Open Data Day 2021

The eleventh annual Open Data Day is taking place on Saturday, March 6, 2021. Open data champions and innovators—including publishers, users, advocates, and analysts—are hosting events to show the power of public data to solve problems and improve public services.

We are honored to support several events this week through the Open Knowledge Foundation mini-grant program. Teams are tracking public money flows through open procurement and budgeting data in Costa Rica, Colombia, Nigeria, Estonia, and Brazil. Plus, our team will join a local government in Argentina for a panel discussion on open contracting data. Check out Open Data Day events around the world on the event website, and see more about the events we’re supporting and participating in below.

Universidad Latinoamericana de Ciencia y Tecnología – Costa Rica

Social/Website: https://www.facebook.com/ulacitcostarica/ | https://twitter.com/ulacitcostarica | https://www.ulacit.ac.cr/

• February 9 – March 6, 2021 | Online
• During this month-long data challenge, university students from across the country will use the data from the Supreme Court of Justice, the first public institution in Costa Rica to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard. The dataset includes 12,491 contracting processes from 2016 to October 2020, and students will use it to propose solutions based on public procurement data in four areas: value for money, integrity in public procurement, citizen participation, and identification of business opportunities.

HackBo / Grafoscopio – Colombia

Social/Website: https://is.gd/grafosportfolio

• February 27 & March 6, 2021 | Online
• This event will focus on building community-centered forums for interactions between citizens and local governments, and will train residents on how to utilize Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gather, open, and republish data on municipal spending and budgeting, and how this might affect neighborhoods. Currently, much of the interaction between local municipalities and citizens is taking place under opaque algorithms on social media platforms. This event will explore the use of mini wikis and chatbots from and for local communities, putting the community peer learning and economies dynamics in dialogue with public expenses and budgets.

City of Rosario – Argentina

Event registration here.

• March 5 & 6, 2021 | Online
• This two-day event will be a series of in-depth conversations on innovative citizen participation practices that open up democracy at the global, national, and regional levels. OCPs Senior Program Manager for Latin America, Mariana López Fernández, will join the expert panel on Day 1 (at 10:00 AST) and share the role of local open contracting in the wider open government movement. The following events will focus on co-creating emerging agendas and priorities for open government and open data alongside civil servants working within the municipality.

Dataphyte – Nigeria

Social/Website: www.facebook.com/dataphyte | www.twitter.com/dataphyte | www.dataphyte.com 

• March 6, 2021 | Socially Distant
• Combining public procurement data from the OCDS-based Nigeria Open Contracting Portal (NOCOPO), the Open Treasury and the Budeshi dataset this event will combine case studies and peer learning to train participants on how to track COVID-19 spending. In the final hackathon segment, participants will clean and analyze data to follow the public money flows of COVID-19 spending by various government ministries, departments, and agencies and tell the story of emergency pandemic procurement.

Open Knowledge – Estonia

Social/Website: https://www.facebook.com/okestonia | https://okee.ee

• March 8 & 11, 2021 | Online
• Opener is a data-based application detecting conflicts of interest in public procurement and political financing across borders, particularly with Estonian and Latvian procurement data. This event will explore questions around  how to increase transparency and detect fraud and corruption in public procurement through the application, as well as what specific skills and  tools are needed to empower different stakeholders to expose corruption through open contracting data.

Jornalismo de Dados – Brazil

Event details here.

Social/Website: https://www.facebook.com/afontejor | https://twitter.com/afontejor | https://afonte.info/ 

• March 13, 2021 | Online
• Open Data Day Porto Alegre 2021 will provide relevant and open-access information to support journalists and civil society in investigating public spending, and tracking public money flows through politicians, government agencies, and private sector vendors and suppliers. The day-long event will include an opening panel and two breakout workshops on access to information laws, public budgets, and online network analyses. The panel will be streamed via YouTube to reach an even wider audience of procurement reformers.

We hope you join your local open data community to celebrate, and follow the conversation online with the hashtags #OpenDataDay and #ODD2021.