Sometimes people look back at certain points in time and say – we were too early. When we started doing work on OpenData in Slovenia in 2010, there was interest but no critical mess yet (just a handful of people showed up for meetup).
But this time, it went much better. ~25 people showed up, despite not having a clear agenda – just a topic of OpenData. Many years of efforts of different individuals and organisations worked!
What we learned:
- Slovenian Ministry of Public Information is continuing their efforts on NIO Portal and they’re developing now solutions and policies related to Open Data. There were more personal discussions on how we can help them with these efforts.
- There were other people present from different Ministries and Government Services that were all championing Open Data within their institutions.
- Developers are using different Open Data tools and projects within their institutions. They promised to keep us updated, once they’re ready to release it to public.
- Journalists are still trying to figure out how to position Data Journalism/Visualisations within the failing Newspaper industry in Slovenia.
- http://danesjenovdan.si/ are working on much better version of http://www.delajozate.si/
- ARSO (Slovenian Weather Agency) has a Data Portal: http://gis.arso.gov.si/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page
Given the big amount of interest, I’ll try to organise another event in the fall, with talks and a bit more structure.
Special thanks to Podcrto, FMF and everyone that shared the news and attended.
(Photo by Crt Ahlin).