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Sun Dec 12 18:29:16 GMT 2010

<quote>
A hands-on workshop for those interested in reusing open government
data in Hungary.

Participants will include developers, researchers, journalists, NGOs,
and others who are interested in consuming or building useful or
interesting things using information from public bodies in Hungary.

The day will include:
  * mapping out public data in Hungary using a community driven data catalo=
gue
  * planning and making applications using Hungarian public data
</quote>

Here's the website: http://ogd-budapest.eventbrite.com/

Open data is data which anyone is free to reuse and redistribute
without restriction. Much like the material in Wikipedia or open
source software. (As I'm sure you're aware!)

Here's a short film about open government data:
http://opengovernmentdata.org/film

Again - I'm sure you know all of this!

> I get invited to much more events
> than I have time to attend and I do not really like events where
> nothing happens apart from smart people telling other smart people
> what a wonderful world this could be if people were doing nice things
> instead of stupid things. Of course there is a place for political
> chitchat at a coffee but ... I would rather let others to do that. I
> often have to waste my time on people in key positions who act like
> they cared while they clearly don't, and trying to change the world
> while the world clearly resists. It makes pretty annoying to attend
> events where it isn't even planned to try to have any effect
> whatsoever.

We'd love it if you came - but no-one is forcing you! :-)

Personally I have several things that I'd like to do (e.g. find out
more about Hungarian spending data, and map out data sources using the
Hungarian instance of CKAN) - but I'm also very keen to learn more
about what other people want to do with open data. E.g. what are
journalists, NGOs, developers, and others interested in doing with
open data.

Perhaps you have different or higher expectations than me about what
can be achieved in a single event. The most I'd hope for is fruitful
meetings and conversations that might lead on to other interesting
collaborations or projects - and perhaps e.g. making some small web
app(s). It will be 'hands on' in the sense that I hope we'll get stuck
into some datasets, dataset mapping and some coding. We hope it will
be engaging and fun - at least for people who are interested in this
sort of thing. ;-)

For a taste of what this might be like and what kinds of things we
might do/talk about, based on other events we've run in the past, see,
e.g.:

http://blog.okfn.org/2008/11/04/after-the-workshop-on-public-information/
http://lod2.okfn.org/2011/03/26/meetings-on-open-government-data-in-france/
http://opengovernmentdata.org/camp2010/after/
http://blog.okfn.org/2010/12/16/exploring-european-energy-data/

While we have some experience of open data laws and policies across
Europe and internationally (e.g. Dr. Rufus Pollock has done some
economic research which informed UK government's open data policy [1],
we help to run ePSIplatform, which is all about European PSI reuse
policy [2]) - I would guess that this will be much less focused on
policy and politics, and much more focused on building a stronger data
reuser community, on how open data can be used to enable things like
useful web applications, better reportage, more evidence based
policies, etc, and practical things like starting to code on such
projects and figuring out what is needed to take things forward.

I'm keen to come along to listen (e.g. to what people want, what
they'd like and what they are working on), and to see if there's any
way we (as a small NGO with limited resources) can be helpful.

[1] http://rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/psi-funding-options/
[2] http://www.epsiplatform.eu/

> This "unconference" isn't described as such, at least it wasn't, and I
> still don't really get what it's about apart from telling each others
> what we already know. Look at the document you opened in etherpad,
> where I have appended just really a few thoughts on the topic, which
> could easily fill a 3 days "real" conference with people in the
> position who could do about it and won't. =A0I can tell you these, I can
> easily talk about it for hours, and it wouldn't change anything.

Thanks for your input. Your aims are all fairly big (free Hungary's
data!) for such a small workshop. Do you have any smaller concrete
things you'd like to discuss or work on? E.g. an app, plugin,
extension or service that you'd like to build using open data?

FWIW we definitely won't be preaching to the converted. Or telling
anyone what to do! :-)