Non-profit organisation founded in 2017 by Steve Ballmer that brings together in one place the official data on the population, economy, budget and public services of the United States, without opinion or party affiliation.

Why it inspires: It is the direct inspiration for SpainFacts: it shows that a country's accounts can be told with official data and in a neutral way, for any citizen.

Research publication by the Global Change Data Lab and the University of Oxford with thousands of charts on health, poverty, energy, climate and education in every country.

Why it inspires: Every chart comes with its source, its methodology and a data download, and all its content and code are open (CC BY).

Foundation created by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund to fight misconceptions about the world with easy-to-understand statistics.

Why it inspires: Its animated bubble charts and knowledge tests show that even well-informed people are often wrong about how the world is changing.

The Dutch statistics office. Its StatLine database offers thousands of tables as open data, with an OData API.

Why it inspires: All its statistical information is published as open data, with an API and under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

The Norwegian statistics office. Its StatBank gives access to the official series, also through a free, open API.

Why it inspires: It combines very comprehensive statistics with a simple API and news stories explaining each figure it publishes.

The New Zealand statistics office and the national open data portal (data.govt.nz). Stats NZ runs the Integrated Data Infrastructure, which links anonymised data from different agencies for research.

Why it inspires: It allows accredited researchers to study real life paths (education, employment, health, benefits) with privacy safeguards.

The Singapore Government's open data portal, with real-time APIs (weather, air quality, transport) as well as thousands of datasets.

Why it inspires: It puts the emphasis on reliable, documented APIs that developers can use directly in their services.

The European Union's official data portal, which brings together data from the European institutions and the national portals, including datos.gob.es. It publishes the Open Data Maturity report every year.

Why it inspires: It allows the degree of openness of each European country to be compared using the same methodology.

TheyWorkForYou, from the charity mySociety, shows what each British MP says and how they vote. mySociety also created WhatDoTheyKnow (freedom of information requests made in the open) and FixMyStreet (reports of street problems).

Why it inspires: It turns parliamentary records and votes into easy-to-follow profiles for each MP, with an API and open source code reused in other countries.

Independent website that has tracked the bills and votes of the United States Congress since 2004.

Why it inspires: It lets people follow every bill, receive alerts and see activity statistics for each member of Congress.

Independent organisation that follows the money in US politics: campaign donations, lobbying spending and the personal finances of elected officials.

Why it inspires: It cross-references scattered official sources to answer who funds whom.

Platform where anyone can publicly ask their MPs questions and look up their answers, votes and additional income.

Why it inspires: Questions and answers stay published, creating a permanent record of what each representative says.

Electronic public procurement system, mandatory since 2016, in which all tenders and awards are published as open data following the international OCDS standard.

Why it inspires: It grew out of collaboration between government, business and civil society, and anyone can monitor contracts, for example with the DOZORRO monitoring platform.

Organisation that promotes open public contracting and maintains the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), used by governments around the world.

Why it inspires: A common standard makes it possible to compare contracts across administrations and countries and to detect anomalies.

Data exchange layer between administrations that Estonia has used since 2001, open source and now maintained by the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS).

Why it inspires: Administrations request data from each other securely, so citizens do not have to hand over the same document twice, and every access is logged, allowing Estonians to check which body has consulted their data.

Non-profit organisation, founded in 2009, that works with governments to make their digital services simple, for example with GetCalFresh for applying for food assistance in California.

Why it inspires: It measures success by how easy it is for people to access public services.

Open civic technology community born in 2012 that creates clearer versions of public websites and data. It gave rise to vTaiwan, an online consultation process that used the Pol.is tool to seek consensus on digital regulations; its activity has been more irregular in recent years.

Why it inspires: It shows that civil society can work with government to open up data and deliberate on specific policies.

Pioneering open knowledge organisation, founded in 2004. It created CKAN, the data catalogue software used by many public portals, and the Open Definition, which defines what open data is.

Why it inspires: It has laid the technical and conceptual foundations of many of the world's data portals.

Partnership of governments and civil society for open government. Spain has taken part since 2011 with action plans drawn up by administrations and civil society organisations.

Why it inspires: It requires specific transparency commitments to be set and subjected to independent assessment.

Open Knowledge Brasil project launched in 2016 that uses an artificial intelligence system (Rosie) to review federal deputies' expense claims and flag suspicious ones. Its code is open (MIT licence); today it is updated less often.

Why it inspires: It showed that a few volunteers with open data and code can audit thousands of public expenses.

Independent fact-checking charity that also develops artificial intelligence tools to detect claims worth checking.

Why it inspires: As well as fact-checking, it asks those who spread an error to correct it and proposes improvements in how statistics are published.

Non-profit outlet founded in 2010, a pioneer of fact-checking in Latin America, with its own tools such as Chequeabot.

Why it inspires: It combines fact-checking, data journalism and education, and shares methods and tools with media across the region.