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On 16 May, Lanzarote became the epicentre of open culture and open data in Spain with the celebration of the IV Encuentro Nacional de Datos Abiertos (ENDA). Under the slogan "Data in the culture of open knowledge", this edition brought together more than a hundred experts, professionals and open data enthusiasts to reflect on how to boost the development and progress of our society through free access to information.

The event, held in the emblematic Jameos del Agua Auditorium, was organised by the Government of the Canary Islands, through the Directorate General for the Digital Transformation of Public Services, the Directorate General for Transparency and Citizen Participation, the Canary Islands Institute of Statistics and the Island Council of Lanzarote under the brand "Canarias Datos Abiertos".

The transformation to data-driven organisations

The day began with the inauguration by Antonio Llorens de la Cruz, Vice Councillor for Administrations and Transparency of the Government of the Canary Islands, and Miguel Ángel Jiménez Cabrera, Councillor of the Area of Presidency, Human Resources, New Technologies, Energy, Housing, Transport, Mobility and Accessibility of the Island Council of Lanzarote.

This was followed by a talk by Óscar Corcho García, Professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who addressed the " Challenges in the transformation of an organisation to be data-centric, using knowledge graphs. The case of the European Railway Agency ". Corcho presented the case study of the European Railway Agency (ERA).

In his presentation, Corcho insisted that the transformation from a traditional to a data-driven organisation goes far beyond technology implementation. This transformation process requires strengthening the legal framework, harmonising processes, vocabularies and master data, establishing governance of the ontology model and creating a community of users to further enrich the model.

In this process, metadata, data catalogues and reference data are key elements. In addition, knowledge graphs are essential tools for connecting and integrating data from proprietary systems.

Open data for science in the service of public decisions

The first of the roundtables addressed how open data can serve science to improve public decisions. Participants highlighted the need to strengthen the data economy, move towards technological sovereignty and promote effective citizen participation.

Diego Ramiro Fariñas, Director of the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), highlighted:

• The importance of longitudinal data infrastructures, i.e. data that are collected over time for the same units.
• The value of linked data in breaking down information silos.
• The need to preserve statistical heritage.
•  The project Es_Datalab, which allows cross-referencing data such as those of the Tax Agency with those of Health.
•  The potential of synthetic data to reduce bias in AI applications.

Ramiro Fariñas also emphasised that the National Statistics Institute has transformed its entire statistical production towards data mining, and that leading institutes such as the Canary Islands and Andalusia are improving the publication of data to improve public policies. He pointed out two fundamental aspects: the need for greater interlocution between data producers and the training of administration staff to overcome the main barriers to putting science at the service of public decisions.

Izaskun Lacunza Aguirrebengoa, Director of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), stressed the importance of transforming the model of science, making it easier for scientific institutions to protect and share research information. He explained the concept of open science in contrast to some of the current practices, where knowledge generated with public funds ends up being controlled by private oligopolies that subsequently sell this processed information to the very institutions that generated it. Lacunza advocated public-public collaboration through initiatives such as the Office of Science and Technology in Congress.

Another participant in this round table was Tania Gullón Muñoz-Repiso, Coordinator of the Innovation and Geospatial Analysis Area of the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, who shared how data is crucial for the management of emergencies such as the DANA. The Ministry's mobility data has hundreds of reusers, drives new businesses and enables predictive modelling. Gullón insisted that it is key that the data provided by citizens include an explanation of how it has been used, considering this feedback fundamental to give value to open science.

Open culture: removing barriers to knowledge

The round table "Open culture: how data brings us closer to knowledge" discussed how to remove barriers to access, study and transformation of knowledge so that it can be returned to society and its potential can be harnessed.

In this thematic block, Florencia Claes, Academic Director of Free Culture at the Office of Free Knowledge and Culture (OfiLibre) of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), defined open culture as the current that seeks access to knowledge without barriers and the possibility of being able to appropriate that knowledge, study it and share it again with society. He highlighted interesting ideas such as that publishing content on the internet does not automatically mean that it is open, as open content must meet certain standards and conditions that are not always met.

 Claes explained the value of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how the URJC has a specific office to disseminate open culture, open science and open data. He pointed out that there is a deficiency in the training of university teaching staff on licensing and OER, considering this training as a key element to advance in the culture of openness.

In addition, he stressed that mass access to data facilitates its control, error detection and improvement. For this, initiatives such as Wikimedia or OpenStreetMap are very interesting, both projects accept voluntary participation and your contribution is essential to building and maintaining online open environments.

