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Next week the first Öppna helsingborg event will be held here at Mindpark, in our CreativeLab eventspace. This is a very interesting and exciting event – the city of Helsingborg will be here and have a session about what data should be published online in the future. Already the group has received 60 suggestions and votes for what to release, but during the session itself more will be discussed.

Why open data – and what to do with it?

Open data is about taking the information that the city has and making it accesable to the public. This does not always mean it is easily accessible – the main focus is to make it easily machine-readable. This way it is easy to ‘release’ the date, while interested developers can build webservices on it. Both just for fun, but also for building business on them. The reasoning is simple – because the city is run on public money, the public should have access to the data.

Usecases from opendata in other cities or areas include amongst other:

Making open data more usefull

“Instead of just opening our data we want to find out what kind of data people are interested in. We want to find people who want to create things with open data. To just release the data without users is not always the best way we believe, even if it is very common.” Says Andreas Krohn, the facilitator.

Andreas is one of the most influential persons in the Nordics when it comes to APIs and open data, being behind the Nordic API sessions and blog. He is also a Mindparker, and since a couple of month a part-time employee at the city of Helsingborg. Somewhat unusual, but this also means the work with open data is taken very seriously.

We look forward to the event and what will happen in general with the initiative. If you want to participate digitally from afar, check out the website. If you want to participate physically, come to the meetup.