Good news: OKFN Greece after 1,5 year becomes an official chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation!
During this time OKFN organized various meet-ups. The second one was a real breakthrough for OKFN:Greece, as the group had the honour to have Mrs. Braybrook invited as the OKFN’s representative as well as Dr. Soren Auer, coordinator of the LOD2 Project and member of the OKFN advisory board. There were also some collaborations, already in progress that were established that evening: with Creative Commons Hellas (via Marinos Papadopoulos) and the Wikimedia Greece Community (via Kostas Stampoulis).
OKFN Greece participated in a series of events: Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting (Serres, May 2012), Ignite Athens Show (Athens, October 2012) , e-Learning Expo (Athens, October 2012), Wikimedia Greece Community Conference (Athenks, April 2013), and co-organized #opnHealth (Thessaloniki, April 2013)
OKFΝ Greece has also organized mini hack-days for various circumstances: the spendings visualization hack-day was organized in parallel with Mrs. Lucy Chambers’ (Open Spending Project Coordinator) visit in Greece and produced an interesting set of visualization samples. Wikipedia in Medicine hack-day was held in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Medical School to train and encourage the medical scientists to contribute valuable and accurate open medical content in Wikipedia.
By that time,the Open Data Handbook had already been translated in Greek and was distributed in the second meet-up for free, as a printed booklet (funded by the mEducator project).
In the meantime, OKFN Greece members have been working towards promoting the OKFN visions through the projects they have been taking part in. The translation of the Open Data Handbook was a great occasion for the group to join the linguistic linked data group. Subsequently the CKAN and the openspending platform were also translated in Greek.
OKFN Greece has developed the Greek version of DBpedia Spotlight and also published the Greek versions of Wordnet and Wiktionary linked datasets. Also, the OKFN Greece has developed the DayLikeToday a timeline visualization which presents what happens in a day like today from wikipedia’s data via DBpedia.
A huge dataset containing the bibliographic information of the Veria public library was published as a linked open dataset, being part of the cloud diagram and particularly the Greek sub-cloud (http://open-data.okfn.gr/linked-data), based on the work of the group’s members. All the OKFs’ Greece source code is released with an open license to the OKFN Greece github.
Our latest work is the Greek open data hub, which gained popularity and was praised by the Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes
As OKF Greece activities start to grow and become more complex, the national group took the decision to split the workload in a few working groups, exactly as the central OKFN does. The aim of OKF Greece working groups is to provide a support mechanism, reflection, development and promotion tools from different communities with common interests on open data and open knowledge throughout Greece, sharing their ideas with the main OKFN working groups.
OKFN:Greece wants to be a part of the future and as an official chapter of OKF could pursue OKFN’s visions, being able to participate in decision-making processes together with the local authorities and the state. The future is ours, would you join us?
