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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Open Data in Cultural Heritage: Finding your way through the license labyrinth, London, 24th November 2011

November 1, 2011 in Bibliographic, Events, Open Data, Our Work, Policy, Talks, WG Cultural Heritage, Working Groups, Workshop

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

Following on from our Open GLAM workshop in Warsaw last month, in a few weeks we’re hosting a half day workshop looking at how to overcome barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector.

So far we have confirmed representatives from the British Library, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Tate, the V&A, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Further details are copied below. If you’re interested in participating, please pop me an email at: .

> ## Open Data in Cultural Heritage: Finding your way through the license labyrinth

> * Where?: Wellcome Trust, London, UK > * When?: 24th November 2011

> Galleries, libraries, archives and museums around the world are opening up datasets, documents and other digital assets to enable the creation of innovative web and mobile services.

> This half day, hands-on workshop aims to help decision makers in the cultural heritage sector to navigate the plethora of licensing options for opening up their data and to develop new business models. The workshop will include:

> * Case studies on successful open data initiatives presented by leading practitioners > * An open data licensing clinic with lawyers and legal experts, to address issues and questions with common licensing frameworks

> If you would like to participate, please email .

> ## Draft programme

> * Introduction – Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation) and Mia Ridge (Cultural Heritage Technologist) > * The Risks and Rewards of Open Data – Jill Cousins (Executive Director, Europeana) > * Opening Up the BBC – Bill Thompson (BBC Archives + Technology Critic) > * Open Data Legal Clinic – Francis Davey (Barrister), Naomi Korn (Copyright Consultant), Prodromos Tsiavos (London School of Economics)

> The workshop is organised by Jonathan Gray and Mia Ridge as part of the Open GLAM initiative in association with the Open Knowledge Foundation. Refreshments are provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through their support of the LODLAM Summit, and the event is kindly hosted by the Wellcome Trust.



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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

PRESS RELEASE: The world’s biggest open data event

October 19, 2011 in Data Journalism, Events, News, OGDCamp, Open Data, Open Government Data, Press, Talks, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

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

The Open Government Data Camp 2011 takes place tomorrow in Warsaw. We’re really excited. Our press release is below. We’d be grateful for any help in sending this to relevant colleagues and organisations!

> ## PRESS RELEASE: The world’s biggest open data event

> Hundreds of public servants, NGOs, journalists and developers will gather in a former factory building in Warsaw this week for what will be the world’s biggest ever open data event.

> Over 40 countries around the world will be represented at the camp, from city level projects in Manchester, Montreal or Munich to national initiatives like data.gov, as well as supranational institutions like the European Commission and the World Bank.

> Ellen Miller, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, says: “We anticipate that this year’s Camp will convene the open data and transparency movement’s most creative thinkers, doers and advocates, whose conversations will help inspire many enduring solutions for using government data for the public good.”

> Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Digital Agenda Commissioner, says: “I am thrilled to see so much open data innovation going on in Europe. There is tremendous potential in this area – from enabling next generation public services, to creating jobs in the digital single market. This year’s Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw will enable key stakeholders from across Europe to exchange ideas and expertise.”

> Chris Taggart, Founder of OpenCorporates.com, says: “Despite the successes of the past few years, the open data community faces considerable obstacles, from proprietary web services to governments who see open data as a threat. Open Government Data Camp will connect people who are serious about overcoming these issues and using open data to help to solve some of the world’s pressing problems.”

> Daniele Silva, part of a grassroots group of over 800 Brazilian hackers and activists, says: “To maximise the value of public data, there is just as much work to de done on the civic society side as there is on the government side. The camp in Warsaw is an opportunity for us to collaborate with groups from around the world to work towards a read/write culture for public data.”

> Nigel Shadboldt, who sits on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, says: “Open Government Data creates social and economic value, improves public services, makes Governments more efficient, transparent and accountable. This Conference is about ensuring that more people understand how to make this work, more people can tackle the challenges and obstacles that arise, and more people are inspired to continue the work.”

> END

> ## Notes for editors

> * For further information and interviews contact the organisers at info@ogdcamp.org. > * The Open Government Data Camp 2011 takes place on 20-21st October in Warsaw, Poland. > * It is organised by over 30 organisations, coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation (UK) and Centrum Cyfrowe (Poland). A full list is available at: > * Further details at: . > * The event has been recently featured on the Guardian Datablog () and O’Reilly Radar ().

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Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

OKCon 2011: Introduction and a Look to the Future

June 30, 2011 in OKCon, Open Data, Talks

This is a blog post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

OKCon, the annual Open Knowledge Conference kicked off today and it’s been great so far. For those not here in Berlin with us you can follow main track talks via video streaming: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/open-knowlegde

Below are my slides from my introductory talk which gives an overview of the Foundation and its activities and then looked to what the challenges are for the open data community going forward.

