Chapter relaunch
Open Knowledge Austria is back
Open Knowledge Austria is back, with a new focus: open knowledge in the age of AI. Help make open data discoverable, keep AI access sustainable and build an open community.
AI is making data more valuable than ever. Yet AI crawlers are threatening the open data commons built over decades.
This pressure is already visible. Wikimedia reported in April 2025 that multimedia download bandwidth had grown by 50% since January 2024, largely because of automated scraping. Read the Docs reported in July 2024 that a single crawler downloaded 73 TB in May, generating more than $5,000 in bandwidth charges and prompting it to block that crawler.
Open Knowledge Austria is back, with a new focus: open knowledge in the age of AI. We're relaunching Austria's chapter in the Open Knowledge Foundation network to help meet this challenge together.
Working with open data? Bring your project, questions or expertise. Civil society, researchers, developers, public institutions, industry and anyone curious about open knowledge are welcome.
Three priorities for the new chapter
Make open data visible, discoverable and integrated. Help people find datasets, connect them and put them to work.
Contribute to a sustainable open data-AI ecosystem. Support fair access for users as well as agents.
An open community. Connect civil society, researchers, developers, public institutions and industry, share practical experience and develop work with other Open Knowledge chapters.
Open knowledge in the age of AI
AI can help people explore unfamiliar datasets and ask new questions. Its answers should still lead back to sources people can inspect, with attribution, licences and context intact.
For us, sustainable AI also means sustaining the public knowledge it relies on. Large-scale crawling can put pressure on the organisations that publish open data. We want to help develop fair ways for AI systems to access and reuse that knowledge without undermining public access or exhausting its providers.
Our interests include open-source knowledge bases, agents working with the Web, climate and environmental knowledge, and collaboration on fair AI access to open data. We welcome research partners and invitations to joint proposals.
Join the Open Data Inside relaunch
Open Data Inside makes the value of open data visible through a shared badge and a public directory of people and organisations using it. Bring a project, meet fellow open-data users and help shape what comes next.
The preliminary date for the badge relaunch is Thursday, 21 January 2027, 17:00-19:00 CET, in person at AI:AT Vienna and online. The date and venue are subject to confirmation. Registration is open now, and confirmed details will be sent by email.
Register your interest: go.okat.at/odi-launch
Be part of this new beginning
Subscribe for updates on projects, events, Open Data Inside and ways to collaborate. The newsletter uses email confirmation, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Join the newsletter: go.okat.at/news
Explore our work at okat.at or get in touch at office@okat.at.
Sources & further reading
The historical and project references behind this story.
- https://okat.at/
- https://okat.at/blog/open-knowledge-austria-starts-anew/
- https://okat.at/blog/okat-network-presentation-2026/
- https://okat.at/register/
- https://okat.at/#newsletter
- https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
- https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/
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