New Release: Problematising Strategic Tension Lines in the Digital Commons

As a part of our exploration of the open movement, last May, we hosted a workshop with a small group of the movement’s leaders. It was co-organised by our partners at Open Future and Wikimedia Europe. The convening built up on what was found out in Shifting Tides – quality research about the state of the movement conducted […]

New Report: “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape”

We’re pleased to announce a new report, “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape” undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge, the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency and the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. The report offers an unprecedented empirical mapping and analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has […]

Launching Spending Stories: How much is it really?

Spending Stories is a new way to put spending figures in their proper perspective. Developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Journalism++ with funding from the Knight Foundation, Spending Stories is an app that helps citizens and journalists understand and compare amounts in stories from the news. When we hear that the UK’s school meals […]

Campaigners challenge Cameron to keep promise to tackle company secrecy

The UK government must use the Open Government Partnership summit in London next week to end the secrecy surrounding who really owns millions of UK companies, campaigners said today. Discussions are underway right now at the highest levels of government and campaigners are expecting a decision to be made by the end of this week. […]

U.S. government’s data portal relaunched on CKAN

Today, we are excited to announce that our work with the US Federal Government (data.gov) has gone live at catalog.data.gov! You can also read the announcement from the data.gov blog with their description of the new catalog. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Services team, which deploys CKAN, have been working hard on a new unified catalog […]

Announcing CKAN 2.0

CKAN is a powerful, open source, open data management platform, used by governments and organizations around the world to make large collections of data accessible, including the UK and US government open data portals. Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece […]

Opening up the wisdom of crowds for science

We are excited to announce the official launch of Crowdcrafting.org, an open source software platform – powered by our Pybossa technology – for developing and sharing projects that rely on the help of thousands of online volunteers. At a workshop on Citizen Cyberscience held this week at University of Geneva, a novel open source software […]

UK Departmental Government Spending – Improving the Quality of Reporting

Continuing in their mission to make spending data more accessible and comprehensible, the Spending Stories team and the team of Data.Gov.Uk are releasing a reporting tool today that will help journalists and analysts to pick the freshest and best departmental spending data to work with when exploring the UK central government expenditure. Spending data is […]

Translators needed!

Do you speak another language apart from English? Have you got a little bit of spare time over the next week? CKAN 1.6 is set to release in one week’s time and all the new features need translating. Can you help us complete it in time? If you can spend 15 minutes filling in the […]

Corruption-busting data releases in Croatia

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF’s blog editor. Government transparency has been making the headlines over in Croatia, thanks to the amazing work of Marko Rakar, Croatia’s leading transparency expert. He has secured the release of all the public procurement data for government spending, dating back to July 1st 2009 in a […]

OpenSpending v0.10 released

This post is by Martin Keegan, project lead on OpenSpending. We’ve released v0.10 of the OpenSpending code, and made it live on http://openspending.org/ Changes in v0.10: Data loading has been separated from the main web application. Web-based and command-line tools for data wranglers to load/reload datasets have been separated from the main end-user facing web […]

Release of DataCatalogs.org to map open data around the world

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re very pleased to announce an alpha version of datacatalogs.org, a website to help keep track of open data catalogues from around the world. The project is being launched to coincide with our annual conference, OKCon 2011. You can see the […]

The Annotator – Preview

In November 2010, Rufus Pollock announced the Annotator project on the OKFN blog. Since this initial release the project has been developed into a fully fledged product. The Annotator is a JavaScript widget that can be added to any webpage to allow inline annotation of its contents. Combined with a storage system, such as AnnotateIt, […]

Where does Italy’s money go?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over the past 48 hours or so we’ve been busy loading 12 years of Italian spending data into Open Spending. Further details on the project and the data are below. This project was put together by Stefano Costa, Friedrich Lindenberg, Luca […]

#opendata: New Film about Open Government Data

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce the release of #opendata, a new short film clip about open government data. The film includes interview footage with numerous open government data gurus and advocates, which we shot at last year’s Open […]

Europe’s Energy: a new mini-app to put the European energy targets into context

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ […]

Opening up linguistic data at the American National Corpus

The following guest post is from Nancy Ide, Professor of Computer Science at Vassar College, Technical Director of the American National Corpus project and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Linguistic Data. The American National Corpus (ANC) project is creating a collection of texts produced by native speakers of American English […]

Launch of the Public Domain Review to celebrate Public Domain Day 2011

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The 1st of January every year is Public Domain Day, when new works enter the public domain in many (though unfortunately not all) countries around the world. To celebrate, the Open Knowledge Foundation is launching the Public Domain Review, a web-based […]

Launch of NosDonnees.fr, a community driven French open data catalogue

A quick note to announce (and celebrate!) the launch of a new community driven French open data catalogue, NosDonnees.fr last Friday in Paris. The catalogue is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Regards Citoyens. Efforts are currently underway to populate the catalogue with information about French public datasets, including legal information about […]

