In our bi-monthly newsletter we update you on the latest news from on our projects, network activities and events.

Probably most of you have been involved in this year's celebration of Open Data Day: a record amount of 406 events took place around the world! It was inspiring to see so much activity on the day itself also on social media, with over 10.000 tweets published on #OpenDataDay  (you can dive deeper into the data on our Labs blog). Following on the day we have been collecting and publishing reports of events funded through our mini-grants scheme. This year, each grantee was paired up with another grantee, which resulted in diverse blogs reporting on each of the four themes of this year from different angles. You can read up on them here.

In mid-April we participated in the Creative Commons Summit to talk about everything open. We co-hosted a session about the "State of Open Licenses" where we advocated for steps forward to reduce the number of open licenses in use. There were interesting conversations about the ‘Big Open’, or how the various open communities can work together more effectively. We started putting this in practice when we discussed OpenGLAM initiatives, and agreed that we would like to bring the community initiatives of the Open Knowledge network, Creative Commons and Wikimedia closer together. We would love to hear from you as well, so join the discussion on our mailing list.  If you would like to hear more, have a listen to the interview with Sander van der Waal that was recorded at the CC Summit.

• Also on the occasion of Open Data Day, Open Knowledge Nepal launched the beta version of Open Data Nepal: a data portal that makes Nepal’s data accessible online perpetually in a central hub. The data available in the portal is harvested and crowdsourced from different public agencies and international organizations who work under the government of Nepal. 
   
• Open Knowledge Greece conducted a survey on the availability of open public budgeting data in Greece within the EU-funded  openbudgets.eu project. Their team created an interactive map that allows users to check the scores of their municipality or regional administrative unit. You can visit openbudgets.gr to check out the map, or read more about the survey on our blog.
   
• On 12 March, Open Knowledge Belgium organised a successful edition of the OpenBelgium conference, bringing together 250 industry, research, government and citizen stakeholders to discuss current trends around open knowledge and open data in Belgium. They wrote up a great summary blog with 5 lessons learned from Open Belgium.
   
• Of course many of our chapters were involved in celebrating Open Data Day as well: read up on how Open Knowledge Finland and Open Knowledge Portugal  got their local communities to talk about open mapping, how Open Knowledge Ethiopia organised OpenCon Addis Abeba with a focus on open science, and  how Open Knowledge Colombia developed the #AlimenData hackathon to follow and visualise public money associated with School Feeding National Program of Colombia.