[open-government] Organisational Identifiers Satellite Workshop - OGD Camp

[Tim Davies]

Hello all,

We're going to be having a Satellite Workshop alongside the Open Government
Data Camp in Warsaw in October (Workshop on Sunday 23rd) to bring together
current projects on 'organisational identifiers' and data on organisations.
With many projects going on right now to make sure we have good open data on
organisations (companies, charities etc.) we thought it would be useful to
bring those conversations together and come up with ways to such projects to
interact and interoperate.

Registration is open at http://ogdcamp11-orgidworkshop.eventbrite.com/ and
more details are below.

Co-organised by Open Corporates (http://www.opencorporates.com) and Aid Info
(http://www.aidinfo.org / http://www.aidinfolabs.org) with OKFN.

All the best

Tim

*Overview:*
Many open data projects would benefit from having a shared and stable way to
identify organisations within datasets. There are a number of ongoing
efforts to collect open data on organisations, or to assign unique
indentifiers to organisations. Establishing a universal scheme of
organisational identifiers is particularly important for projects such as
the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which need to identify
organisations across many jurisdictions and across sectors (companies,
charities, governments, other associations and organisations), covering
countries with diverse approaches to, and quality of, official registration
schemes. This workshop seeks to bring together different initiatives working
on organisational identifiers to share knowledge and develop shared
approaches to creating complementary and compatible access to organisational
information.

The core aims of the workshop are to:

   - Bring together different actors exploring the organisational identifier
   question: including those focused on companies, charities, government
   agencies and other forms of organisation.
    - Identify a shared method (standard) for re-using existing
identifiers(e.g. Company Registration; VAT Registration). This may
focus on convergence
   and compatibility between schemes such as the IATI
Identifier<http://iatistandard.org/guides/organisation-identifiers>(a
framework for Identifiers); Open
   Corporates <http://www.opencorporates.com/> URIs (seeking to cover all
   companies globally); ORGPedia
entries<http://cairns.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/orgpedia-the-open-organizational-data-project-.html>(“facilitating
   the “mashing up” of disparate data sets about the ownership, structure,
   performance and regulatory compliance of organizations”
[REF<http://dotank.nyls.edu/orgpedia/>]);
   Guidestar Identifier (NGO focussed) and other open data sources and
   initiatives.
   - Identify existing efforts to collect open data on organisations and to
   map together different identifiers (e.g. Corporate groupings; mapping
   Charity and Company numbers etc.)
   - Identify gaps in current approaches (e.g. how to handle countries or
   organisation-types with limited registration options available to them; how
   to check the quality of data etc).
   - Develop a shared agenda for action in which partners can each take
   forward complementary efforts to define and use shared organisational
   identifiers, and to build the eco-system of open data available for as many
   of those identifiers as possible.



Registration for the workshop is open at
http://ogdcamp11-orgidworkshop.eventbrite.com/ and participation is free.

Participants may also wish to register for the main OGD Camp. Registration
for the Open Government Data Camp is at http://ogdcamp.org/.
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