Unlocking the Benefits of Open Data; HuffingtonPost.com, 2/25/14

Ariel Smilowitz, HuffingtonPost.com; Unlocking the Benefits of Open Data:

"This past weekend marked the third annual Open Data Day, an international event that gathers people around the globe each year in an effort to support and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world's governments and institutions. Open data is defined as "data that can be freely used, shared, and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose". With this in mind, over the weekend, designers, coders, statisticians, and those interested in open data participated in workshops and open data hackathons. Ultimately, each event provided participants with the chance to "write applications, liberate data, create visualizations, and publish analyses using public open data." In other words, participants were given a space to come together and collaborate on new ways to visualize, analyze, and spread information throughout the world.

All in all, Open Data Day connected over 100 cities on five continents."