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Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

We need open carbon emissions data now!

May 13, 2013 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Featured, Featured Project, Open Data, Policy, WG Sustainability, Working Groups

Last week the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, a level which is said to be unprecedented in human history.

Leading scientists and policy makers say that we should be aiming for no more than 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change.

But what’s in a number? Why is the increase from 399 to 400 significant?

While the actual change is mainly symbolic (and some commentators have questioned whether we’re hovering above or just below 400), the real story is that we are badly failing to cut emissions fast enough.

Given the importance of this number, which represents humanity’s progress towards tackling one of the biggest challenges we currently face – the fact that it has been making the news around the world is very welcome indeed.

Why don’t we hear about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from politicians or the press more often? While there are regularly headlines about inflation, interest and unemployment, numbers about carbon emissions rarely receive the level of attention that they deserve.

We want this to change. And we think that having more timely and more detailed information about carbon emissions is essential if we are to keep up pressure on the world’s governments and companies to make the cuts that the world needs.

As our Advisory Board member Hans Rosling puts it, carbon emissions should be on the world’s dashboard.

Over the coming months we are going to be planning and undertaking activities to advocate for the release of more timely and granular carbon emissions data. We are also going to be working with our global network to catalyse projects which use it to communicate the state of the world’s carbon emissions to the public.

If you’d like to join us, you can follow #OpenCO2 on Twitter or sign up to our open-sustainability mailing list:

Image credit: Match smoke by AMagill on Flickr. Released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

5 Comments »

Avatar of Zara Rahman

by Zara Rahman

Global Community Stories #3

May 13, 2013 in Featured, OKF Australia, OKF Austria, OKF Belgium, OKF Brazil, OKF Greece, OKF Nepal, OKF Spain, OKF Switzerland, OKFN Local

 

 

Open Data Maker Vienna - April 2013

For your delectation, we bring you the third installment of Global Community Stories – a round up of the fantastic projects and activities of our Local Groups across the world, including a Wikipedia Editathon for girls in Nepal, a multitude of events in Belgium, Big Data Week across Spain, a Swiss Government pilot project, a multicultural open data event in Edinburgh, and a tiny town in Austria taking the lead in releasing data sets – the race is on!

Following the incredibly kind donation of OpenBelgium.be to our Open Knowledge community by Wunderkraut, OKF Belgium is preparing to take on maintenance of the site and grow the community that they began. They’ve been busy developing other collaborations too; a meet up with Random Hacks of Kindness is coming up June 1-2, as well as developing appsforgeo.be. Their impressive upcoming events include a fully booked master class on Open Culture data, a presentation at the Flemish government to civil servants, as well as Apps for Flanders on June 14, and a General Assembly in June too. They’ve been keeping an eye on the public sphere too, and are organising a debate on new business models to allow financial sustainability through art following a lawsuit by the Belgian copyright organisation Sabam against ISP for not wanting to cooperate on copyright tax on internet subscriptions.

In Austria, the OKF community is supporting the fight for a freedom of information act…

 Together with other civil society initiatives, the Austrian Chapter of OKFN is supporting this movement by organising a series of workshops for all stakeholders on the upcoming freedom of information law, reaching out to civil servants, citizens and politicans. They’ll be providing an opportunity for every stakeholder group to discuss and define their point of view, empowering change-makers across the sphere to broaden their influence, and they’ll be looking to develop the debate around freedom of information in a similar way to which the topic of open data was discussed some years ago.

 One little village in Austria deserves a special mention – Engerwitzdorf, a town of only 8000 inhabitants, has released 116 data sets – more than the entire federal government of Austria! They’ve been honoured for their work by being nominated for the Document Freedom Award by the Free Software Foundation Europe – congratulations! OKF Austria will joining in the celebrations through organising Engerwitzdorf’s first OKF MeetUp.

In Switzerland, government data is being made more accessible…

In Switzerland, the OKF Swiss Chapter has been developing a pilot project called Open Government Data at the Confederation – or, OGD@ Federation for short. Through the project, a group of government agencies will be attempting to bundle their data together via an open source platform, and they’ll be presenting this on May 22. We’ll keep you updated with how it goes, and for readers in Switzerland, you can register here.