At the same table, Julio Cordal Elviro, Head of the Area of Library Projects and responsible for relations with Europeana at the Ministry of Culture, explained the evolution of Europeana from simple harvester to digital library, with projects based on semantic metadata, highlighting the challenges of standardisation and digital preservation of more than 60 million cultural works. He explained that the emergence of Google Books acted as a catalyst to "get the ball rolling" in this area.

Cordal also presented the Hispanaproject, which compiles information on digitised collections throughout Spain and federates with Europeana, and mentioned that they have begun to generate OER. He underlined how the use of technologies such as OCR (rOptical Character Recognition) and the online availability of funds makes it easier for researchers to save infinite time in their work. "When you make data open and free, you are opening up new opportunities," he concluded.

On the other hand, José Luis Bueren Gómez-Acebo, Technical Directorof the National Library of Spain (BNE), shared the digital transformation process of the institution, its commitment to open licences and the importance of the emotional component that drives citizen participation in cultural projects.

Bueren explained how the BNE continues its work of compiling and digitising all the bibliographic works produced in Spain, keeping connected with Wikidata and other international libraries in a standardised way. Through initiatives such as BNE Data, they offer a more practical and didactic vision of the information they publish.

He stressed the importance of citizens re-appropriating the cultural content, feeling that it is theirs, recalling that the BNE is indebted to the scientific community and to all citizens. Among the innovative projects they are promoting, he mentioned the automatic transcription of manuscripts. As challenges for the future, he pointed to sustainability, the management of intellectual property and the need for cultural institutions to be able to adapt to new trends.

Prioritisation of public data openness

As in each edition, ENDA presented a specific challenge. This year, Casey Abernethy, Technical Manager of the Asociación Multisectorial de la Información (ASEDIE), and José de León Rojas, Head of the Negociado de Modernización del Cabildo Insular de Lanzarote, presented a methodology and tool to help public administrations decide what datasets they should publish and in what order of priority, based on:

• Data sets recommended by the FEMP.
• Priority sets defined in the UNE Standard on Smart Cities and Open Data.
• High-value assemblies according to European standards.
• Sets requested by ASEDIE (Top 10 ASEDIE).
• Sets derived from transparency indices or regulations.

The proposed methodology considers three fundamental indices: organisational maturity, technical difficulty and strategic relevance. The 4th challenge in the context of the Encuentro was specifically aimed at choosing the key datasets to be published in a public administration according to its open data maturity. This methodology has been implemented in an operational tool that can be found on the Meetings website.

The power of free software and open communities

During the afternoon, the panel "Unlocking the potential of open data" highlighted how free software and open communities drive the use and exploitation of open data:

• Emilio López Cano, Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and president of the Hispanic R Community, showed how the R community facilitates the use of open data through specific packages.
• Miguel Sevilla Callejo, Research Assistant at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology of the CSIC and vice-president of the OpenStreetMap Spain association, presented OpenStreetMap as an invaluable source of open spatial data and highlighted its importance in emergency situations.
• Patricio del Boca, Technical Lead and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) CKAN technical team, explained the advantages of CKAN as an open source platform for implementing open data portals and presented the new Open Data Editor tool.

Open administrations at the service of citizens

The last round table addressed how administrations can bring data and its value closer to citizens:

• Ascensión Hidalgo Bellota, Deputy Director General for Transparency of Madrid City Council, presented "View Madrid with Open Data". Hidalgo stressed that the project has significantly reduced the number of citizen consultations thanks to its clarifying nature, thus demonstrating a double benefit: bringing data closer to the population and optimising the administration's resources.
• Carlos Alonso Peña, Director of the Design, Innovation and Exploitation Division at the Directorate General for Data, highlighted the cultural change that the Administration is undergoing, moving from data protection to responsible openness. He presented the Data Directorate General's initiatives to move beyond open data towards a single data market: the data spaces, where concrete solutions are being developed to demonstrate the business potential in this area. He also pointed to the growing importance of private data in the wake of the General Data Regulation and the obligations it establishes.
• Joseba Asiain Albisu, Director General of the Directorate General of the Presidency, Open Government and Relations with the Parliament of Navarre of the Government of Navarre, explained Navarre's strategy to improve data quality, centralise information and promote continuous evaluation. He commented on how the Government of Navarra seeks to balance quantity and quality in the publication of data, centralising data from the entire region and submitting metadata to external evaluation, with the collaboration of, among others, datos.gob.es.

