would like to do next year already, with the anticipation that OKFN will offer mini grants for 2025. If you’re looking for a similar upcoming event, the Canadian Open Data Society is also hosting a June Open Call.
While the WDS-ITO didn’t host an Open Data Day event this year, we spent this week (and most weeks!) working towards data findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, often geared towards open data. In particular for this week, we’re excited to announce our endorsement of the Open Climate Campaign, which is advocating and working towards open access for climate science data and other research outputs like publications.
You will also see us at the upcoming Year of Open Science Culminating Conference on March 22nd in the Organizational Stories of Successes and Challenges D session with a presentation on the status and use of the Global Open Research Commons International Model.