OKF Spain has been expanding rapidly…

..having reached 149 members on their mailing list and recently having organised a successful Big Data Week in Madrid and Barcelona! It doesn’t sound like they’re sitting on their laurels though, as they have another three day event coming up in Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla and Valladolid about data journalism which will include a hackathon, a barcamp and several workshops. They have an impressive line up of speakers too, including James Ball from the Guardian, Manuel Aristarán from the Knight Foundation, and OKF Central’s own Michael Bauer, so if you can, swing by!

They also undertook the invaluable task of translating into Spanish Laura’s blog post, “Open Knowledge: much more than Open Data” – which has now become “Conocimiento Abierto: Mucho más que Open Data.” This is a wonderful way of getting our message out to a whole new audience – thanks!

Laura’s post was also a hit with our OKF Greece Chapter, who kindly translated it into Greek. Translations of posts on the okfn.org into any language at all are very much welcome; if you do any translations, please do let us know so we can publicise it too, and we very much appreciate your efforts!

OKF Greece have also been busy organising an #OpenHealth event, and also took part in a Wikimedia workshop together with the Greek Wikipedia community. They recently completed the incredibly useful task of translating the Open Spending handbook into Greek, and you can now find the OKF Greece group on Facebook, too!

In Scotland, Germans and Brits came together…

Last week, the University of Edinburgh hosted the wonderfully multicultural event of German-British Open Data event. Scholarship holders from the Foundation of German Business came together for the weekend of talks, under the title “Open Data — Better Society?” and you can find a great round up of the talks and conclusions on the OKF Scotland blog.

OKF Nepal have been focusing on getting girls into ICT…

OKF Nepal recently teamed up with Wikipedia Nepal to organise a Wikipedia Editathon, which took place on the International Day of Girls in ICT. A truly great initiative, addressing a key issue facing the tech movement. OKFN Nepal’s Prakash Neupane also took to the stage to explain about the Open Knowledge Foundation’s mission, and from the photos it looks like all involved had a wonderful time. We look forward to hearing from the next event!

Congratulations all, for some incredible activities from across the globe!

(and keep an eye out for some exciting upcoming events- OKF Brazil are organising an event on Open Science at the beginning of June, and OKF Australia are organising a Beautiful Data GovHack at the end of May !)

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Avatar of Mark Wainwright

by Mark Wainwright

Announcing CKAN 2.0

May 10, 2013 in CKAN, Featured, Featured Project, News, OKF Projects, Open Data, Open Government Data, Releases, Technical

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 of CKAN news since the project began, and represents months of hectic work by the team and other contributors since before the release of version 1.8 last October, and of the 2.0 beta in February. Thank you to the many CKAN users for your patience – we think you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait.

[Screenshot: Front page]

CKAN 2.0 is a significant improvement on 1.x versions for data users, programmers, and publishers. Enormous thanks are due to the many users, data publishers, and others in the data community, who have submitted comments, code contributions and bug reports, and helped to get CKAN to where it is. Thanks also to OKF clients who have supported bespoke work in various areas that has become part of the core code. These include data.gov, the US government open data portal, which will be re-launched using CKAN 2.0 in a few weeks. Let’s look at the main changes in version 2.0. If you are in a hurry to see it in action, head on over to demo.ckan.org, where you can try it out.

Summary

CKAN 2.0 introduces a new sleek default design, and easier theming to build custom sites. It has a completely redesigned authorisation system enabling different departments or bodies to control their own workflow. It has more built-in previews, and publishers can add custom previews for their favourite file types. News feeds and activity streams enable users to keep up with changes or new datasets in areas of interest. A new version of the API enables other applications to have full access to all the capabilities of CKAN. And there are many other smaller changes and bug fixes.

