I organised a virtual event for Open Data Day 2026 in Hong Kong. Open Source Hong Kong and Open Platform Society are co-organsiers.
I gave a presentation titled “State of Open Data 2026” to share my thoughts on the current state of open data in Hong Kong and globally.
Standardisation of open data is my recommendation for the global open data movement to improve open data quality from different cities. Previous open data indexes by different organisations are no longer active, and they are insufficient to check the data quality. Some open data is not detailed enough, eg, missing some information or data fields. Sustainability of the open data movement is a concern, and funding is required to start the work to recommend the standard of open data datasets with open source software tools and an open source approach.
Improvement is still needed for Open data in Hong Kong, but nowadays the open data community in Hong Kong is no longer active after the pre-COVID-19 era. Feedback forms on data.gov.hk are not transparent; there’s no way to know the status or progress of submitters’ requests. The Open Data Hong Kong community lacks administration, and its leadership was not transferred, so the ODHK community has died. The website accessinfo.hk was out of service for a year between 2024-2025, and the new administrators and organisation behind it are unknown, so it may cause some concern about its system administration and community governance.
Some speakers and participants shared their use cases and experiences. Ms. Kazel Lau shared how open data is important to release cyber security incidents. I added that HKCERT also released 2 open data datasets on data.gov.hk, but the data quality in RSS is not good, recommended to use JSON.
HKIIT student Mr. Andy Mak shared his projects with classmates to use fraud-related open data from data.gov.hk to develop a GenAI application for AntiFraud to help Hong Kong citizens. I think it is a strong use case for demonstrating the importance of open data in Hong Kong.
An anonymous participant shared that he is looking for a flight dataset, pre 2020 weather dataset, and MTR passenger flow dataset. I also submitted a request for live flight data, but HKAA refused. And data archives are also important for open data.
Lastly, I hopes the open data communities can be built up again in Hong Kong, and a new global movement for open data should be started to reach the next milestone of digital rights.