International Open Data Day
“Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. “ On this day, organisations host events that aim to familiarize citizens with open data concepts and tools showcasing the benefits of open data and promote the adoption of open data policies in government, business, and civil society. These events can be hackathons, demonstrations, activities and data quest. Saturday, 4th March 2017 marks the fifth year of International Open Data Day and will focus on four key areas that using open data can solve. These four areas are Open Research Data, Open Contracting and tracking public money flows, Open Data for Environment and Open Data for Human Rights. On International Open Data Day, events take place all around the world connecting the global open data community.
Open Data Durban plans to host a “Make a Weather Station” event for this day. We are inviting the community of Durban to get together and build weather stations which will record various weather condition data such as air temperature, humidity, and air quality! The data recorded from these weather stations will be automatically uploaded to a database which will allow citizens to monitor weather conditions over a period of time and as develop interesting visualisations.
For this event, we are partnering up with some creative minds from different industries.
The MakerSpace: The MakerSpace in Durban is a community of makers who “use both cutting-edge technology and age-old methods, or often a combination of both.” Using Arduino electronics kits, experts at The MarkerSpace will facilitate the building process.
OpenSensors: OpenSensors is the largest Internet of Things (IoT) community in the world. We will be connecting our weather station sensors to the OpenSensors database. This platform also allows us to create visualisations aiding in interrupting data and noticing trends.
Open Knowledge International: Open Knowledge International (OKI) is an organisation that helps civil society to access and use data to solve social problems. OKI has provided us with funding for Open Data Day. With this extra funding, the event is completely free for all who attend.
Plan for the day
Meet at The MakerSpace at 8:30 am to register and grab some coffee and muffins to get your brain ready for the day. Then you can expect to join groups with each member being either a techie, system engineers or environmentalist and start building a particular section of the weather station with step by step instructions from The MakerSpace experts. Lunch will be around 1 pm if we can get you to take a break from the fun of building.
We have active citizenry through data literacy as a key theme in the work we do this year. To this end partnering with schools to promote open data by building Arduino weather stations in a bid to promote environmental awareness and responsibility as an objective that will see us achieving our active civics goal. By helping us build the weather stations we would collectively help empower future citizens to make informed decisions.
Keen on open data and testing our maker skills? Want to join us for Open Data Day? Sign up for the event visit our meetup page.
- Tricia Govindasamy & Nkululeko Mthembu
Originally published at Open Data Durban.