Design and theming

The first thing that previous CKAN users notice will be the greatly improved page design. For the first time, CKAN’s look and feel has been carefully designed from the ground up by experienced professionals in web and information design. This has affected not only the visual appearance but many aspects of the information architecture, from the ‘breadcrumb trail’ navigation on each page, to the appearance and position of buttons and links to make their function as transparent as possible.

[Screenshot: dataset page]

Under the surface, an even more radical change has affected how pages are themed in CKAN. Themes are implemented using templates, and the old templating system has been replaced with the newer and more flexible Jinja2. This makes it much easier for developers to theme their CKAN instance to fit in with the overall theme or branding of their web presence.

Authorisation and workflow: introducing CKAN ‘Organizations’

Another major change affects how users are authorised to create, publish and update datasets. In CKAN 1.x, authorisation was granted to individual users for each dataset. This could be augmented with a ‘publisher mode’ to provide group-level access to datasets. A greatly expanded version of this mode, called ‘Organizations’, is now the default system of authorisation in CKAN. This is much more in line with how most CKAN sites are actually used.

[Screenshot: Organizations page]

Organizations make it possible for individual departments, bodies, groups, etc, to publish their own data in CKAN, and to have control over their own publishing workflow. Different users can have different roles within an Organization, with different authorisations. Linked to this is the possibility for each dataset to have different statuses, reflecting their progress through the workflow, and to be public or private. In the default set-up, Organization user roles include Members (who can read the Organization’s private datsets), Editors (who can add, edit and publish datasets) and Admins (who can add and change roles for users).

More previews

In addition to the existing image previews and table, graph and map previews for spreadsheet data, CKAN 2.0 includes previews for PDF files (shown below), HTML (in an iframe), and JSON. Additionally there is a new plugin extension point that makes it possible to add custom previews for different data types, as described in this recent blog post.

[Screenshot: PDF preview]

News feeds and activity streams

CKAN 2.0 provides users with ways to see when new data or changes are made in areas that they are interested in. Users can ‘follow’ datasets, Organizations, or groups (curated collections of datasets). A user’s personalised dashboard includes a news feed showing activity from the followed items – new datasets, revised metadata and changes or additions to dataset resources. If there are entries in your news feed since you last read it, a small flag shows the number of new items, and you can opt to receive notifications of them via e-mail.

Each dataset, Organization etc also has an ‘activity stream’, enabling users to see a summary of its recent history.

[Screenshot: News feed]

Programming with CKAN: meet version 3 of the API

CKAN’s powerful application programming interface (API) makes it possible for other machines and programs to automatically read, search and update datasets. CKAN’s API was previously designed according to REST principles. RESTful APIs are deservedly popular as a way to expose a clean interface to certain views on a collection of data. However, for CKAN we felt it would be better to give applications full access to CKAN’s own internal machinery.

A new version of the API – version 3 – trialled in beta in CKAN 1.8, replaced the REST design with remote procedure calls, enabling applications or programmers to call the same procedures as CKAN’s own code uses to implement its user interface. Anything that is possible via the user interface, and a good deal more, is therefore possible through the API. This proved popular and stable, and so, with minor tweaks, it is now the recommended API. Old versions of the API will continue to be provided for backward compatibility.

Documentation, documentation, documentation

CKAN comes with installation and administration documentation which we try to keep complete and up-to-date. The major changes in the rest of CKAN have thus required a similarly concerted effort on the documentation. It’s great when we hear that others have implemented their own installation of CKAN, something that’s been increasing lately, and we hope to see even more of this. The docs have therefore been overhauled for 2.0. CKAN is a large and complex system to deploy and work on improving the docs continues: version 2.1 will be another step forward. Where people do run into problems, help remains available as usual on the community mailing lists.

… And more

There are many other minor changes and bug fixes in CKAN 2.0. For a full list, see the CKAN changelog.

Installing

To install your own CKAN, or to upgrade an existing installation, you can install it as a package on Ubuntu 12.04 or do a source installation. Full installation and configuration instructions are at docs.ckan.org.

Try it out

You can try out the main features at demo.ckan.org. Please let us know what you think!

