February 21 marks Open Data Day, a day of open data events – including meetups, hackathons, and more – occurring across the world.

Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualisations, and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

So far there are two events marked for Australians, including one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. Both events will be hosted by Code For Australia.

If you have an idea for using open data, want to find an interesting project to contribute towards, learn about how to visualise or analyse data, or simply want to see what’s happening, then come participate!

No matter your skillset or interests, the international organisers are encouraging local organisers to foster opportunities for you to learn and help the global open data community grow.

The Code For Australia blog has details on the Sydney International Open Day Event, but you may need to contact them for more details on the Melbourne event.

You can see a map of all the events planned across the world at http://opendataday.org/map/.