Description
On the occasion of Open Data Day 2026, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) held an online conference entitled "The Future of Open Data", an open-access event that brought together a diverse community of data professionals from governments, civil society organizations, universities, newsrooms and activist collectives. From datos.gob.es we follow the day live and share here a summary of the main ideas that marked the day.
Three approaches to understanding the role of open data in the age of AI
The conference was structured around three main thematic blocks:
- Navigating open data regulation in the public interest: interventions by representatives of academia, public policy makers and researchers from different countries who discussed the regulatory framework of open data in the current context of AI.
- Community Voices, Open Data, and AI: Short presentations of concrete projects from around the world exploring the intersection between open data and artificial intelligence, from tools for judicial analysis to citizen science dashboards.
- 20 years of CKAN: The future in the age of AI: reflections on the two decades of history of open data and CKAN, on the past, present and challenges to come.
Overall, the day combined political reflection, technical innovation and community vision, with voices from Spain, France, India, Ukraine, Kenya, the United States and Australia, among other countries. And the common thread of the event was the question that today runs through digital policy forums around the world: what is the role of open data in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence?
Thematic block 1. A movement that was born out of activism
In its origins, the open data movement began in conversations between activists committed to transparency, accountability and access to public information to citizens.
This episode of the datos.gob.es podcast also discusses the origin of open data and its evolution
Today, however, the movement is more diversified because there are now more agents that influence, such as artificial intelligence. There is also a regulatory context that functions as a framework in the development of the open data movement.
The topic of regulation and governance was the backbone of the first session of the event, moderated by Renata Ávila, CEO of OKFN. The following participated in it:
- Jonathan Gray, author of the book Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025) and professor at King's College London, presented his work as a reference source for reflecting on data as an open asset: how this openness is built and how it can help us respond to great collective challenges. His proposal is that public data is not simply technical information, but the result of cultural and political decisions about what we tell, how we tell it, and for whom.
- Renato Berrino Malaccorto, research manager of the Open Data Charter, stressed that the openness of data is fundamental for the ethical development of AI. Without open, auditable and quality data, it is not possible to build artificial intelligence systems that are accountable to citizens. At the same time, he pointed out that there is a real capacity gap: many organizations and governments lack the technical and human resources necessary to harness the potential of open data in this new context.
- Ruth del Campo, general director of data at the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function of the Government of Spain, offered a very relevant institutional perspective for our context. He recalled that "The data economy is part of the economy", and underlined the boost that the Government is giving to initiatives such as datos.gob.es and Impulsa Data (aimed at modernizing internal management and feeding the Sectoral Data Spaces). He also stressed the importance of the data strategy incorporating AI ready principles, guaranteeing adequate resources – such as linguistic corpora – to train AI models efficiently and without generating new inequalities. Finally, he pointed out the need to simplify and harmonize data regulations, a process in which progress is already being made at the European level.
The panel's underlying message was clear: open data needs to be placed at the heart of the digital agenda, adequately resourced and explicitly connected to public AI strategies. AI of social interest cannot be built without open data; and open data without a vision of AI risks being relegated to irrelevance.
Thematic block 2. Lightning Talks: Projects That Demonstrate the Potential of Open Data
The second session of the day brought together short presentations of concrete projects that illustrated how open data and artificial intelligence can work together in the public interest. Some examples are:
- Ihor Samokhodskyi from the Ukrainian initiative Policy Genome presented an open data-based analysis tool for judicial practice that demonstrates how public information, combined with AI techniques, can contribute to transparency and the improvement of justice systems.
- Javier Conde, from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, presented the proposal he has developed together with his colleagues Andrés Muñoz-Arcentales and Álvaro Alonso to improve the integration of European open data in data spaces. This project facilitates the automatic generation of high-quality metadata, thus ensuring the interoperability and reuse of datasets. A directly relevant initiative for the improvement of portals such as datos.gob.es and its connection with data.europa.eu.
- Renu Kumari, from #semanticClimate and Frictionless Data (India), presented a project that works at the intersection between open climate data and semantic tools to make scientific literature and data on climate change more accessible, structured and reusable.
- Richard Muraya, from The Demography Project (Kenya), presented Uhai/Life, a citizen science dashboard that aggregates open data on natural resource use to provide insight into human and environmental well-being at the local scale. An example of how open data can empower communities to tell their own story, without relying on external narratives or institutions.
Figure 1. Presentation slide of one of the presentations of the event. Source: conference "The Future of Open Data" organized by OKFN.
- Finally, Sayantika Banik from DataJourney (India) showed an autonomous analytics assistant capable of transforming open datasets into easily understandable information.
Thematic block 3. Round table: 20 years of CKAN and the challenges of the future
The longest session of the day was also the most reflective: a round table to celebrate two decades of CKAN, the open data portal management tool born within OKFN and which today feeds hundreds of data portals around the world, including datos.gob.es. The panel was moderated by Jamaica Jones, CKAN/POSE community manager at the University of Pittsburgh. The following participated in this table:
- Rufus Pollock, founder of OKFN and Datopian, and co-founder of Life Itself, stressed the importance of keeping power in the hands of citizens and of betting on open source as a driver of economic development and shared knowledge. For Pollock, AI must be understandable and accessible to most, not just large corporations.
- Joel Natividad is Co-CEO and co-founder of datHere, a company specializing in open data solutions and analytics tools for the public sector. As a CKAN user for more than 15 years, he insisted on one idea: "We have always tried to learn how machines think, and now it is machines that are learning how humans think."
- Patricio Del Boca is Tech Lead and Open Activist at OKFN, where he leads the technical development of initiatives related to CKAN and open data infrastructures. He shared OKFN's next steps for 2026: building more community and developing use cases that demonstrate the practical value of open data in the current context.
- Andrea Borruso is an expert in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and open data. As president of onData, an Italian non-profit association that promotes access to and reuse of public data, he highlighted data activism and citizen science as drivers of technological development that involve the community.
- Antonin Garrone of data.gouv.fr, France's national open data portal, brought to the table the perspective of an established portal that has spent years exploring how to integrate new technologies without losing sight of its public service mission.
- Steven De Costa is CEO of Link Digital, an Australian company specializing in the implementation and development of CKAN-based solutions, and Co-Steward of the CKAN project. His perspective combined technical vision with a concern to maintain an open and participatory governance model.
- Finally, Public AI research engineer Mohsin Yousufi insisted on the intersection between artificial intelligence, public data infrastructures, and technology policies, exploring how AI systems can be designed and governed to serve the public interest.
Final Thought: Open Data as Democratic Infrastructure
If there is one conclusion that ran through all the sessions of Open Data Day 2026, it is that open data is not in crisis, but at a decisive moment. The opportunities offered by artificial intelligence are real, but so are the risks. It is important to know them in order to know how to address them. Some of those that were mentioned are:
- Prevent public data from becoming the raw material of private systems without transparency or accountability.
- Preserve the political will to keep open data portals functional and updated.
- Bridging the digital skills and training gap to facilitate the participation of all countries and communities in the new AI ecosystem.
In the face of this, the message of the event was one of mobilization: it is necessary to vindicate open data as a democratic infrastructure, explicitly connect data policies with public AI strategies, and ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence reach all citizens, and not only those who already have access to technological resources.
From datos.gob.es we will continue to work in that direction, and we celebrate the existence of spaces such as Open Data Day to remind us why we started and where we want to go.
You can watch the event video again here
