Europe’s proposed PSI Directive: A good baseline for future open data policies?

Some weeks ago, the European Commission proposed an update of the PSI Directive**. The PSI Directive regulates the reuse of public sector information (including administrative government data), and has important consequences for the development of Europe’s open data policies. Like every legislative proposal, the PSI Directive proposal is open for public feedback until July 13. […]

International Data Week: From Big Data to Open Data

Report from International Data Week: Research needs to be reproducible, data needs to be reusable and Data Packages are here to help. International Data Week has come and gone. The theme this year was ‘From Big Data to Open Data: Mobilising the Data Revolution’. Weeks later, I am still digesting all the conversations and presentations […]

Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches

At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]

Draft Open Data Policy for Qatar

The following post was originally published on the blog of our Open MENA community (Middle East and North Africa). The Qatari Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (generally referred to as ictQATAR) had launched a public consultation on its draft Open Data Policy. I thus decided to briefly present a (long overdue) outline of Qatar’s […]

The Open Definition in context: putting open into practice

We’ve seen how the Open Definition can apply to data and content of many types published by many different kinds of organisation. Here we set out how the Definition relates to specific principles of openness, and to definitions and guidelines for different kinds of open data. Why we need more than a Definition The Open […]

Principles for Open Contracting

The following guest post is by the Open Contracting Partnership, announcing the release of their Principles for Open Contracting. It is cross-posted from their website. Over the past year, the Open Contracting Partnership has facilitated a global consultation process to create a set of global principles that can serve as a guide for all of […]

Frictionless Data: making it radically easier to get stuff done with data

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 […]

Document Freedom Day 2013

What is document freedom? Have you ever been stuck with some data that you have not been able to open because it was in a format that needs some specific kind of software to open it? The same thing happens tens of thousands of times each day. Can you imagine how much knowledge exchange doesn’t […]

From Open Data to GovData: why the OGP matters in Germany

The following post is by Maria Schröder and Christian Heise from the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. It is cross-posted (and slightly shortened) from the Open Government Partnership blog. Germany’s official policy on transparency and accountability is lacking commitment and leadership. Disappointed by the political elites, the community is continuously trying to make the case for […]

Open Research Data Handbook Sprint

On February 15-16 we are updating the Open Research Data Handbook to include more detail on sharing research data from scientific work, and to remix the book for different disciplines and settings. We’re doing this through an open book sprint. The sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. […]

Protecting the foundations of Open Knowledge

###The foundations of the Foundation The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) was one of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s very first projects: drafted in 2005, 1.0 in 2006. By stipulating what Open means, the OKD has been foundational to the OKF’s work, as illustrated by this several-years-old diagram of the Open Knowledge “stack”. Knowing your foundations seems […]

Dutch PhD-workshop on research design, open access and open data

This blog post is written by Esther Hoorn, Copyright Librarian, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. If Roald Dahl were still alive, he would certainly be tempted to write a book about the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. For not only did he make up the research data […]

BioMed Central Open Data Awards

The deadline for nominations in the annual BioMed Central Open Data Awards is on January 31st. Get your votes in now! It’s been a big year for open science in general, and for BioMed Central in particular. We’ve been hard at work promoting the value of data-sharing, developing standards to make it more attractive to […]

First Open Economics International Workshop Recap

The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the […]

Digital Public Library of America recommends CC0

The following post is cross-posted from the OpenGLAM blog. On the OpenGLAM blog we have previously written about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an initiative that has the goal to make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all. To achieve this goal the board of directors has […]

Open Research Data Handbook Sprint – 15-16 February

On February 15-16, the Open Research Data Handbook Sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. The Open Research Data Handbook aims to provide an introduction to the processes, tools and other areas that researchers need to consider to make their research data openly available. Join us for a […]

4 Ideas for Defending the Open Data Commons

The following post was written by Simon Chignard, author of L’Open data: Comprendre l’ouverture des données publiques. The post was originally posted on Simon’s blog following the launch of the Open Knowlege Foundation French national group, and has been translated by Samuel Goëta from OKFN France. ##Open data and the commons: an old story? There […]

Research Data Management in Economic Journals

This blog post is written by Sven Vlaeminck | ZBW – German National Library of Economics / Leibniz Information Center for Economics Background In Economics, as in many other research disciplines, there is a continuous increase in the number of papers where authors have collected their own research data or used external datasets. However, so […]

Let’s defend Open Formats for Public Sector Information in Europe!

Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats! When we work on building all […]

CC license version 4.0: Helping meet the needs of open data publishers and users

Over the last few months, Creative Commons has been working on the next version of its license suite, version 4.0. The goals of version 4.0 are wide-ranging, but the overall objective is clear: update the licenses so they are considerably more robust, yet easy to understand and use, for both existing communities and new types […]

On the way to the new market of information in Russia

On June 5th at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow a round table conference took place, devoted to the opening of state-collected datasets. It was convened by the Higher School of Economics (HSE) together with the Russian Office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Open data is the new trend in the state […]

Data Catalog Schema and Protocol – Draft Specification

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 […]

Aid Data: From XML to Visualisations – IATI data in OpenSpending

Are the World Bank and Department for International Development (DfID) spending money on projects in similar sectors and countries? Does all aid to Kenya go the North-East? How much aid in total did India receive last year? Until recently, it was impossible to know. But now, thanks to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), we’ve […]

Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance: Report Published

In early March, we embarked on a project to map out projects which use technology to further the aims of fiscal transparency, accountability and participation. Today, we are happy to announce the official release of the resulting report, Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance. Preliminary findings were presented at last month’s GIFT meeting in […]

UK Open Standards Consultation

The following post is cross-posted from Jeni’s blog – http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/ Over the last few months, the UK Government has been running a consultation on its Open Standards policy. The outcome of this consultation is incredibly important not only for organisations and individuals who want to work with government but also because of its potential knock-on […]

From CMS to DMS: C is for Content, D is for Data

This is a joint blog post by Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, and Rufus Pollock, Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. It’s being cross-posted to both blogs. Content Management Systems, remember those? It’s 1994. You haven’t heard of the World Wide Web yet. Your brother goes to a top university. He once overheard some geeks […]

Announcing the Open Definition Licenses Service

We’re pleased to announce a simple new service from the Open Knowledge Foundation as part of the Open Definition Project: the (Open) Licenses Service. The service is ultra simple in purpose and function. It provides: Information on licenses for open data, open content, and open-source software in machine readable form (JSON) A simple web API […]

Free! Music! Contest – fewer choices, more freedom

The following guest post is by Christian Hufgard, chairman of Musikpiraten, and member of the OKF’s Working Group on the Public Domain. The Free! Music! Contest is a contest for bands and artists releasing their songs under a creative commons license. In its third year the focus is set on enabling remixes – and freeness. […]

Keeping Open Government Data Open?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. An unprecedented amount of freely reusable government information is currently being released by public bodies around the globe. This is being consumed and reused by numerous stakeholders – including civic developers, data literate citizens, data journalists, NGOs, researchers, and companies. There […]

What “open data” means – and what it doesn’t

The following post is from Melanie Chernoff, Public Policy Manager for Red Hat. It was originally published on opensource.com. Last week, an article in the Wall Street Journal talked about the Open Data Partnership, which “will allow consumers to edit the interests, demographics and other profile information collected about them. It also will allow people […]

Open Licenses vs Public Licenses

The following post is from Jordan Hatcher, a Director at the Open Knowledge Foundation and founder of the Open Data Commons project. It was originally posted on his blog. Let’s face it, we often have a definition problem. It’s critical to distinguish “open licenses” from “public licenses” when discussing IP licensing, especially online — mostly […]

Open Geoprocessing Standards and Open Geospatial Data

The following guest post is from Lance McKee, who is Senior Staff Writer at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Geospatial Data. As the founding outreach director for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and now as senior staff writer for the OGC, I have […]

New report on sharing aid information is now open for comments

We’re pleased to announce the publication of a new report, Unlocking the potential of aid information. The report, by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Aidinfo, looks at how to make information related to international development (i) legally open, (ii) technically open and (iii) easy to find. The report and relevant background information can be found […]

Interview with Rufus Pollock on NetSquared

Jed Sundwall of Netsquared just published an interview with Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The interview includes discussion about the distinction between price and value, about the Open Knowledge Definition, about CKAN, about decentralised approaches to working with large quantities of data, about packaging for knowledge and about ‘Shiny Front End Syndrome’. […]

What Obama can do to promote openness

With the inauguration of US President-Elect Barack Obama later today – we thought we’d prepare a brief list of things he can do to promote openness in his new role. Open government data. Make core government data open (as in opendefinition.org) – so that it can be re-used in mashups, visually represented, used in semantic […]

Dispatches from Digistan

Chris Puttick of OpenArchaeology sends news of the Digital Standards Organisation: A new group is being formed to promote open digital standards, starting with a declaration regarding the importance of digital standards being truly open. Part of Digistan’s effort to promote understanding, development, and adoption of open digital standards implies a clear definition of what […]