This is the third part out of a four part series reporting on the International Open Data Day Stockholm 2016. Read part I here and II here.

After the presentations at Open Data Day Stockholm 2016 we took a short break to have the first and essential break for “fika” having coffee, tea, cookies and cinnamon buns. With participants warmed up and inspired by projects there was a lot of chatting in the space. Following this we moved on towards workshop and demonstrations, e.g. having participants ideate and brainstorm on why open data for cultural heritage should be maintained and released.

The FrågaStaten project were letting users test to request public documents from the EU institutions. FrågaStaten (run as Handlingar.se) will help you to make Freedom of Information Access request and the platform publishes all requests and answers online. It can be said that it is a version of AskTheEu.org for the local context in Sweden.

I personally sent a request during the test at AskTheEu.org and got my answer two days later. The only thing that you need to do is submitting your e-mail and create your own profile. Your information remains anonymous to the public bodies and you can use a pseudonym if you want or need – you have the right to. Then you can ask about whatever public document you want to request and you can also see all similar previous requests and questions.

Fascinating how easy it now can be to get information out that you did not have any idea about before! In the third workshop we were how to submit local and regional datasets to the Local Open Data Index – the next level of the Open Data Index. Are you interested to help crowdsource? Please do!

Stay put for the next part of this four part series about International Open Data Day Stockholm 2016.

Our blog post with the invitation to the event is published here.
The event on the wiki for OpenDataDay.org was located at the wiki.opendataday.org.

The International Open Data Day in Stockholm 2016 was held on 5th March at the Wikimedia Sweden offices hosted by Open Knowledge Sweden and Wikimedia Sweden.