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Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

Government Data Open and Machine Readable by Default Announces President Obama

May 10, 2013 in News, Open Data, Policy

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 which will require U.S. government agencies to conform to standards “to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities”. Below, we summarize the key points.

Open By Default

The order reiterates some of the key reasons for openness and makes clear that open is the default:

To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness …

Development of an “Open Data Policy”

Sec. 2. Open Data Policy. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), shall issue an Open Data Policy to advance the management of Government information as an asset

Clear set of best practices and tools

[Section 3] (a) Within 30 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the CIO and CTO shall publish an open online repository of tools and best practices to assist agencies in integrating the Open Data Policy into their operations in furtherance of their missions. The CIO and CTO shall regularly update this online repository as needed to ensure it remains a resource to facilitate the adoption of open data practices.

Build the policy into procurement

(b) Within 90 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, … to identify and initiate implementation of measures to support the integration of the Open Data Policy requirements into Federal acquisition and grant-making processes

By building open data release as a default into procurement this should greatly simplify open publication and remove arguments against release based on cost and complexity.

Assessment

Implementation will be tracked and assessed:

[Section 3] (c) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) shall work with the President’s Management Council to establish a Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal to track implementation of the Open Data Policy.

In a follow-up we’ll be providing more detailed analysis of the full Open Data Policy memorandum including plans for the new data.gov and its use of CKAN.

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Avatar of Sam Leon

by Sam Leon

Announcing the Open Humanities Award Winners

May 8, 2013 in Featured, Open GLAM, Open Humanities

awards-logo

Earlier this year, as part of the DM2E project, we put out a call to humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source.

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners are Dr Bernhard Haslhofer (University of Vienna) and Dr Robyn Adams (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London). Both winners will receive financial support to help them undertake the work they proposed and will be blogging about the progress of their project. You can follow their progress via the DM2E blog.

Award 1: Semantic tagging for old maps… and other things

Screen Shot 2013-05-07 at 11.02.15

The first Award goes to Dr Bernhard Haslhofer of Vienna University. His project will involve building on an open source web application he has been working on called Maphub.

Dr Haslhofer told us a little bit about the inspiration for his project:

“People love old maps” is a statement that we heard a lot from curators in libraries. This combined with the assumption that many people also have knowledge to share or stories to tell about historical maps, was our motivation to build Maphub.

In essence Maphub is an open source Web application that, first of all, pulls out digitized historical maps from closed environments, adds zooming functionality, and assigns Web URIs so that people can talk about them online. It also supports two main use cases:

(i) georeferencing maps by linking points on the map to Geonames locations; (ii) commenting on maps or map regions by creating annotations. While users are entering their comments, Maphub analyzes the entered text on the fly and suggests so-called semantic tags, which the user accepts or rejects.

Semantic tags appear like “normal” tags on the user interface, but are in fact links to DBpedia resources. In that way, the user links her annotations and therefore also the underlying historical map with resources from two open data sources. Besides consuming open data during the annotation authoring process, Maphub also contributes collected knowledge back as open data by exposing all annotations following the W3C Open Annotation specification. In that way, Maphub supports people in a loop of using and producing open data in the context of historical maps.

Dr Haslhofer looks forward to seeing how collaborations will blossom between these various web annotation systems:

We believe that people also love other things on the Web and that Web annotation tools should support semantic tagging as well. Therefore, we will make it available as a plugin for Annotorious. Annotorious is a JavaScript image annotation library that can be used in any Website, and is also compatible with the Open Knowledge’s Foundations’s Annotator.

Annotorious and Maphub have common origins and the Open Humanities will support us in unifing parallel development streams into a single, reusable annotation tool that works for digitized maps but also for other media. We will also conduct another user study to inform the design of that function for other application contexts.

Award 2: Joined Up Early Modern Diplomacy: Linked Data from the Correspondence of Thomas Bodley

Thomas_Bodley

The second award goes to Dr Robyn Adams of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. The project will re-purpose the open resource that Dr Adams has been building with a team of others: the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley.

The project will use ‘additional’ information that was encoded into the digitisation of early modern letters that took place at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. In the initial incarnation of the project this data which included biographical and geographical information contained within letters was not used (although it was encoded).

