ODINE Newsletter – December 6th

Company Updates

Exceedance, from the 6th cohort, have received an award from the UCC for the best spin-out. The award was mentioned in an article in Tidal Energy Today.
Contagt, from the 6th cohort, won the first official Galileo Hackathon by ESA. The event is summarised here.
Green Spin, from the 7th Cohort, have doubled their number of employees in two months.
Idalab, from the 8th cohort, have been generating media in the form of a blog post by Code for Germany.
Zazuko, from the 7th cohort, presented in Amsterdam.

Open Government Partnership Summit 2016, Paris

France will soon be hosting the 4th global summit for Open Government Partnership (OGP) scheduled to take place from the 7th – 9th of December. The event will gather together more than 3000 representatives from over 70 countries, featuring heads of state, government ministers, public servants, members of parliament, local authorities, startups, digital innovators, developers, researchers and many more.

Earlier this year a process of co-construction of the program was launched in order to build an agenda that reflects the priorities of the participants. The key areas that the summit aims to tackle include transparency and anti-corruption, climate action and sustainable development, digital commons and civic technology, access to information, open parliament and improvements to the better implementation of open government.

ogp16

A session to look out for at OGP2016 is “Open Gender Monologues”, presented by Open Heroines.The group have been known to promote different voices from within open government, data and civic technologies: notably they organised a panel at the International Open Data Conference (IODC2016) recently, and published a range of blog posts written by women in technology which are designed to provide a safe space through their Slack channel.

In the session Open Heroines explain that the content will be “unheard voices from the OGP community, success stories and challenges for women and the LGBTQ community in the open government space”. They hope to conclude by reflecting on how we can create a better space to overcome gender disparity in our community.

Articles and News

The Finance, Economy and Education Ministers have announced the winners of open data for education competition. Participants were challenged to create new and innovative resources using data from the public sector open data portal to assist with teaching in schools. The two winners will have roughly four months to further develop their prototype applications, which will then be available for full use in schools for a three year period.

The Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics has recently recommended in a report that banks should be forced to provide open access to customer and small business data by 2018. The Committee suggested that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission are to be charged with developing a binding framework to facilitate the sharing of data, API usage, and ensuring privacy safeguards. Consequently, governments from around the world will be waiting with bated breath to see how this will effect the top four banks in Australia and the open government movement in general.

Can we unlock the secrets of the brain using open data? In a roundtable discussion (summarised in a blog post), leading researchers and institutions are trying to promote open science in neuroscience. This is being supported by global leaders (at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016, establishing an International Brain Station. This aims to be a community-driven platform to facilitate data sharing and analysis amongst neuroscientists. The researchers are hoping that the open data movement will have a similar impact to the field of study as it did in the field of Astronomy in the form of software tools and crowdsourcing analyses.

Upcoming Events

1st December BD2k Open Data Science Symposium

6th – 9th December – Open Government Partnership Summit, Paris

12th – 13th December DanubeHack 2.0

15th -16th December – Open Data Hackathon DB

27th – 30th December – 33C3, Hamburg

Sincerely yours,

The ODINE team