European Data Portal’s experts Esther Huyer and Laura van Knippenberg forecast that the market size of open data in Estonia could reach 445 million euro by 2025 if current growth continues. To harness the economic potential of open data, they recommend countries to increase collaboration between the public and private sectors, combine different types of data, and focus on improving the awareness and capacity of data reusers. They also encourage Estonia to undertake a more thorough study of the socio-economic impact of open data and exchange knowledge with other European countries. Esther Huyer

When Brett Goldstein started his job as the City of Chicago’s Chief Data Officer in 2011, the city had already taken its first steps in publishing open data. It had an open data portal with some datasets, it had an open data community interested in engaging with the data, but overall not much progress was being made. Everything changed when, in the same year, a new mayor took office, for whom data-driven decision-making and opening up the city’s vast data resources to the public was a priority. Just a few years later, Chicago’s open data program had become a success story which has thereafter

Transition to a green economy not only requires idealism and initiative but also data, data and more data. It was in the fall of 2019, around the same time the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg sailed around the world scorning world leaders for ignoring environmental problems, that the environmental initiative called Rohetiiger . took its first breaths in Estonia. Rohetiiger (Estonian for Green Tiger) is a broad-based collaboration platform seeking to boost the development of green economy. Among other plans, the platform wants to develop a system for data-driven assessment of products’

The year 2020 was special for cultural data and digital culture for several reasons. To the broader public this meant visiting exhibitions and theater plays virtually while sitting on their sofa due to the COVID-19 pandemic. From a narrower, policy-making perspective, 2020 marked the Year of Digital Culture – a policy initiative that aimed to promote new forms of culture driven by the use of digital technologies. As a result of this initiative, a report will be launched in January 2021 summarizing the state of Estonian digital culture and open cultural data. Based partly off of this report