Dr Adams told us a little bit about what she plans on doing with the money from the Awards:

With the prize funding from the Open Humanities Awards, we propose to mine the data that was generated but not fully used in the first phase of the project. This data is a rich source of biographical and geographical information, the visualization of which evokes the complex and diverse texture of the late sixteenth-century European diplomatic and military landscape. Bodley’s position in The Hague as the only English representative on the Dutch Council of State put him at the centre of a heterogeneous nexus of correspondents a time long before the Republic of Letters burgeoned in the subsequent century.

The project will interrogate three data fields within the larger data set of Bodley’s diplomatic correspondence in order to generate visualizations; the network of correspondents and recipients, and the people and places mentioned within the letters. These visualizations will be incorporated into the project website, where they will enhance and extend the knowledge derived from the existing corpus of correspondence. The visualizations, which will have scope to be playful while drawn from scrupulous scholarship, will offer an alternative pathway for scholars and the interested public to understand that in this period especially, the political, university and kinship networks were fundamental to advancement and prosperity.

“In mapping the relational activity between data sets,” Dr Adams went on, “I hope to further illuminate and reanimate Bodley’s position within the Elizabethan compass. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that fruitful routes of enquiry can result if scholars commit to going the extra mile to encode and record data in their research that may not have immediate relevance to their own studies.”

We offer our heartiest congratulations to the both Dr Haslhofer and Dr Adams both of whom will be presenting their work at the forthcoming Web as Literature conference at the British Library and this year’s OKCon in Geneva. Follow the progress of the Awards recipients via the DM2E project website.

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Avatar of Ross Mounce

by Ross Mounce

The White House Seeks Champions of Open Science

May 8, 2013 in Open Access, Open Science, WG Open Data in Science

Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we know Open Science is tough, but ultimately rewarding. It requires courage & leadership to take the open path in science.

Nearly a week ago on the open-science mailing list we started putting together a list of established scientists who have in some way or another made significant contributions to open science or lent their esteemed reputation to calls for increased openness in science. Our open list now has over 130 notable scientists, among whom 88 are Nobel prize winners.

In an interesting parallel development, the White House has just put out a call to help identify “Open Science” Champions of Change — outstanding individuals, organizations, or research projects promoting and using open scientific data for the benefit of society.

whitehouseOPENSCIENCE

Anyone can nominate an Open Science candidate for consideration by May 14, 2013.

What more proof do we need that open science is both good, and valued in society? This marks a tremendous validation of the open science movement. The US government is not seeking to reward any scientist; only open scientists actively working to change the world for the better will win this recognition.

We’re still a long way from Open Science being the norm in science. But perhaps now, we’re a crucial step closer to important widespread recognition that Open Science is good, and could be the norm in the future. We eagerly await the unveiling of the winning Open Science champions at the White House on the 20th June later this year.

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Avatar of Theodora Middleton

by Theodora Middleton

The Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, May 2013

May 7, 2013 in Newsletter

Heard of Big Data? How about #smalldata?

There’s been loads of buzz this month around #smalldata, and the need to prevent the centralisation of data-power in the hands of the few. Redistributing knowledge power is what we’re all about at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and this month’s launch of data.okfn.org is doing just that – making it easier than ever for everyone to get their hands on the data and make it used and useable. Find out more below.

With OKFN:Local initiatives continuing to spring up across the globe, it seems like this vision is becoming a reality. Rhizomatic sharing of tools and skills are making it ever easier for data to be turned into the knowledge we need to build a more fair and sustainable world, from local to global. Keep up the inspiring work!

With so much going on, we’ve decided to make our updates to you a bit more frequent, so we’ll be sending out a newsletter once a month. You can sign up here to have it delivered straight to your inbox. And, of course, we remain a not-for-profit organisation, providing all our community services openly and for free. We rely on the generosity of our institutional and individual supporters. Please visit okfn.org/support to find out more about how you can help.

