You might have heard of the notion of open data.

I’m very happy to have been involved with something that, I’ve just realized, is now at last available to the world – the new data portal for the Municipality of Porto: dadosabertos.cm-porto.pt. My role has been merely on the software development side of things, but I do hope that society (citizens, industry, press) find these and future datasets useful. The most rewarding for me, in this project, is having contributed to something based on values that I hold so dear, such as transparency and democracy.

In the meantime, I have moved on to other projects, but I have high expectations on the success of this one over the next months, as more datasets are made available. The Open Knowledge Foundation runs a webpage to track the state of government open data, which is great to put things into perspective. It puts Portugal in position #39 (2014 data), and gives an interesting overview by municipality of the datasets that you may expect to find out there.

In case you’re wondering, for Porto’s data portal we have used CKAN, and the source code is available on github.