Unlocking the Value of Ireland’s Open Data: National Open Data Conference 2026
On 21 October 2026, Ireland’s open data community will come together at Croke Park for the National Open Data Conference 2026.
This year’s theme — “Unlocking Impact: Open Data for Trust & Transformation” — gets to the heart of what I believe the next phase of open data needs to be about.
We have made significant progress in making public-sector data available. The next challenge is increasingly about what we do with it.
How can open data help deliver better public services? How can businesses, researchers and entrepreneurs build new products from it? How can it support better decisions? And, particularly as AI changes what is technically possible, how do we turn public data into meaningful economic and social impact?
Ireland has built an extraordinary public data asset
Ireland’s national Open Data Portal, data.gov.ie, now provides access to more than 22,000 datasets, published across a remarkably broad range of areas including transport, housing, planning, health, energy, environment, education, population, finance and public services.
Behind those datasets are public bodies across Ireland continually making information available in open and reusable formats.
As a member of Ireland’s Open Data Governance Board, one of the areas I am particularly interested in is how we move beyond simply measuring the amount of data published and increasingly measure the impact created through its reuse.
Publishing the data is the beginning of the journey, not the end.
From open data to products, companies and better services
Some of the most interesting opportunities arise when we bring together three things:
Public data + entrepreneurial thinking + emerging technology.
A transport dataset can become a journey-planning product.
Environmental and weather data can support climate modelling, renewable-energy optimisation or insurance products.
Planning, property and geographic information can underpin entirely new PropTech businesses.
Health, demographic and public-service data can help identify emerging needs and inform better allocation of resources.
And the combination of open data and AI significantly expands what can be built.
Large language models, agentic AI, geospatial technologies and modern data platforms can make datasets that previously required specialist analytical skills dramatically easier to interrogate, combine and turn into useful applications.
The opportunity is not simply to ask AI questions about government data.
It is to build new services, applications and businesses on top of trusted public data infrastructure.
We need more enterprise engagement
One area I would particularly like to see continue to grow is engagement between Ireland’s open-data ecosystem and the startup, SME and wider technology community.
There is an enormous pool of potential raw material available to entrepreneurs on data.gov.ie.
A founder looking for their next idea could spend an afternoon exploring datasets covering transport, housing, energy, planning, tourism, agriculture, the environment or public services and potentially identify problems worth solving.
For established companies, open data can enrich proprietary datasets, improve decision-making and provide inputs into entirely new products.
For researchers, it can shorten the path between research and practical application.
And for Government, greater reuse creates a powerful multiplier effect: data collected for one public purpose can generate additional social and economic value many times over.
That is why the conversation around open data increasingly needs to include not only “What should we publish?”, but also:
Who is using it?
What are they building?
What barriers are preventing greater reuse?
What datasets would unlock entirely new use cases if they were available?
And ultimately:
What measurable economic, social and public-service outcomes are being created?
Open data is also critical infrastructure for AI
There is another reason why this discussion is becoming increasingly important.
AI needs data.
But as organisations move from experimenting with AI towards deploying it in real operational environments, questions around data provenance, quality, licensing, governance and trust become increasingly important.
Well-governed public datasets can therefore become part of the national infrastructure that supports AI innovation.
Ireland has an opportunity to connect its open-data strategy much more closely with its wider ambitions in AI, digital government, research and enterprise.
That means making high-value datasets easy to discover, machine-readable and accessible through APIs where appropriate.
It also means continuing to improve data quality and interoperability while making it easier for developers and businesses to understand what data exists and how it can be reused.
National Open Data Conference 2026
These are exactly the kinds of conversations I hope we will have at this year’s National Open Data Conference.
The programme will examine three broad themes:
Open Data for Better Public Services
Open Data for Impact
Open Data for Transformation
It will bring together people from across the public service, academia, civil society, business, enterprise and the wider Irish Open Data community.
The timing is particularly interesting as Ireland holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, creating an opportunity to consider open data not only from an Irish perspective but as part of the wider European digital and data landscape.
From publication to impact
Ireland has already created a substantial national open-data resource.
The opportunity now is to maximise its impact.
I would like to see more developers experimenting with it.
More startups building businesses with it.
More established companies incorporating it into products.
More researchers translating it into practical applications.
More public bodies using each other’s open data.
And ultimately more examples where we can draw a clear line between an open dataset and a measurable improvement in people’s lives, public services or economic activity.
That, for me, is where open data becomes particularly exciting.
It stops being simply a data-publishing initiative and becomes infrastructure for innovation.
I’m looking forward to continuing that discussion at the National Open Data Conference 2026 in Croke Park on 21 October.
If you work in technology, AI, data, research, government, startups or digital transformation, I would strongly encourage you to join us.
National Open Data Conference 2026
Unlocking Impact: Open Data for Trust & Transformation
📅 Wednesday, 21 October 2026
📍 Croke Park, Dublin
🕙 10:00–14:30
Registration:
https://ti.to/open-data/national-open-data-conference-2026
And before attending, I would encourage everyone to spend some time exploring data.gov.ie.
You might be surprised by what you find — and perhaps by what you could build with it.
