As the 2nd Brazilian Information Technology Meeting started today, Ministress Míriam Belchior talked about the Brazilian Government's participation on the Open Government Partnership, about the Open Data Initiatives in the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management and also about the National Infrastructure for Open Data (INDA) project and its regulatory milestone, which has just gone out under public consultation yesterday. Secretary of Logistics and Information Technology Delfino Natal de Souza also reaffirmed the importance of Open Data and reinforced the commitment to it by the Brazilian Government.

Tomorrow, the 1st Brazilian Open Data Meeting will begin at the same place, and here are some activities scheduled for the first day:

• what open data projects are currently under way in Brazil, in the federal and state (São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul) levels of government
• journalists Fabiano Angélico, Partícia Cornils and Pedro Markun discuss the subject of Data-driven journalism on a panel
• a public hearing on the regulatory milestone for the National Infrastrucute for Open Data, which is currently under open public consultation
• an academic panel on research related to open data, featuring professors Maria Luiza Campos, João Paulo Almeida and Renato Rocha Souza, respectively from the Federal Universities of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and the Getúlio Vargas Foundation

For Thursday (27th), the highlights are:

• a debate on open data applications made by civic hackers
• another one on the open data ecossystem
• the international take on open data, featuring Marco Fioretti, who built the Open Data Open Society Report, Daniela Silva, from Transparência Hacker, both of them freshly back from the Open Government Data Camp 2011, and Juan Jose Soto, from Ciudadano Ingeligente, in Chile
• a talk on Open Tools for Open Data, CKAN and the Open Spending project, by Friedrich Lindenberg from the Open Knowledge Foundation

For details and last minute changes, please see the full programme.