Today we’re pleased to officially launch Open Knowledge Foundation Labs, a community home for civic hackers, data wranglers and anyone else intrigued and excited by the possibilities of combining technology and open information for good – making government more accountable, culture more accessible and science more efficient.
Labs is about “making” – whether that’s apps, insights or tools – using open data, open content and free / open source software. And you don’t need to be an uber-geek to participate: interest and a willingness to get your hands dirty (digitally), be that with making, testing or helping, is all that’s needed – although we do allow lurking on the mailing list ;-)
Join in now! Sign up on the mailing list, follow us on twitter or read more about what we’re up to and how you can get involved.
Find out more
For the full picture of what Labs is up to, check out its projects page and the list of ideas for projects. Highlights include:
- ReclineJS, a library for building data-driven web applications in pure JavaScript
- Annotator, an open-source JavaScript library and tool that can be added to any webpage to make it annotatable
- Nomenklatura, a simple service that makes it easy to maintain a canonical list of entities such as persons, companies or streets, and to match messy input against that list
- PyBossa, a platform for crowd-sourcing online volunteer assistance on tasks that require human intelligence, which powers CrowdCrafting
Labs is part of the Open Knowledge Foundation Network and operates as a collaborative community, which anyone can join. You can also take a look at the:
While some of you may have noticed we’ve been operating unannounced and somewhat under the radar for some time, we recently revamped the website and decided that it was high time to officially cut the ribbon and open our doors.
If you’re interested in making things with open data or open content, we hope you’ll come and say hello.
Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.
