Open data leaders from government, the private sector and civil society organisations will be attending a transparency event on Saturday 15 June as part of the run up to the G8 Leaders Summit (17 to 18 June).

Benefits of open data

Open data has the potential to:

• hold institutions to account
• provide greater choice in services and give citizens more trust in their governments
• make service providers more efficient
• offer greater innovation opportunities for businesses

Read more about the government’s position on transparency.

Get involved

You will be able to watch a live stream of this event here on Saturday.

Open data challenges

Participants in this event will be discussing a number of open data challenges around:

• releasing data
• funding or supporting open data competitions
• funding training and products in developing countries
• contributing knowledge and skills
• tackling global problems

Read the challenges in full.

More about transparency and open data

The UK is currently the lead chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) (with Indonesia), until October 2013. The OGP, a partnership between 59 countries and civil society organisations, asks governments to become more open by committing to promoting transparency and access to information to enable citizens to hold their governments to account more easily.

See what data is being released on data.gov.uk.