Johann Mittheisz, former CIO of the City of Vienna, wins European Data Innovator Award (EDI Award) 2014 for his outstanding visions and activities in the area of open government and open data in the City of Vienna, in Austria as well as in the D-A-CH region and above.

Since 2011 Johann Mittheisz pushes on the topic of open data on local, regional, national and international level in his role as CIO of the City of Vienna, Austria. As lead of the Open Government board of the City of Vienna he realised a full integration of open data into many of the core content- and data related processes of City. In strong co-operation with the political open government / transparency board of Vienna he established a cultural change inside public administration to enable more collaboration between and participation of all relevant stakeholders as politicians, public administration, citizens and industry / economy to establish innovative mechanisms and services. 

He is one of the founders of the Cooperation OGD Austria (co-operation of all 20+ open data publishing governmental departments in Austria) that realised open data guidelines / recommendations for all Austrian governmental departments that are publishing open data in the form of an open data metadata standard, a recommendation for a harmonised URL-convention for Austria, for the use of open source software and especially CKAN for OGD catalogues, and a harmonised license for all published data sets in the form of the use of CC-BY Austria 3.0.
 

The City of Vienna has established quarterly data publishing phases (phase 13 has been finalised by end of 2013) that are always combined with a face to face event where the data publishers and the data consumers meet for 

knowledge sharing on new release data sets, for discussions around the data as quality, formats or attributes as well as for discussing concrete requests on additional data sets needed for concrete use cases.
 

On international level Johann Mittheisz always pushed forward the idea of harmonisation of open data standards and processes in the D-A-CH region (Germany - Austria - Switzerland) and above to ensure communication and interoperability across 

the borders of these German speaking countries of Europe to enable efficient and sustainable cross border services and tools.

After being honoured with the PSI Alliance 5stars award as well as the 1st prize of the 11. eGovernment Award of Germany-Austria-Switzerland for the most innovative service Johann Mittheisz and the open data (Open Government) team of the City of Vienna will receive the European Data Innovator Award 2014 (EDI Awrad 2014) for outstanding visions and activities in the field of open data in Europe on the 19th of March 2014 at the European Data Forum 2014 (EDF2014) taking place in Athens, Greece (see://2014.data-forum.eu).

The Eccenca European Data Innovator Award was established to recognize outstanding enterprises and individuals, who have shown exceptional vision and execution in the field of integrating and leveraging enterprise and/or open data for a broad range of commercial use cases. The European Data Innovator Award was made possible by eccenca GmbH, a AKSW Research Group spin-off from Leipzig, Germany. The award will be presented at the European Data Forum 2014 on the first conference day in the course of the morning session - and will be handed over by representatives of the European Commission and Chris Brockmann CEO of eccenca GmbH.