Frictionless Data with data.okfn.org

This month saw the very exciting launch of a project which has been quietly brewing for some time. Frictionless Data – data.okfn.org – makes it radically easier to get the data you want in the form that you need it. Its about creating an infrastructure so that we’re not re-doing each others’ work, through standards and simplification. We’ve started with some key datasets, curated, quality-checked and packaged, ready for use by you. It’s currently in alpha, and we’d love you to get involved in the discussion. Check out data.okfn.org for more!

OKCon 2013

OKCon 2013 will take place in Geneva on the 17th and 18th September 2013. We are very excited to announce that our Call for Proposals has gone live today! We want to hear what you want to do at OKCon 2013 – and you’ve got until May 24th to tell us. The overarching theme of OKCon 2013 is Open data – Broad, Deep, Connected, and we’ve identified six thematic areas for our talks and workshops: Open Data, Government and Governance; Open Development and Sustainability; Open Science and Research; Open Culture; Technology, Tools and Business; Evidence and Stories. Get in touch now with your ideas!

Opening up the wisdom of crowds with Crowdcrafting.org

Remember our very cool micro-tasking tool, Pybossa? Well we’ve been hacking away on it for a while now, and it was very exciting this month to see the launch of Crowdcrafting, the Pybossa-powered open source platform for developing and sharing projects that need the help of thousands of volunteers. Launched in collaboration with the University of Geneva, the platform has already been used for all sorts of projects from mapping the impact of a typhoon through tweets, to classifying the orientation of magnetic molecules. Get involved!

Some stuff we’ve been up to

  • It’s so exciting to see the work of Open Knowledge Foundation groups around the world. From conferences and hackathons in Spain, to a new Icelandic CKAN, find out all the news in the Global Community round up. And while our Nepalese group held it’s first public event, OKF Greece completed its eighteen-month journey to full Chapter status!

  • The groundbreaking Panton Fellowships have come to an end. Find out what our Fellows have been doing to spread openness in the sciences over the last year.

  • The Public Domain Review has been Saved! After a heroic community fundraising effort, the Public Domain Review surpassed its $20,000 target, and can continue to bring us all joy.

  • The School of Data teamed up with P2PU to offer their inaugural Data Explorer Mission, this time looking at Carbon Data – like a Data Expedition but with a robot as your guide. You can still sign up with Mission Control for future Missions here.

  • And the Open Research Data Handbook is taking shape, but we want your case studies.

Comment and Thought

There’s been a lot of very interesting comment on the blog this month. In case you missed them, here are a couple that you need to know about:

Comments Off

Avatar of Beatrice Martini

by Beatrice Martini

OKCon 2013 Call for Proposals – out now!

May 7, 2013 in Events, Featured, Join us, OKCon, Talks

_MG_5387-web

  • Event. OKCon 2013 – 17th-18th September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland.
  • Call for Proposals. Find the call, FAQs and the submission form on the OKCon 2013 Call for Proposal webpage.
  • Deadline. The deadline to submit your proposals is May 24th, 23:59:59 GMT. Results will be published by 17th June, 23:59:59 GMT.
  • Tickets. Early Bird tickets are on sale until 23rd June!

 

Following the announcement of the dates for this year’s Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), we have been asked by many people from our community how they can get involved. We are now glad and excited to give you the news: the Call for Proposals is launched today!

OKCon 2013 will be an intense 2-day event (taking place on 17th-18th September in Geneva, Switzerland). Its programme will be curated in part directly by the organisers, nominating Invited Speakers, and partly together with you – our community – thanks to your proposals.

We have identified six specific topics to discuss and explore on this year’s theme of Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected which we hope will inspire and excite you as much as it does us:

  • Open Data, Government and Governance
  • Open Development and Sustainability
  • Open Science and Research
  • Open Culture
  • Technology, Tools and Business
  • Evidence and Stories

We have compiled a how-to guide, with FAQs and the submission form – please find them all on the OKCon 2013 Call for Proposal webpage. We are looking forward to your ideas!

The Call for Proposals starts today (7th May) and ends on 24th May, at 23:59:59 GMT. Read all about OKCon’s Call for Proposals and more on the conference website.

