First version: Dec 2016, updated Feb 2018. This blog is a summary of the full article at http://rufuspollock.com/ubernomics Around the world countries have struggled to work out how to deal with Uber, AirBnB and their like. Are these new apps something to be welcomed or something to be stopped? But how we treat Uber-like companies […]
The good news is that an increasing number of people seem to agree that: Facebook, Google etc are monopolies That is a problem Agreeing we have a problem is always a crucial first step. But to go further we need to: Correctly diagnose the disease — in particular, avoid confusing the symptoms with the root […]
The dream of the Internet is dying. Killed by its children. We have barely noticed its demise and done even less to save it. It was a dream of openness, of unprecedented technological and social freedom to connect and innovate. Whilst expressed in technology, it was a dream that was, in essence, political and social. […]
A few weeks ago I sat down for a virtual interview with Molly Schwartz from Open Knowledge Finland about my thoughts on open data and mydata and why I am so excited about the MyData 2016 conference. The three-day conference is taking place from August 31 to September 2 in Helsinki and is being organized by Open […]
Today we’re publishing a new white paper looking at whether free/open source software matters for government and civic tech. Matters in the sense that it should have a deep and strategic role in government IT and policy rather than just being a “nice to have” or something “we use when we can”. As the paper shows the […]
Today, I am pleased to announce the completion of my move to a non-executive role at Open Knowledge International. When Pavel Richter took over as CEO last year, my plan was to move to the role of President and transition to a non-executive position on a timeline that allowed me to support Pavel as he […]
Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council are pleased to announce the release of version 2.1 of the Open Definition. The definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content” and continues to play a key role in supporting the growing open ecosystem. The Open Definition was first published […]
Video Slides Talk Text Introduction I’m Rufus Pollock. In 2004 I founded a non-profit called Open Knowledge The mission we set ourselves was to open up all public interest information – and see it used to create insight that drives change. What sort of public interest information? In short, all of it. From big issues […]
I am delighted to announce we have found the newest member of the Open Knowledge team: Pavel Richter joins us as our new CEO! Pavel’s appointment marks a new chapter in the development of Open Knowledge, which, over the last ten years, has grown into one of the leading global organisations working on open data […]
Open Knowledge are delighted to advertise several new open positions: Project Manager – Open Data Python Developer Frontend Developer Data Wrangler A brief summary on each post can be found below. Full details and application forms can be found on http://okfn.org/about/jobs/. Project Manager – Open Data We are looking for a professional and dynamic hands-on […]
This is a joint blog post by Open Knowledge CEO Laura James and Open Knowledge Founder and President Rufus Pollock. In September we announced that Laura James, our CEO, is moving on from Open Knowledge and we are hiring a new Executive Director. From Rufus: I want to express my deep appreciation for everything that […]
Today we are delighted to put out our formal announcement for a new Executive Director. In our announcement about changes in leadership in September we had already indicated we would be looking to recruit a new senior executive and we are now ready to begin the formal process. We are very excited to have this […]
The following is the joint Submission to the UN Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution from the World Wide Web Foundation, Open Knowledge, Fundar and the Open Institute, October 15, 2014. It derives from and builds on the Global Open Data Initiative’s Declaration on Open Data. To the UN Secretary General’s […]
Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council are pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content” and plays a key role in supporting the growing open data ecosystem. Recent years have seen an explosion in […]
The Open Definition performs an essential function as a “standard”, ensuring that when you say “open data” and I say “open data” we both mean the same thing. This standardization, in turn, ensures the quality, compatibility and simplicity essential to realizing one of the main practical benefits of “openness”: the greatly increased ability to combine […]
Many of today’s global challenges are not new. Economic inequality, the unfettered power of corporations and markets, the need to cooperate to address global problems and the unsatisfactory levels of accountability in democratic governance – these were as much problems a century ago as they remain today. What has changed, however – and most markedly […]
Today I would like to share some important organisational news. After 3 years with Open Knowledge, Laura James, our CEO, has decided to move on to new challenges. As a result of this change we will be seeking to recruit a new senior executive to lead Open Knowledge as it continues to evolve and grow. […]
A recent European Court Justice (ECJ) ruling may affect how privacy, transparency, and open data interact and has a direct relation with growing discussion about the “right to be forgotten”. Roughly summarized the ruling finds that organisations which publish information may be obliged to “take down” and remove information when an individual requests that removal […]
Let’s explore local open data around the world! Local data is often the most relevant to citizens on a daily basis – be it rubbish collection times, local tax rates or zoning information. However, at the moment it’s difficult to know which key local datasets are openly available and where. Now, you can help change […]
This article by Rufus Pollock, Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, is cross-posted from “Telefonica Digital Hub” released on 5 December 2013. Every day we face challenges – from the personal such as the quickest way to get to the work or what we should eat to global ones like climate change and […]
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, […]
This Autumn the Open Government Partnership Annual Conference is coming to London and will place on the 31st October and 1st November. As a lead into the main event, OGP is planning a 1-day civil society Pre-Conference event on Wednesday 30th October and we here at the Open Knowledge Foundation will be collaborating with them […]
The ability to do “version control” for data is a big deal. There are various options but one of the most attractive is to reuse existing tools for doing this with code, like git and mercurial. This post describes a simple “data pattern” for storing and versioning data using those tools which we’ve been using […]
Today’s release of an Open Data Charter by the G8 is testimony to the growing importance of open data worldwide. The Charter recognizes the central role open data can play in improving government and governance and in stimulating growth through innovation in data-driven products and services. It endorses the principle of “open by default” — […]
PRESS RELEASE. Cambridge, UK, 14th June 2013. Also available in Chinese, German, Russian, Spanish and other languages here. Open data and transparency will be one of the three main topics at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland next week. Today transparency campaigners released preview results from the global Open Data Census showing that G8 countries […]
