We are delighted to announce the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which took place yesterday at the Leipzig Semantic Web Day.

The OKF Germany chapter will be dedicated to promoting all forms of open knowledge in Germany — including open government data, open data in science, and the public domain.

Work is already underway create a citizen driven registry of open data (with a particular focus on government information) which can be seen at:

OKF Germany has attracted a distinguished board of academics, technologists, journalists, librarians, scientists and policy experts. These include:

In addition to the launch of the OKF chapter there were plenty of interesting discussions about the state of open knowledge in Germany. Some key highlights:

  • A keynote from Prof Rainer Kuhlen, talking about the “bigger picture” of information society, the right of access to information and the issues with restrictive copyright licensing and the artificial scarcity of “immaterial goods”.
  • A talk from Prof Jörn von Lucke, talking about the potential innovation that can be brought about by open government data and greater transparency and participation.
  • A talk from Jonathan Gray on the Open Knowledge Foundation, open government data in the UK, and the future of open data.
  • Matthias Spielkamp talking about the importance of free licenses for sustainable open data strategies.
  • Daniel Kinzler talking about structured data in the Wikipedia project, with a sneak preview of how Wikipedia will look in about one year (exciting!)
  • A panel discussion on the state of open government data in Germany with representatives form public sector, the scientific community, the private sector and civil society. This discussion highlighted the obstacles and opportunities in German politics to help government and public sector to become more open and transparent and what initiatives and prototypes can be developed to underline the value of the reuse of public sector information.

This is fantastic news and we look forward to following the activities of the new chapter — and doing everything we can to support it! If you’re interested in getting involved, please say hello on the mailing list.

For further information see:

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