For those who are following our blog but haven’t heard of Open Antwerp yet, it is a free evening programme with three speakers about local city data and Antwerp on the 25 of june 2014, next wednesday. Please feel free to go to the Eventbrite webpage and register a seat.

During Open Antwerp, Maaike Scherrens and Mathias Van Compernolle will give a workshop and start a discussion about implementing a ‘local data census’ in Belgium.

You might think, “What’s a local data census?”
The census.okfn.org reads: “We’ve created the Local Open Data Census to survey and compare the progress made by different cities and local areas in releasing Open Data. You can help by tracking down Open Data from a city or region where you live or that you’re interested in.”

OKFN Belgium wants to start up a Belgian local data census later this summer but found out that most of the other local data censuses use the same data to pinpoint open data efforts, which seemed a bit strange. Especially in a country like Belgium where you have a Federal, Regional, Provincial and Local government, you can’t always pinpoint data to a local level, even if that is were you can see its impact. So we need to be careful about which datasets to use as a benchmark. Because we deemed it wrong to just decide ourselves, Maaike and Mathias prepared the starting point for this discussion on the 25th. They’ll give a few examples, but really want to go into a dialogue with Open Data (re)users to make this a structurally good census.

If you want contribute to this discussion, you’re welcome next wednesday at Idealabs Antwerp. If you can’t make it, no worries, afterwards we’ll write the aftermath on another blogpost and use this for an online survey.

We hope to see you there.