OKCon 2011 Introduction by Rufus Pollock
View more presentations from okfn

Looking to the Future

The last several decades the world has seen an explosion of digital technologies which have the potential to transform the way knowledge is disseminated.

This world is rapidly evolving and one of its more striking possibilities is the creation of an open data ecosystem in which information is freely used, extended and built on.

The resulting open data ‘commons’ is valuable in and of itself, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because the social and commercial benefits it generates — whether in helping us to understand climate change; speeding the development of life-saving drugs; or improving govenance and public services.

In developing this open data ecosystem there are three key things are needed: material, tools and people. This is a key point: open information without tools and communities to utilise it is not enough, after all, openness isn’t an end itself – open material has no value if it isn’t used.

We need therefore to have widely available the capabilities for utilising open material, for processing, analysing and sharing it, especially on a large scale. Relevant tools need to be freely and openly available and the related infrastructure — after all tools need somewhere to run, and data needs somewhere to be stored — should be capable of effective deployment by distributed communities.

Over the last few years we’ve started to see increasing amounts of open material made available, with release of open data really starting to take off in the last couple of years.

But the (open) tools and the communities to use them are still very limited — we’re just starting to see the first self-identified “data wranglers / data hackers / data scientists” (note how the terms have not settled yet!).

Key architectural elements of the ecosystem, such as how we create and share data in an open componentized way, are only just beginning to be worked through.

We are therefore at a key moment where we transition from just ‘getting the data’ (and building the app) to a real data ecosystem in which data is transformed, shared and reintegrated and we replace a ‘data pipeline’ with ‘data cycles’.

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Open Government Data Camp 2011 is coming soon!

June 16, 2011 in Events, OGDCamp, OKF, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy, Talks, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

Open Government Data Camp 2011 is coming soon! You can find more at:

  • We’re currently working with the excellent Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt:Polska to finalise logistics for the event, which is currently scheduled to take place on 21st October 2011.

As with last year’s event, we will have lots of developers, designers, data journalists, public servants, NGOs, and others at the event. It will coincide with the EU Presidency in Poland. And as you’d expect, there will be lots of workshops, code sprints, planning sessions, and other open data related activities.

If you’re interested please add your details to this form and we’ll ping you as soon as further details are available.

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Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

Open Data Workshop and OpenCamp in Sofia, Bulgaria 4-5 June

June 7, 2011 in Events, Open Data, Open Government Data, Talks

On Saturday and Sunday (4th and 5th June) I was in Sofia, Bulgaria to run a Open Data Workshop on the Saturday and speak at the OpenCamp on the Sunday.

Separate notes on the workshop are here: http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/06/06/open-data-workshop-in-sofia-bulgaria-4th-june/ with results of mapping of Bulgarian gov data on CKAN wiki: http://wiki.ckan.net/Bulgaria.

Slides (fullsize): Open Data: What, Why, How

Photos

OpenCamp Sofia

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Interested in data-driven journalism?

June 3, 2011 in Events, External, OKCon, Open Data, Open Government Data, Talks, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

The following guest post is from Lilliana Bounegru at the European Journalism Centre (EJC).

The EJC in collaboration with Mirko Lorenz at Deutshe Welle have created a survey that aims to gather the opinion of journalists on the emerging practice of data-driven journalism and understand their training needs in this field.

Data has always been used as a source for reporting especially by investigative journalists and will play an increasingly important role in journalism in the future. Data-driven investigative operations in the past however involved a lot of resources and time. With the increasing pressure on newsrooms to be more time and cost efficient, they remained a marginal practice.

Why data-driven journalism?

Data-driven journalism enables journalists and media outlets to produce value and revenues without requiring the large investments of time and resources that data-driven investigative operations required in the past, thus holding the potential to more evenly distribute this practice across newsrooms. This is partly due to the increasing availability of open data catalogues which reduces the time required for journalists to get their hands on valuable data, and of free and open tools for data interrogation and visualization that lend themselves to non-expert use, which make data-driven reporting easier to undertake. The most notable data journalism operation in Europe, the Guardian Data Blog, works mainly with Excel or Google spreadsheets and free tools for data interrogation and visualization, and was until not long ago a one-man show, using the potential of crowdsourcing for data analysis at times.

How to understand what journalists need?

