[okfn-discuss] Meeting in Buenos Aires, anyone?

Wed Mar 14 23:00:35 UTC 2012

Hola Patricio!

Cómo estás? :)

2012/3/14 Patricio Molina <patriciomolina at gmail.com>:

> I've already created an space for a potential meeting[0], in which I'd
> like to start talking about establishing an enduring group of people
> with the same goals. For example, to promote workshops (with focus on
> the points described in the Open Data Handbook), talks, hackathons,
> etcetera.

That's great! And I believe our friends from Wikimedia Argentina
<http://www.wikimedia.org.ar/> can get interested in some activities
from OKFn, as happened here in Brazil with our Wikimedia Brasil
<http://br.wikimedia.org> friends. As examples, we have translated
into Portuguese the Panton Principles using our wiki-community driven
skills. [0] Another volunteer from WMBR (Mateus, who you met in Haifa)
is interested in starting an open speding project
<http://openspending.org/> for his city, Mossoró, where he just
started his law faculty this year - I have plans to write a guide fo
Brazilians, which is a great challendge, since we have lots of
different situations, using the fact that our access to information
legislation just sanctioned at the end of last year.

> On another hand, and as far as I know, Argentina doesn't have any
> centralized website with collections of publicly available datasets,
> like datos.gob.cl (Chile), datos.gub.uy (Uruguay) or dados.gov.br
> (Brazil), and we should have it. It's important to raise awareness
> about this matter as soon as possible.

I think you could try to gather available data online and use the Data
Hub <http://thedatahub.org/> to organize these Argentinian data sets.
I've been talking to some friends in Brazil from NGOs, for isntance,
to use it - one friend I haven't had the opportunity to meet, but she
got excited and I'll help her to upload interesting data concerning
statistics of Brazilian education.

> But before running, we need to learn how to walk, and these are "baby steps" :-)

I think to focus in some particular project. I think Open Speding
awesome and I've been talking for a long time with people in the
Economics Council of São Paulo state to understand how to get this
data to make in the city level visualizations like this
<http://www.paraondefoiomeudinheiro.com.br/>, which was done for the
federal level and São Paulo state level, that made possible to realise
all this data is not enough to track our money.

Also, I'd suggest to begin to gather people interested in open/free
knowledge by field of interested, as I've been doing here

http://wiki.okfn.org/Chapter/Brazil/people

I think OKFn Brazil can work as a hub of open/free knowledge groups
and I believe it'll be possible to have interesting project among them
in the near future.

Abraços!

Tom

[0] http://br.wikimedia.org/wiki/Princ%C3%ADpios_Panton

-- 
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil