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Finnish data journalism app contest

February 21, 2012 in Data Journalism, External, OKF Finland, visualization

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s leading national paper, is organizing an article app contest to find data visualizations.

For many journalists today, it’s not a lack of open data that’s the problem, but a lack of the skills and off-the-shelf visualizations needed to make that open data useful to them.

A year ago, the Finnish government decided that in principle all data generated with taxpayer money should be free.

This has been leading to tonnes of great releases. At the beginning of May, the National Land Survey of Finland will release all its maps as open data. The National Audit Office of Finland has already released campaign funding data as a kind of API. The City of Helsinki has the Helsinki Region Infoshare project, that collects city-level data into one place. Statistics Finland are also publishing all their data openly.

Furthermore, Open data activists such as Antti Poikola and Petri Kola have been doing great work in lobbying the Government and creating a data ecosystem. An Open Knowledge Foundation chapter is about to be formed and Open Data activists are crowdsourcing Freedom of Information Act-related data requests on Tietopyynto.fi.

So we have plenty of data, but using and publishing it is still lagging behind. This is especially true with the major media outlets. Journalists are still publishing static charts with their articles online or using Google Fusion Tables to make very basic visualizations. Not very innovative.

To tackle this problem, Helsingin Sanomat is organizing a contest to find article apps.

By article apps we mean applications that can be embedded into any web site in 560×400 pixel Iframe. An article app should visualize some interesting data, with the possibility of user interaction or of displaying data inputted by the users.

There are 3000 euros worth of prizes. Developers will not lose any rights to the works they submit to the contest. The contest is open to everyone, and the deadline for submissions is the 8th April 2012. More info can be found here.

There are few limitations for the article apps, but we hope that the apps use open data. If the article app crowdsources data from the users, it would be great if the data could be exported openly.

One part of this process has been to think about the business models of open data journalism. The idea behind the article app format is to standardize at least one format in data journalism. When we have some kind of standard, it will be easier to buy and to sell data journalism.

Our suggestion is that outlets buy the license to publish an article app once with each article – regardless whether it’s published at the HS.fi site, in our iPad application or some other channel. The next time we use the same graph with different data, we would pay the license fee again. For one article the compensation would be quite low, but if the app is used hundred times, it would be higher.

This business model is still theoretical, as we have not published anything using this model. Also, the amount we would pay for one article is still unclear, as we have not had any discussions with developers. We’d love to hear your thoughts on

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by Liliana Bounegru

Data Journalism Awards – Call for Entries!

February 20, 2012 in Data Journalism, External

Showcase your work and win a chance to €45,000 in prizes by applying for the first ever Data Journalism Awards

In an age of overwhelming abundance of data, journalists and media organisations are learning to separate signal from noise in order to provide valuable insights to society. From the Guardian to the New York Times, La Stampa to Die Zeit, journalists and media organisations are experimenting with new ways of using data to improve reportage of complex issues and to give readers direct access to the sources behind the headlines. As Tim Berners-Lee says, “data-driven journalism is the future.”

To recognize and showcase outstanding work, as well as highlight best practices in this fast-growing field, the first international Data Journalism Awards (DJA) has been established this year. The DJA is organised by the Global Editors and is sponsored by Google. The competition is run by the European Journalism Centre.

A jury of data journalism experts and editors from all over the world, including from prestigious organisations like New York Times, Reuters, and Les Echos will award a total of €45,000 (over $55,000) to six winners. The jury is headed by Paul Steiger, founder of ProPublica.

There are three award categories awarded at both (i) national and international and (ii) local and regional levels to give a total of six prizes. The three categories are:

Data-driven investigative journalism
Data visualisation & storytelling
Data-driven applications

How to apply

The competition is open to media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers and individuals. Applicants are welcome to submit their best data journalism projects before 10 April 2012 at http://datajournalismawards.org/ submit-your-work/.

Find out more about the competition and how to apply at datajournalismawards.org. If you have any questions about the competition get in touch with Liliana Bounegru, DJA Coordinator (bounegru [at] ejc [dot] net).

Relevant links:
Website: www.datajournalismawards.org
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Data-Journalism-Awards/305250662849826
Twitter: @ddjournalism, @EditorsNet
Twitter hashtag #dja

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by theodora

Linked Open Data and Low Carbon Development

January 27, 2012 in External, Guest post, Open Data

The following guest post is by Denise Recheis from reegle, the clean energy info portal.

Offering multiple explanations for a concept increases understanding and using LOD allows both humans and machines to semantically connect related content. This is a huge advantage in our increasingly complex world!

Especially in the field of clean energy, the increasing availability of LOD is really beneficial. To make sense of the often complex factors contributing to climate change and the highly technical solutions thereof, as well as rapid development in national and international policy regarding these factors, access to high quality and timely information is crucial.

The clean energy info portal www.reegle.info and the energy info wiki www.openEI.org see themselves as gateways to a wealth of information regarding renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change issues. They are hosted by REEEP (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership – where I work) and NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) respectively. Both organizations have a strong commitment to the idea of Linked Open Data (LOD) and have been integrating the core principles of LOD into their online portals.

In an effort to increase awareness about the possibilities associated with publishing and consuming LOD, we organized a well-attended workshop in Abu Dhabi in January 2012. Alongside the event, we brought out a publication explaining the basics of LOD, as well as the first steps for any organization considering joining the LOD cloud. “Linked Open Data: The Essentials” (published by Semantic Web Company and REEEP) is available as a downloadable PDF, as well as a booklet which can be ordered.

“Linked Open Data: The Essentials” also highlights some best practice examples, two of them being reegle and OpenEI. Reegle’s country energy profiles are a prime example of mashed up open data. These dossiers present the reader with statistics, maps, general facts and policy and regulatory details in a pleasant design. The information is provided by LOD providers such as DBpedia (Wikipedia), the UN and the World Bank, OpenEI and other highly trusted sources. Reegle has also developed an extensive thesaurus covering clean energy and climate compatible development with full liked data capabilities, which is available for free to re-use as a widget or word press plugin, and which is currently used as the basis for a brand-new API. Of course reegle provides all its datasets as Linked Open Data free for re-use and provides datasets in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format and via a SPARQL endpoint on our data portal.

OpenEI (Open Energy Information) has always seen sharing as one of its key missions. The data is available in RESTful API, RDF and SPARQL, for integration into external websites. But even when browsing the site, users benefit from a variety of LOD sources which enhance and increase the information presented. For example, several definitions offered in the glossary are collected from different LOD sources and OpenEI’s country pages feature information from a variety of sources, including reegle’s country energy profiles. This is easily possible when organizations rely on LOD, because when several websites describe the same things they can all be connected and give users a more rounded picture of sometimes difficult subjects.

Our expected end-users include the educational sector, helping students across the world study laws and regulation, efficient engineering, and the latest ideas in clean energy from many different authoritative sources in a single gateway. Specialists and project developers can quickly gather valuable information about specific regions and areas focusing on energy-relevant issues.

Integrating the principles of LOD has had a pleasant side-effect which has been highlighted in the recent workshop in Abu Dhabi: sharing data is often a starting point for fruitful collaborations between organizations with a similar agenda. Sharing data very often also means sharing the work burden. Each organization can then focus on their specific areas of expertise, while freeing up resources from areas that can be taken over by other organizations. Sharing the results of such targeted efforts generates high-quality content, and makes it available to all stakeholders in renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate adaptation/mitigation.

We are committed to increasing the share of information available as LOD, and will continue to actively support other organizations thinking of joining the LOD cloud.

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by theodora

Share Your African Knowledge

November 9, 2011 in External, Featured Project, Guest post, Open Knowledge

The following guest post is by Iolanda Pensa, the scientific director at WikiAfrica and Share You Knowledge.

What about African knowledge?
Where is it? Who has it? And what is African knowledge anyway?

Defining “African knowledge” is so difficult that it probably takes less time to share it. Talking about African knowledge is to talk about a wide range of controversial issues. Colonial history, diaspora, migrations, borders, restitutions, power dynamics, the way the African continent is (not) represented, the possibility for African pupils to access books and educational materials, the chance for all pupils to access information, and our capacity to build a common knowledge that contemplates all points of view in a neutral way. I often like to think of the British-Indian-Pakistani artist and intellectual Rasheed Araeen who joined the Black Panthers in the Seventies because at the time – and I’m surely going to say it in an over-simplistic way – it represented fighting for power and freedom.

When we talk about African knowledge everybody is concerned. We are talking about the collections of world museums, about the world population, and even about the coltan inside the computer I’m using right now. Sharing African knowledge is something everybody can contribute to. And – great news – we have two tools that already facilitate the job: Creative Commons and Wikipedia.

In 2006 the lettera27 foundation launched the project WikiAfrica. The mission of lettera27 is to support education, literacy, and access to knowledge all over the world – but in particular in the most disadvantaged areas. Africa is the continent with the lowest literacy rate: it is the least connected and the least represented on the Internet. Wikipedia is THE contemporary source of information, it is the world’s biggest non-profit non-organisation and an incredibly powerful educational tool. Contributing to Wikipedia requires a specific literacy and it produces international multilingual anonymous mainstream (but negotiable) knowledge.

WikiAfrica, Kër Thiossane, Dakar, 2008

After supporting research projects, presentations and training, at the end of 2009 lettera27 decided to produce 30,000 African contributions to Wikipedia by 2012. To achieve the goal WikiAfrica focuses on cultural institutions. Museums, NGOs, foundations, festivals, research institutes and publishers have archives, collections, biographies and film descriptions they can share on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. They are valuable first points-of-contact – they can involve their staff, collaborators and public to use their contents to enrich the online encyclopedia, and they are interested in reaching a wide audience and make their contents more accessible (as we’ve already found out).

We wanted to involve African institutions immediately, but it was not easy. There are Creative Commons guidelines for individuals but not really for small and medium- sized cultural institutions with an heterogeneous documentation. Same problem with Wikipedia: “no problem” if you want to upload a large amount of public domain images but quite some troubles if you have a little of this and a little of that. How can you figure out which documentation belongs to you as an institution? Who can take the decision to adopt the CC BY-SA license in a museum? How can an NGO produce an agreement with its collaborators that allows it to use their images and publish them on wikimedia commons?

Frédéric Keiff, L'Arbre à Palabre à Douala, 2007, produced by doual'art. This image of Frédéric Keiff is in cc by-sa as a contribution to WikiAfrica and to the work of doual'art. Like Wikipedia l'Arbre à Palabre is a place of knowledge production and discussion.

So in January 2011 we started Share Your Knowledge. An initial pilot phase would include 10 institutions, expanding to 50 by 2012. The institutions (museums, research centres, archives, festivals, foundations, publishers, organisations working on cooperation and development) are asked to contribute to the GLAM project; to specify a number of items they will make available with a CC BY-SA license (or in the public domain) and with which they will contribute to WikiAfrica; and to sign a letter in which they express their support of knowledge-sharing.

All this is done in collaboration with a lot of people and institutions. Wikimedia Italia has been contributing to WikiAfrica since 2006, the Africa Centre based in Cape Town became a main partner in January 2011, and the NEXA Center for Internet and Society at Politecnico di Torino and the Cariplo Foundation joined Share Your Knowledge in 2011, along with all the other institutions which we need to thank and which you can find listed here. We also benefit from the work of two tutors, two lawyers, a wikipedian in residence, a wide number of wikimedian and wikipedian volunteers, and the expertise of a team of external evaluators and people that just pass by and help.

We are looking forward to starting collaboration with a wikipedian in residence at the Africa Centre, which is financing a call for a one-year reimbursed collaborator focussed on Africanizing Wikipedia.

lettera27 is the 27th letter of the alphabet, the missing letter, the letter yet to be, the hybrid sign, the empty box, the link between oral and written words, the connection to the future, the intersection of analog and digital. http://www.lettera27.org/

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by theodora

Exploring open aid data with aidinfo labs

August 16, 2011 in External, Guest post, WG Development

The following is a guest post from Tim Davies, open data action researcher, currently curating the aidinfolabs.org website for aidinfo, and a member of the OKFN Working Group on Open Development.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) was set up in 2008 by 18 leading international development organisations. It aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand. Since the start of this year IATI has been making great progress securing access to data on aid activities and spending, with an agreed machine-readable data standard, a licensing framework, a registry of available data (based on the OKF’s CKAN software), and political commitments from over 20 donor countries and agencies to publish IATI data in the next year.

Alongside the IATI Standard and Registry which focus on making data accessible, aidinfolabs.org provides a space to share efforts in making IATI data easier to understand and use: turning raw data into information that makes a difference. With a recent barcamp focussed on IATI data in Katmandu, a hack-day coming up in Berlin, and a growing community of users, we recently relaunched the aidinfo labs site to make sure we had all the ingredients that might be needed to make timely and accessible aid information a reality. We’ve created space for:

People: given the global development focus of IATI data, there can often be a distance between developers and data-wranglers working with data, and the people with some of the strongest demands for accessible aid information. We’ve put a ‘people’ section at the heart of the site where we’re going to be profiling real users of IATI data, and where we’re collecting a range of ‘open personae’ profiles, resources to give anyone working with the data a head-start in taking user-centred design approaches.
Plans: we’ve been finding that often similar ideas for working with a dataset can emerge at the same time in different places. By encouraging potential users of the data to share their plans and ideas at the start of a project, we can hopefully help collaborations emerge. The plans section also makes sure people with ideas for making aid information accessible and useful, but without the time or resources to put them into practice, can share the ideas.
Prototypes: there are already many prototypes built to show the potential of IATI data, from the IATI Explorer and IATI Data Ruby on Rails app, to visualisations of aid flows, graphs of funding allocated to projects, and ongoing work to convert IATI data for use in open spending, or to make it available as linked data. Some of these prototypes are ongoing works-in-progress, others were one-off experiments, created to explore and learn about the data. We’ve encouraged prototype creators to share source code or how-to’s so that others can build on their work in future.
Products: We’ve created a space for products that ‘graduate’ out of the labs and we’re working on a check-list that will help us identify the stable and supported IATI-using products that we can point users at when they want direct access to information and data, without sifting through different prototypes.

We’ve also brought together sections on the site for:

Datasets – showing that IATI is one amongst a number of open datasets. We’re using the CKAN API so that our list of datasets is kept up to date directly from The Data Hub.
Support – providing quick access to How To guidance, shared source code and tools that make working with the data easier, such as the IATI Explorer Toolkit, which takes all the different IATI XML files and gives easy access to query across them and fetch back the data in a number of formats. As we’ve been reminded recently from a number of angles, open data alone isnot enough. Aidinfo labs is part of our action learning to discover what else we need to add to data to make a difference, and discovering effective approaches to curating a growing global dataset.

Get involved:

With 10 more donors due to publish IATI data in the coming months, and the potential for IATI data to cover more than 50% of global aid by value by next year, there’s great potential for working with the data. If you’ve got ideas or experience to share, head over to the aidinfo labs site and get involved.

If you’re interested in wider issues of how open data and access to information can impact global development join discussions on the open-development working group mailing list.

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by theodora

Open data research at Aalto University Business School

July 8, 2011 in Business, External, Open Data

The following guest post is by Yulia Tammisto, from the Open Service Innovation Observatory at the Aalto University School of Economics, Finland.

A few months ago, myself and my colleague Dr. Juho Lindman at the Aalto University School of Economics started to explore open data academically. We are particularly interested in the business applications and economic potential of open data. So far we have done a small round of interviews in Finland with business and non-profit sector employees, and have written a couple of conference papers about the results. Interestingly, we found out that open data seemed to have a lot in common with open source from a research perspective. Now we are trying to interpret and use these similarities to better understand the phenomenon of open data and the interplay between these two concepts. We looked into open data-related services offered on the Finnish market, and tried to understand how open data-related service providers operate in order to draw a generic business model. In this process, we came to the understanding that there is no common meaning of open data shared by the different players on the market. We tried to embrace the various perceptions, and build some classification of existing meanings that industry assigns to the term “open data”.

In the future we plan to focus on developing a better understanding of what open data is in a business context and for business users, exploring the economic benefits of open data application and new business models based on open data.

None of our papers are published yet (as it takes quite a while in academia), but I am happy to share and discuss our research – just drop me a line at yulia.tammisto[at]aalto[dot]fi

It would be particularly interesting to hear about similar academic studies or projects – maybe we could join forces and make something great together!

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by theodora

Draft Bill on PSI access and reuse introduces openness of public information in Poland

July 6, 2011 in External, News, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The following post is from Theodora Middleton, Editor of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog.

We’ve just heard from our friends at Centrum Cyfrowe in Poland, that the Polish Council of Ministers has adopted a draft bill amending the Bill on Access to Public Information and certain other laws. The amendments mean that all Public Sector Information (PSI) which is accessible online or made available because of individiual requests, will be available for re-use free of charge with very limited reuse conditions. From their press release:

The primary objective of the amendment is to introduce into national legislation rules for re-use of public information in line with the EU Directive 2003/98/EC. The Bill introduces a new method for making public information available for re-use – through content repositories, pro-actively filled with resources by public institutions. Designated public institutons will provide resources – in particular public data – specified by the Prime Minister, especially information of particular value as a source of innovative added value.

The full English translation of the bill and further details will be available soon. Looks like a good step towards greater openness from the Polish government!

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by theodora

Polit.ru Open Data project

June 29, 2011 in External, Featured Project, Guest post, Open Government Data, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, founder of OpenGovData.ru and member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data.

On 27 June 2011, news and analysis channel Polit.ru launched a special project called “Open Data”, regarding the issues of publishing the data of governmental structures in a format that allows further processing (i.e. open data). The project will also consider the initiatives regarding how to process this data in order to enhance civil control over the activities of government agencies.

From Boris Dolgin, Polit.ru science editor

Real academics have a common rule: conclusions based on an accidental selection of sources are invalid. Similarly, a clever reader of analytics is no longer satisfied with the sophisticated combinations of illustrating figures. No matter whether these figures come from advocates of power who try to make an impression that all good things are on the increase and bad things are declining; or from radical populists who provide measured disclosures, which fit well into the backstage scuffle.

A whole scope of the data available for processing by anyone is a principally different sort of material. Any individual can work with it and share the original, method and results with others. It is not similar to WikiLeaks: in this case, nobody tries to resort to the hypocritical rhetoric of absolute transparent diplomacy or to disclose the secrets of private conversations. It is about processing the data in the cases where publicity is not only realistic and morally justified, but is also obligatory in terms of the current law. As an expert media outlet, Polit.ru has to play the leading role in implementing a new approach to processing data.

From Dmitry Izkovich, Chief of editorial board of Polit.ru

Freedom as such presupposes the freedom of movement. Similarly, the information freedom presupposes the potential emergence of an open information space. It is also important that processing open data can be strategy-orientated, as opposed to the tactically-orientated movements of the current political environment. Right here and now we can begin to improve our life. At the moment, it is vital to realise what can be done for the development of the projects based on open data in Russia. There is also a question as to how much it depends on the government and media and what role each side will play in it. In this area, it is certainly important to develop both the supply and the demand. It is wrong to think that the supply must necessarily come from the government and the demand is only about individuals. Open data is similar to freedom: we have to learn how to use it.

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by theodora

Open data and Kasabi

June 25, 2011 in External, Guest post, Open Data

The following guest post is by Leigh Dodds, programme manager for the Talis platform

Talis has recently launched a new data marketplace called Kasabi. In this post I wanted to explore why Kasabi should be of interest to the Open Data community.