CKAN v1.2 Released together with Datapkg v0.7

We’re delighted to announce CKAN v1.2, a new major release of the CKAN software. This is the largest iteration so far with 146 tickets closed and includes some really significant improvements most importantly a new extension/plugin system, SOLR search integration, caching and INSPIRE support (more details below). The extension work is especially significant as it […]

Open-Source Annotation Toolkit for Inline, Online Web Annotation

This is a post by Rufus Pollock, a long-time Open Knowledge Foundation member and coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. We’ve been working on web-annotation — inline, online annotation of web texts — for several years. Our original motivation was to support annotation of texts in http://openshakespeare.org/ so we can collaboratively build up critical notes […]

Visualising the German budget with Offener Haushalt

We’re delighted to announce that our friends at the Open Data Network and OKF Deutschland last week released some work that they have been doing to collate and visualise information related to public spending in Germany: Infosthetics broke the news: Offener Haushalt [offenerhaushalt.de] (German for ‘open budget’) is another demonstration of the large potential behind […]

Data.gov.uk releases CKAN Drupal Module

We’re delighted to see that the data.gov.uk folks have released the code for their CKAN Drupal module. As many will know, the OKF’s CKAN powers data.gov.uk as well as over a dozen other data catalogues around the world. From the blog post: As part of the government’s ongoing work around transparency, today we are releasing […]

Launch of it.ckan.net for open data in Italy!

The following guest post is by Stefano Costa and Federico Morando. Stefano Costa is a researcher at the University of Siena and Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Federico Morando is Managing Director & Research Fellow at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society and a member of the Working […]

Putting the cuts into context: where is that £6 billion going to come from?

With the UK election over, reductions in public spending are currently at the top of the agenda. Whichever way you cut it, taxpayers and public service users look set to face big changes. The ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ dashboard – a free, interactive online tool from the Open Knowledge Foundation – will help to […]

CKAN v1.0 Released

We are pleased to announce the availability of version 1.0 of the CKAN software, our open source registry system for datasets (and other resources). After 3 years of development, twelve point releases and a several successful production deployments around the world CKAN has come of age! As well as being used to power http://ckan.net and […]

CKAN 0.11 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.11 of the CKAN software, our open source registry of open data used in ckan.net and data.gov.uk. This is our biggest release so far (55 tickets) with lots of new features and improvements. This release also saw a major new production deployment with the CKAN software […]

Data.gov.uk goes public – and its using CKAN!

Data.gov.uk goes public today, and we’ve very proud that it is using CKAN, our open source registry of open data, to list official UK government datasets (as we announced in October): We’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office team to get this out the door, and over 2500 datasets have been released via the […]

Draft of an Open Data Commons Attribution License

Yesterday Open Data Commons released a draft of a new attribution license specifically aimed at data and databases. We would warmly welcome feedback on the new draft, and help circulating it to relevant parties (including legal experts, prospective users and so on)! From the announcement: Open Data Commons are happy to announce the first draft […]

Where Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched

We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]

Alpha Release of Where Does My Money Go? Prototype

We’ve pleased to announce the alpha release of our Where Does My Money Go prototype. This is a web application that allows you to explore UK public spending – and you can take a look here: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-alpha/ Update: access underlying data here. This an “alpha” release and its still a way from finished – we’re […]

Latest Developments on Open Shakespeare (v0.8)

The last six months have seen significant developments on our Open Shakespeare project, many of which have are reflected on the website: http://www.openshakespeare.org/ The most major advance is the availability of new HTML and PDF editions of the texts, see, for example, these versions of Twelfth Night: http://www.openshakespeare.org/resource/view/92/twelfth-night-moby/ http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/twelfth_night_moby.pdf We’ve also made improvements to multiview, […]

CKAN 0.9 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of CKAN version 0.9! CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects. Changes include: Add version attribute for package Fix purge to use new version of Versioned Domain Model (vdm) (0.4) Link to changed packages when listing revision Show most recently […]

Shakespeare v0.6 Released

See http://pypi.python.org/pypi/shakespeare/0.6 which includes full installation instructions. We’ve also reorganized the sites so that the news/blog is here at http://blog.openshakespeare.org/ and the Shakespeare package web interface is at http://www.openshakespeare.org. Main changes include: Major refactoring of internal code to be cleaner and simpler A new cleaner and reorganized web interface Search support via Xapian: http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/ Statistical […]

v0.4 of Open Shakespeare Released

A new version of open shakespeare is out. Get it via the code page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/ Changelog Annotation of texts (js-based in browser) (ticket:20, ticket:21) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/04/10/annotation-is-working/) Switch to unicode for internal string handling (resolves ticket:23: some texts breaking the viewer) Add functional tests for the web interface (ticket:11) Substantial improvements to speed of concordance (ticket:22) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/01/03/improvements-to-the-concordance/) […]