The value of open data meetings

The IV ENDA has demonstrated, once again, the importance of these spaces for reflection and debate for:

• Sharing good practices and experiences between public administrations.
• Encourage collaboration between institutions, academia and the private sector.
• Promote the culture of open data as a tool for social innovation.
• Promote the development of skills in public administration staff.
• Improving public policies through information sharing.

After four consecutive editions, the National Open Data Meeting has established itself as a must-attend event for all the people and entities involved in the open data ecosystem in Spain. This event contributes significantly to building a more informed, participatory and transparent society.

ENDA will continue in 2026 with its fifth edition, committed to continue promoting the culture of open data as a driver of economic and social development in our country.  The organisation has already announced that the next edition of the event will be held in Navarre in 2026.. Follow us on social media to keep up to date with events on open data and related technologies. You can read us on Twitter (X), LinkedIn and Instagram.

The National Open Data Meeting (ENDA, in its Spanish acronym) is an initiative born in 2022 from the joint effort of the Diputación de Barcelona, the Government of Aragón and the Diputación de Castellón. Its objective is to be a space for the exchange of ideas and reflections of the administrations to identify and elaborate concrete proposals in order to promote the reuse of quality  open data that can bring concrete value in improving the living conditions of citizens.

An important peculiarity of the Encounters initiative is that it fosters an annual cycle of collaborative work, where challenges are posed and solutions are worked out together. These challenges, proposed by the organisers, are developed throughout the year by volunteers linked to the field of data, most of them belonging to the academic world and the public administration.

Three challenges have been worked on so far. The conclusions of the challenges worked on are presented during each annual event and the documentation generated is made public.

CHALLENGE 1.- Generate data exchanges and facilitate their opening up

At the first ENDA (held in Barcelona, November 2022) a vote was taken on which data should be prioritised for openness. Based on the results of this vote, the Challenge 1 working group made an effort to collect standards, regulations, data sources and data controllers, as well as cases of publication and re-use.

The objective of this challenge was to foster inter-administrative collaboration to generate data exchanges and facilitate their openness, identifying datasets to work on in order to boost their quality, the use of standards and their reusability.

• Material from Challenge 1: Encourage inter-administrative collaboration to generate data exchanges and facilitate their openness presented at the second ENDA (Zaragoza, September 2023)

CHALLENGE 2.- Increase capacities for data openness

Challenge 2 aimed to ensure that public sector workers develop the knowledge and skills needed to drive the dissemination of open data. The ultimate goal was to improve public policies by involving citizens and businesses in the whole process of opening up. 

Therefore, the working group defined profiles and roles needed for data opening, collecting information on their functions and the skills and knowledge required.

In addition, a list of free training courses on open data and data analytics was compiled, linking these with the profiles for which they could be targeted.

• Document of the Challenge 2: Capabilities for opening data

CHALLENGE 3.- Measuring the impact of open data

Challenge 3 sought to address the need to understand the impact of open data. Therefore, throughout the year, work was carried out on a methodological proposal for a systematic mapping of initiatives that seek to measure the impact of open data.

At the third ENDA (Peñíscola, May 2024), a self-test for local authorities to measure the impact of the publication of open data was presented as a result of the working group.

• Document of the Challenge 3: Methodological proposal for a systematic mapping of initiatives that seek to measure the impact of open data

The answers to these challenges have been made possible through collaboration and joint work, resulting in concrete documents and tools that will be of great help to other public bodies that want to advance their open data strategy. In the coming years, work will continue on new challenges, with the aim of further boosting the openness of quality data and its re-use for the benefit of society as a whole.

The Barcelona’s city council organizes, for the second consecutive year, the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge, a contest aimed at promoting the knowledge and use of open data in the schools of Barcelona city. This year's edition is organized, like the previous year, with the collaboration of Consorci d'Educació de Barcelona and Centro de Recursos Pedagógicos Específicos de Soporte a la Innovación y la Recerca Educativa (CESIRE); and Barcelona Activa S.A. were added.

The contest is aimed at students who are preferentially in the 3rd and 4^th grades of ESO and from formative cycles, prioritizing public centers, through their teaching staff. By analyzing the environment, students will develop real projects that can help improve the city. With this objective, they must use the information published in the Open Data BCN website, which currently has more than 440 data sets on topics as diverse as housing, population, environment, accident, complaints, transport, culture and leisure, trade or science and technology, among others.

Every centre will participate only with one project. All proposals will be evaluated by leading university professors and professionals from open data world. The 10 projects with the best score will be presented at a public act, where students will have to defend their proposal in front of the jury and audience.

In addition, teachers from participating centers can enroll in a specific Training Plan about open data. The objective is to learn about data available in Open Data BCN and the analysis and visualization tools used for its treatment. In this way, teachers will be able to train and support the students to develop their projects.

The bases are already published and those centers that want to participate must fill the following document and make registration before October 1st. The students will develop the projects until the month of March. The final presentation act will take place on April 30, 2018.

Great success in the first edition

The first edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge was held during the 2017-2018 academic year. The project, which was conceived as a pilot, was a great success, and this has led to this second edition.

The presented projects addressed various topics, such as the analysis of traffic accidents, the location of free wifi points or housing access. Although it was not easy to make a decision due to the high quality of all the works, the Institut Ferran Tallada won the first prize thanks to its project La cohesió social va per barris, where social cohesion indexes from different neighborhoods of the city were analysed, allowing a comparison of inequalities.

The award was a guided tour in the Media-TIC building, the hub of Barcelona's economic and innovation strategy, as well as a personalized data analysis workshop.

Open data as a training mechanism

With this initiative, Barcelona’s city council takes a step further in the introduction of knowledge and use of open data in the educational field, as other projects such as Escuelas Comciencia are also doing.

The use of open data in education allows students to work with real information, and understand what the actual results and benefits are on aspects that affect their daily activity, which contributes to foster critical thinking and citizen awareness. In this way, it contributes to develop their citizens’ spirit, and their implication in the social and economic reality that take place around them.

Open data can be a really powerful tool to overcome the challenges that currently exist in the areas of agriculture and nutrition. GODAN has organized an Open Data Challenge, an international initiative that seeks innovative ways to unleash the potential of open data in both sectors. Open Data Challenge is divided into two categories, both related to the availability and re-use of open data to improve food security in the world.

Category A: Policy Challenge

Participants in this challenge -researchers, entrepreneurs, students, government officials, among others- are invited to send their proposals to design a policy or program that incentivizes governments and non-governmental agencies to collect, re-use and improve open data to impact positively in one of these two specific themes:

1. Agriculture: The lack of crowdsourced data from rural areas, especially as it relates to helping farmers make better decisions about inputs, pricing, and other factors related to agricultural production.
2. Nutrition: The cost and difficulty of capturing and utilizing consumer open data about daily nutritional intake, with the goal of understanding nutritional risks, opportunities, and constraints.

Participants of this challenge must choose one of these issues and design a practical solution to respond to the chosen theme. Before 1^st August, a brief summary will be sent through the GODAN website and a jury will choose the finalists assessing the impact, innovation and feasibility of each proposal.

On 17^th August the names of the finalists will be announced who, in this occasion, have to develop a white paper (maximum 7,000 words) that includes an analysis of the current context, the detailed articulation of the solution and the feasibility of the solution in practice, accompanied by graphics, illustrations and infographics of the information provided.

Category B: Open Data-Maker’s Challenge

The second challenge is aimed at young entrepreneurs and students who are interested in creating a prototype product or service that responds to one of the following five areas:

1. Improve Growing Plant Innovations: Using open data to improve how and where we grow our food.
2. Empower the Crowd: Using open data to improve how we leverage the crowd’s actions and knowledge to create a better food system.
3. Improve Nutrition and Health: Using open data to improve how we track, make available, and improve nutrition in our daily diets.
4. Deliver Climate Smart Agriculture: Using open data to improve agriculture’s resilience in the face of a changing climate.
5. Meet the Protein Frontier: Using open data to improve how we address the growing demand for protein, and the opportunity for more sustainable and alternative proteins.

Individuals or team leaders, between 17-26 years of age, who are current university students or recent graduates can submit their proposals. As in the previous challenge, a jury will select the proposals that meet the challenge requirements based on their impact, innovation, implementation and uniqueness.

The finalists of both challenges will assist at the GODAN Summit that takes place in september and where an open data hackathon will be organized for the finalists of Challenge B, choosing the winning proposal. In this last edition, during two days, the GODAN Summit will bring together world leaders, researchers and farmers in New York to discuss and share ideas that maximize open data potential in agriculture and nutrition.