There was big news for open data yesterday with a new Executive Order announced by President Obama. The order lays out the general principles that open, machine readable, data are the “new default”. (We note the Open Definition already includes machine readability in the definition of open data). There will a new Open Data Policy […]
Earlier this week we published the first in a series of posts on small data: “Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution”. In this second in the series, we discuss small data in more detail providing a rough definition and drawing parallels with the history of computers and software. What do we mean […]
Frictionless Data is now in alpha at http://data.okfn.org/ – and we’d like you to get involved. Our mission is to make it radically easier to make data used and useful – our immediate goal is make it as simple as possible to get the data you want into the tool of your choice. This isn’t […]
This is the first in a series of posts. The next posts in the series is What Do We Mean by Small Data There is a lot of talk about “big data” at the moment. For example, this is Big Data Week, which will see events about big data in dozens of cities around the […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2013 Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) will take place in Geneva, Switzerland on 17th -18th September. The theme of this year’s edition will be Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected. When: 17th – 18th September 2013 Where: Geneva, Switzerland at the CICG – Centre International de […]
This coming Tuesday the Open Knowledge Foundation are organizing an Open Data Maker Night in London at the Centre for Creative Collaboration! When: Tuesday 19th March, 18:00 – 21:00 Where: Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC), 16 Acton Street, London (see map) Signup: Just one-click RSVP on our London Meetup page so we can get an […]
The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) together with the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Data Institute, are pleased to invite you to join a jointly organized workshop to discuss how we can realize the promise of open data on the web. What?: Open Data on the Web Workshop (for more, see topics below) When?: 23-24 […]
Recent years have seen a huge expansion in open data activity around the world. This is very welcome, but at the same time it is now increasingly difficult to assess if, and where, progress is being made. To address this, we started the Open Data Census in order to track the state of open data […]
We have never been so busy! Over the past 18 months we have been working with hacks and hackers, citizens and civil servants, students and scientists to open up knowledge which should be available for everyone. We want to enable as many people as possible to use this knowledge to improve the world. Just some of our highlights: […]
Students for Free Culture recently published two excellent pieces about why Creative Commons should drop their Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives license variants: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of the NC and ND clauses As the first post says: Over the past several years, Creative […]
Here’s Julia Kloiber from OKFN-DE’s Stadt-Land-Code project, talking at the OKFest about the need for more citizen apps in Germany, the need for greater openness, and how to persuade companies to open up.
The following guest post is by Stef. The European Parliament is one of the most notoriously impenetrable institutions that governs our lives. Shining a light into the murky corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg becomes increasingly vital as the reach of the Parliament grows. Opening up the EU to greater citizen scrutiny will help to improve […]
This is second of two pieces about “managing expectations” (the first is here). Open data has come a long way in the last few years and so have expectations. There’s a growing risk that open data will be seen as a panacea that will magically solve climate change or eliminate corruption or “fix” democracy. This […]
We’re delighted two new members to the Open Knowledge Foundation Board: Jane Silber and Gavin Starks. Jane is currently CEO of Canonical the company behind Ubuntu, while Gavin is Founder and Chairman of AMEE, the provider of Environmental Intelligence using Open Data. At the same time we can also announce that long-time Board member Jordan […]
We’re posting this announce to let people know we’ve updated the Open Knowledge Foundation’s general privacy policy and terms of use. Updates to the privacy policy are fairly limited and largely around making the setup around email more explicit. The terms of use is somewhat new in that it consolidates in one place terms of […]
We’re big on promoting open information: be that sonnets, statistics, genes or geodata. We’re big on it because we think it has the potential to improve the welfare of peoples around the world in a variety of ways, from making governments more accountable to improving research on cancer. At the same time I think it […]
We’re pleased to announce Data Protocols, a community-driven effort to develop simple, light-weight protocols and formats for distributed and collaborative work with data. If you’re interested in the project got check out the Knight News Challenge Data Protocols application and give our proposal the thumbs up! What’s the Idea The civic and open data community […]
We’re taking the Data Wrangling Handbook on the road! We’ll be in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday, July 18th from 3-7 pm at Collective Agency, 322 NW Sixth Ave (between Everett and Flanders), Suite 200. (Buzz “200″ when you arrive.) View Map Then, to keep the ball rolling, we’re following up with a virtual sprint on […]
Today we’re pleased to announce the first public release of Recline.JS, a simple but powerful open-source library for building data applications in pure Javascript. For those of you who want to get hands on right away, you can: Try out a demo – like this demo of the grid, graph and map components Dive in […]
Last week I gave a quick introduction to OpenSpending and Where Does My Money Go at Activate 2012. Here are the video and slides. Slides
Today, the UK govenrment made a major announcement regarding Open Data and released a revamped Data.Gov.UK — its flagship open data site. Open Data White Paper The Cabinet Office is ushering in a new wave of open data releases with the publication of a new Open Data White Paper. The White Paper gestures at a […]
Open Data is an idea that continues to gain momentum, and one of the signs of this is that the world has more and more data catalogs. This is great for many reasons but it also brings its own problem especially around interoperability and standardization — the lack of standard schema and interfaces is something […]
Last week I was at the European Data Forum and gave a Keynote entitled Open Data, Where We’ve Come From, Where We’re Going. Here are the slides.
I’m pleased to announce that the video of my talk, Open Data: How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, that I gave a few weeks ago at the LIFT 2012 conference has now been published: Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data with significant uptake in government, research […]
A major new feature in the DataHub is good news for data wranglers. The DataStore allows users to store and load structured data into a database, where it can be queried, filtered, or accessed from other programs via a rich data API. The API is also used by CKAN’s inbuilt Recline Data Explorer, giving in-page […]
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