If you need another reason to open another bottle of champagne: as of the 21st of September, OKFN Belgium has changed from a local group to an official OKFN chapter. Since the foundation of the legal structure in February this year, we didn’t only had some community events (a general meeting and some Apps For X events) and a lot of board meetings, but we have also started 4 working groups.

Creative Commons Belgium

Benevolent working group leader: Yannick H’Madoun (yannick.hmadoun at okfn.org)

Update: For the next months Yannick is going to visit Creative Commons in Amsterdam and is going to manage Creative Commons Belgium from abroad. In the near future CC Belgium will be organizing brain storms and other sessions involving creators. More soon.

Open Transport working group

Benevolent working group leader: iRail vzw/asbl (info at iRail.be)

Update: During the next months iRail is going to do more international projects (for instance with the SNCF and OpenOV) together with the international transport working group. They are going to do several projects on standardization, user interfaces, community building and they are going to be co-writing an open transport data handbook for transport agencies that want to implement an open transport data policy.

Open education working group

Benevolent working group leader: SchoolKid vzw/asbl

More information on http://schoolkid.be

App/Hack/Make competition working group

Benevolent working group leader: Lieven Janssen (lieven.janssen at okfn.org)

Update: This working group has certainly been going through the most amazing evolution the past few months. We have been organizing Apps For Ghent, open data workshop for Truvo, Labs For VDAB, Apps For Flanders, the Open Data Day for Flanders and a lot of these events are still in the pipeline: Apps For Antwerp (first of December), Apps For Bruges (First half of 2013), Apps For Ghent 3, and so on and so forth, each time bringing together more than 50 developers, students, data enthusiasts, policy makers, data owners and so on.

Want to get involved in one of the current working groups? Interested in setting up your own working group at OKFN Belgium? Interested in our app/hack/make contests? Don’t hesitate to contact us.

Pieter