During the Open Access Week and although the concept relates primarily to scholarly research, OKFN:Greece took the opportunity to transfer the ideas and values of Free Content and Open Data to municipalities throughout Greece.
Each municipality, as a centralized point of reference for each local community, is an organisation that receives and produces a broad range of knowledge and information. Knowledge and information that may be valuable to researchers and authors, scientists and artists who may wish to use it in order to create new knowledge or share the existing knowledge about a subject in many other ways.
Municipalities can contribute and participate in the community of free and open access to knowledge, opening their data to the Internet, freely licensed and using open standards, so they can be used in any way. This data may be geographical information, public documents, cultural content, or even just the metadata of the municipal libraries.
For these reasons, we turned to the municipalities to inform them, sending them also the greek translation of the Open Data Handbook. OKFN:Greece may be patron and supporter of such efforts, providing relevant information and guidance to any municipality that wants to open its content. International practice and the experience of the members and volunteers of OKFN in the development of software and services, in accordance with international standards, will be important to help anyone who is interested in this.