To enable more journalists and newsrooms across Europe to tap into the potential of data-driven journalism, the European Journalism Centre plans to organize a series of trainings this year and in the coming year. To understand what journalists need in order to practice data journalism, we created a survey. The survey has 16 questions asking journalists and others for their opinion on data journalism, aspects of working with data in their newsrooms, and what they are interested in learning.

  • We’ve had a good start: in a bit over one week over 80 journalists responded. If you are a journalist we would be grateful if you took 10 minutes of your time to take the survey and help us understand what is useful for journalists in order to organize trainings that fit real needs. To say thank you one of the entries will win a EUR 100 Amazon gift voucher.

The insights from this survey will be made freely available. We would much appreciate also help with tweeting, blogging or forwarding this to relevant people you might know.

If you’re interested in keeping in touch with developments in this area, you may wish to join the EJC’s Data Driven Journalism group and the joint EJC/OKF mailing list on data-driven-journalism. You may also be interested in coming to the data journalism session at OKCon 2011 in Berlin on 30th June – 1st July, where we will present the results of the survey so far!

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Avatar of jwalsh

by jwalsh

Open Data talk at Census Microdata workshop

May 25, 2011 in Talks, Uncategorized

Jo Walsh, Service Manager at EDINA and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation board, writes: Yesterday I gave a last-minute talk on open data, the work of OKF and EDINA to a Census Microdata workshop in Edinburgh.

The slides consist of screenshots with links and cover the following.

CKAN – the Data Hub and the place to get all sorts of data that may be relevant to demographic analysis. A CKAN search for ‘census’ currently returns 27 relevant datasets. There are many CKANs, some are run by governments (including data.gov.uk) and many more run by community groups. Open Data Search looks at many different sources of open data including (i think) the network of CKANs.

Note that CKAN includes datasets that are not open, but one day may be open. So there is a companion service, “Is it Open Data?”; one can write to data providers through it, and the questions and answers are recorded in public. So if there are datasets which may be non-commercial or research-only that you really want to see opened, try “Is it Open Data”.

Now that we have got data, what are we going to do with it? Get the Data may help – this is a stackoverflow-type site intended for data wranglers rather than programmers. Ask questions here and look for relevant answers…

So all these things are projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation which builds infrastructure / tools and also does some open knowledge production – for example Open Shakespeare, which has done some print editions, and Where Does My Money Go?, visualising public spending and contributions in novel interactive ways.

Open Data Commons is another OKF project – it publishes the PDDL and ODBL licenses (inspired by free software licenses), which can be used to preserve the future freedom of your data.

OpenStreetmap is one open data project that’s now moving to the ODbL license – take the data and adapt it, but if you make improvements they should be contributed back to the original project. Taginfo shows that some people are adding census data to OSM.

EDINA the JISC datacentre based at the University of Edinburgh, provides several open data services which may support demographic data analysis and visualisation. Open Boundaries is the open data side of the long-standing UKBORDERS service for research access to boundary data. Digimap OpenStream provides web map tile services based on Ordnance Survey Open Data. Both these services are currently available to anyone with an .ac.uk email address. And the Unlock place search and text mining service provides some global open data coverage, free for anyone to use.

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

#opendata: New Film about Open Government Data

April 13, 2011 in Events, Interviews, OGDCamp, OKF, OKF Projects, Open Data, Open Government Data, Releases, Talks, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

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 Government Data Camp. You can find the film at opengovernmentdata.org/film.

({ video_url: “http://vimeo.com/21711338″, video_config: { color: ‘FF0000′, width: 549, height: 309 } })

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s work in this area you can visit opengovernmentdata.org, a website about open government data around the world for and by the broader open government data community.

If you’re interested in meeting others interested in open government data around the world, please come and say hello on our ‘open-government‘ mailing list.

We are currently in the process of subtitling the film in several other languages. If you’d like to help translate the film into your language (or review or improve a translation) please fill in this form and we’ll get in touch with you with more details as soon as we can!

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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Post-event material from Open Government Data Camp 2010 is now online!

December 10, 2010 in Events, External, OGDCamp, OKF, OKF Projects, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy, Talks, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

A few weeks ago was the first international Open Government Data Camp in London. The event brought hundreds of people interested in open government data from around the world for two days of talks, discussions, planning and coding.

You can now find videos, photos, notes and other material from the event online at:

    *

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Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

Open Data Talk at PICNIC 10 in Amsterdam

September 21, 2010 in Events, External, OKF, OKF Projects, Open Data, Talks

This week I’m going to be in Amsterdam at PICNIC ’10 speaking about open data — what it is, why it’s good and how we can go about growing the open data ecosystem.

If you’re in Amsterdam — at PICNIC or otherwise — and interested in open data we’d love to hear from you.

Update: slides have now been posted – enjoy!

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