Presentations from the Mini Symposium on Development and Sharing of Open Geodata organized by ITC in collaboration with OpenGeoHub in Enschede, The Netherlands on 18 January 2023.

Open geodata is the idea that certain geospatial and Earth Observation (EO) data should be freely available to everyone to use, re-use and redistribute without restrictions like copyright or patents, but with requirements such as attribution and share- alike. It is considered as a best practice for modern geo-information and EO research in line with Open Science and FAIR principles. However, developing easily accessible (e.g. cloud-optimised) and re-usable (big) geospatial datasets, and sharing them "effectively" with the research community and other stakeholders is challenging and usually requires a team effort including researchers, research software engineers, technology advisors, and community managers.

Collaboration between research institutions to share technical and practical know-how on best practices, as well as lessons learned while developing and sharing open geodata, supports such efforts and helps in developing an open data culture for open research and development communities. The meeting on "Development and Sharing of Open Geodata" aims to initiate such a collaboration between ITC and OpenGeoHub, by bringing both institutions together to present state-of-the-art research activities with a focus on open geodata, discuss the needs and challenges, and pursue collaboration opportunities especially to produce joint datasets and software.