1 Comment »

Avatar of Martin Tisne

by Martin Tisne

Follow the Money, Follow the Data

May 3, 2013 in Ideas and musings, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Spending

The following guest post from Martin Tisné was first published on his personal blog.

Money tunnel by RambergMediaImages, CC-BY-SA on Flickr

Some thoughts which I hope may be helpful in advance of the ‘follow the data‘ hack day this week-end:

The open data sector has quite successfully focused on socially-relevant information: fixing potholes a la http://www.fixmystreet.com/, adopting fire hydrants a la http://adoptahydrant.org/. My sense is that the next frontier will be to free the data that can enable citizens, NGOs and journalists to hold their governments to account. What this will likely mean is engaging in issues such as data on extractives’ transparency, government contracting, political finance, budgeting etc. So far, these are not the bread and butter of the open data movement (which isn’t to say there aren’t great initiatives like http://openspending.org/). But they should be:

At its heart, this agenda revolves around ‘following the money’. Without knowing the ‘total resource flow’:

  • Parents’ associations cannot question the lack of textbooks in their schools by interrogating the school’s budget
  • Healthcare groups cannot access data related to local spending on doctors, nurses
  • Great orgs such as Open Knowledge Foundation or BudgIT cannot get the data they need for their interpretative tools (e.g. budget tracking tool)
  • Investigative journalists cannot access the data they need to pursue a story

Our field has sought to ‘follow the money’ for over two decades, but in practice we still lack the fundamental ability to trace funding flows from A to Z, across the revenue chain. We should be able to get to what aid transparency experts call ‘traceability’ (the ability to trace aid funds from the donor down the project level) for all, or at least most fiscal flows.

Open data enables this to happen. This is exciting: it’s about enabling follow the money to happen at scale. Up until now, instances of ‘following the money’ have been the fruit of the hard work of investigative journalists, in isolated instances.

If we can ensure that data on revenues (extractives, aid, tax etc), expenditures (from planning to allocation to spending to auditing), and results (service delivery data) is timely, accessible, comparable and comprehensive, we will have gone a long way to helping ‘follow the money’ efforts reach the scale they deserve.

Follow the Money is a pretty tangible concept (if you disagree, please let me know!) – it helps demonstrate how government funds buy specific outcomes, and how/whether resources are siphoned away. We need to now make it a reality.

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Avatar of Adam Green

by Adam Green

The Public Domain Review is Saved!

May 2, 2013 in OKF Projects, Public Domain, Public Domain Review

At 12:00pm BST today, as midnight struck over the Pacific island of American Samoa and the 1st of May truly ended all over the world, so did end the inaugural Public Domain Review Fundraiser. In 58 days, with the help of 676 wonderful supporters we managed to leapfrog our target of $20,000 and raise an amazing $22,070, ca. £14200 / €16,800. Thank you all so much, we’ve been really blown away by your amazing generosity.

We saw donations come in from all over the world, and the Tote Bags have been sent out to homes far and wide across 6 of the 7 continents on the planet (still missing that ever elusive Antarctica). There weren’t just offers of monetary support – a few people also pledged their skills and time. We’ve had a very kind offer to build a PDR App for Android which is currently in progress, and also a printmaker interested in partnering up to do some prints for us using an old Victorian letterpress. There are also other interesting collaborations currently being discussed – all to be revealed soon!

We have lots of really exciting things lined up for the future, and thanks to all the incredible generosity we’ve seen we can them happen. Amongst others, we have coming soon a brand new monthly feature – “Guest Curator of the Month” – in which an invited curator shall do a guest post focusing on works in their institutions openly licensed digital collections: the British Library, Rijksmuseum and others are onboard already. In addition to improving the website with new features like these, part of the work we’ll also be doing is, of course, trying to secure additional funding which we’ll be very much focusing on over the next few months.

All in all, very exciting times ahead. And, again, a huge thank you to all who donated!

And in case you missed it, here’s the super-extended version of the fundraising film: aptly retitled “SAVED!” and with a new happy ending!


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