Denmark
Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen has a background in Political and Computer Science and loves to find ways to combine the two fields. He is engaged in the activities of Open Knowledge Denmark. His primarily interest is in political data and he advocates for transparency, open data and open government. Among other things he has launched the Danish parliamentary monitoring site, hvemstemmerhvad.dk (direct translation - "who votes what").
Denmark ranked #2 in the 2014 Open Data Index / Other stories from Europe
I feel that the Global Open Data Index is a great way to get an overview of the open data situation in your own country. Some government agencies publish data in ways that do not live up to the standards recommended for open data, for example, they don't include a license (even though they attach an open license when asking for it they don't find it worthwhile to include it on their webpage), or they provide an advanced API but no options to a simple download in bulk. There have been multiple initiatives from government agencies in Denmark. The difficult task seems to be to turn data into knowledge and make good use of it. The wish for economic growth seems to be the number one driver for opening up data, meaning that transparency and civil society aspects are often forgotten.
The Index will be a very important tool to push for more open data here, and also important in pushing for using that open data, eg. "we have a lot of open data, why don't we make use of it for x, y and z?".
