Our new beginning
Open Knowledge Austria starts anew
An Austrian story worth carrying forward. A new beginning for open data, shared knowledge, and technology that serves everyone.
Knowledge becomes useful when someone can question it, connect it to something else, and put it to work. That conviction brings us here: Open Knowledge Austria is starting anew.
We are building a new Austrian organisation for open data, shared knowledge, and technology that serves the public good. Our starting point is Vienna. Our invitation reaches anyone who wants to make information more accessible, understandable, and useful.
There is a history behind this beginning—and a changed world ahead of it.
An Austrian story worth carrying forward
The Austrian open knowledge community helped turn an ambitious idea into practical work. In a 2012 account for the Open Knowledge Foundation, Martin Kaltenböck traced the Open Knowledge Forum Austria’s beginnings to Vienna in early 2011. Its work included support for municipal open data portals, events, and cooperation across public administration, research, business, and civil society.
By the community’s 2016 update, that work encompassed open science, data literacy, Vienna Open Data Meetups, and the OpenDataPortal collaboration with Wikimedia Austria. These were people making openness useful in everyday practice.
Open Knowledge Forum Austria begins in Vienna.
The former Austrian chapter dissolves at the end of the year.
A new Open Knowledge Austria initiative begins its work.
The Foundation’s country archive records that the former chapter dissolved at the end of 2018. That is an important part of the story. We honour the people who built the earlier community, and the projects, skills, and relationships their work made possible.
Today’s OKAT is a new organisation taking up that cause. The continuity is in the commitment: knowledge should be something people can examine, share, and use together.
Why begin again now?
We can reach more information than we could a generation ago, yet finding common ground can feel harder. Conversations are divided across platforms, languages, institutions, and borders. A document can be public and still be practically unreachable. A dataset can be downloadable and still be impossible to interpret without help.
Artificial intelligence adds another layer. It can help someone explore an unfamiliar dataset, translate a document, or ask a question they could not previously express in code. It can also hide a weak source behind a fluent answer. Access to an answer is only part of access to knowledge: people need a way to understand where that answer came from.
The more powerful our tools become, the more valuable it is to share the evidence, the methods, and the ability to question them.
That is why open knowledge matters so much now. It gives us something to work on together: sources we can inspect, methods we can improve, and a record that can be corrected. Shared evidence does not end disagreement. It can make disagreement more informed and productive.
Open knowledge in the age of AI agents
For us, the arrival of AI agents—systems that can use tools and carry out sequences of tasks—makes familiar open data questions newly urgent. If an agent retrieves a public dataset, combines it with another source, and proposes an action, can a person follow that chain? Can they see the date, the licence, the missing values, and the choices made along the way?
These are practical design questions. We want to explore AI that cites its sources, preserves context, explains uncertainty, and leaves consequential decisions accountable to people. An open licence and a working download link are a beginning; documentation, provenance, accessibility, and opportunities for correction make reuse meaningful.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is already working on this wider agenda. Its AI Learning Labs develop practical, openly shared approaches to responsible AI. A September 2026 conversation with public-sector partners in Brazil and Uruguay describes experiments connecting AI tools to public data while retaining a route back to the underlying sources. That direction is an inspiration for the work we want to develop in Austria.
Openness also needs care. Protecting personal information, respecting the people represented in data, and recognising the limits of a dataset belong in the same conversation as reuse. Useful openness is deliberate.
A beginning you can take part in
Our priorities are to make open data easier to use, connect people who can learn from one another, and explore how open tools can support public understanding. We want to learn through practical work with researchers, journalists, developers, educators, public institutions, and civil society.
One concrete starting point is the relaunch of Open Data Inside: a way to make the people and projects using open data more visible. A badge is a small thing. The conversation it starts—about where information comes from and what people build with it—can be much larger.
Daniel Dobriy, Director, and Shahrom Sohi, Treasurer, are helping establish this new beginning. We would love to hear from people who took part in the earlier Austrian community, and from those arriving at open knowledge for the first time.
Bring a question, a dataset, a project, or a perspective we are missing. Tell us what would make knowledge more useful to your community. Explore the global Open Knowledge Network, and help us connect that international conversation with work here in Austria.
A new beginning is an invitation. Let’s make something worth sharing.
Sources & further reading
The historical and project references behind this story.
Be part of what comes next.
Bring your questions, your experience, or an idea we should explore together.
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