Our goal with Kasabi is to help make data as easy to use, and as easy to publish as possible. We also want to help people unlock the value inherent in data, whether that means making it freely available – in order to drive innovation – or to explore more commercial models. With this in mind, Kasabi provides more than just a directory of datasets: it provides a complete platform for the hosting and publishing of Linked Data.

From the outset our intent has been to support a range of different publishing models in Kasabi. Talis has a long track record in supporting the publication of Open Data, most notably via the Talis Connected Commons scheme. The scheme, which provides free use of the Talis Platform for public domain data, has most recently been used to support the JISC LOCAH project. The scheme will shortly become a formal part of Kasabi, meaning that we’re at last able to provide a complete self-service environment to support the publishing of truly public domain data.

Data hosting in Kasabi is free. This means anyone can use Kasabi as a way to publish Open Data for others to use. A number of the core APIs and services, including basic Linked Data publishing will also always be a free part of the service. Data is most useful when it can be quickly and easily accessed and linked to other sources. This means the service provides a completely free platform for sharing Linked Open Data.

While many developers want access to raw data downloads that they can process and analyse data locally, many others would prefer to have access to APIs over that data, avoiding the costs of running their own infrastucture. This is the area which we’re focusing on with Kasabi. As a commercial service we clearly need to cover our own costs and our intention is to do that by charging for use of specific APIs, e.g. at high-volumes.

But, by providing flexibility about who pays, we can still support Open Data and services that are freely available. In Kasabi there will be two options. Firstly, as a developer you can pay for your own usage of the Kasabi APIs. Secondly, the data owner will be able to cover all of the usage costs that apply to their data. This model means that both the data and services will be free at the point of use. We think this model will work well for government and public sector organizations that are looking to provide access to APIs as well as raw data downloads.

Kasabi will also support publishing of commercial data. But our goal is to require a free usage level for all data that is offered within the marketplace. So even here we hope that the service will support our collective goal of making more data, more accessible.

But commercialisation of data is not totally against Open Data principles. MusicBrainz has long operated a dual model of providing Public Domain data for curated by its community, coupled with paid services for commercial organizations. This lets the MusicBrainz community continue to benefit from open data and a free service, whilst requiring organizations to pay for the value that has been created. This is a sustainable approach that could be replicated in other communities, and is something we’re keen to support in Kasabi.

With free hosting, free services, a sensible set of terms and conditions, and plans to support data publishing models that will embrace a number of different approaches to open data, we think that Kasabi should definitely be of interest to the Open Data community. And we’re excited to see what you can create! We’ve just entered early public beta but the basic features are all in place: anyone can come, sign-up and starting publishing and using data. We’ve also seeded the platform with a number of new and existing open datasets to let people start playing with the tools.

We’d love to hear your feedback both on the service itself, and our plans to continue to support the Open Data movement.

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by Jonathan Gray

Interested in #RHoK + #opendata?

June 3, 2011 in Events, External, Government, OKF, Open Data, Open Government Data, Sprint / Hackday, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

This weekend developers all over the world will get together for a series of events as part of Random Hacks of Kindness, which aim to use “practical open technology to make the world a better place“. We imagine that many of the things that people will work on will build on open datasets from public bodies.

As Random Hacks of Kindness finishes on the evening of the 5th June, we thought we’d remind people that the Open Data Challenge also finishes on midnight on the 5th June (i.e. between 5th and 6th June). There are €20k worth of prizes for apps, ideas, datasets and visualisations. Any #RHoK developers based in Europe are eligible to enter!

http://opendatachallenge.org/

If you’re not a developer, or don’t have time to build anything – you might nevertheless be interested in submitting an idea to the competition.

Also if you’re looking for open data to use as part of RHoK, you might be interested in having a look on OpenDataSearch.org, PublicData.eu and on CKAN. If you get or clean up any datasets and want to share them – please do consider adding them on CKAN so others can find and build on your efforts!

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