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 […]
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 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 […]
This post is by Gregor Aisch, graphic designer and visualisation architect on the OpenSpending project. Today, at the OpenSpending worksop at OKCon2011 he gave a sneak preview of some of the work he has been doing to create new visualisations for OpenSpending, including a re-adaptation of David McCandless’ famous bubble visualisation from ‘Where Does My […]
The following guest post is from Nagarjuna G. from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai. Nagarjuna will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his workshop on metaStudio.org. ###About metaStudio.org is a collaborative workspace for shaping up education and research inspired by free software philosophy and open science. Here we design and […]
The following guest post is by David Jacovkis and Wouter Tebbens from the Free Knowledge Institute. David and Wouter will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for their workshop on Building a master Curriculum on Free Technologies, and presentation on the Free Technology Academy and Shared QA for producing Free Educational Materials. The Free Technology […]
The following guest post is from Martin Kaltenböck and Thomas Thurner from the Semantic Web Company, members of our brand new Austrian chapter, Open Knowledge Forum Österreich! The OGD2011 – the first Open Government Data Conference in Austria -took place on 16 of June 2011 in Vienna and was great success! The fully booked conference […]
The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, founder of OpenGovData.ru, and member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. I know that not too many people know about Russian open government projects. To be honest we don’t have many of them. But, at the same time, they do exist, and we have […]
After several months of hard work, we are glad to announce the official launch of OpenSpending and turn to everyone interested in government accountability and financial transparency to help shape the future of the project. The OpenSpending project will make it easier for the global public to explore and understand government spending. Our developers have […]
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, […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Last week I went to an excellent workshop on open metadata organised by Europeana. The workshop drew together directors from libraries, archives and cultural heritage organisations across Europe – such as the British Library, the Deutsche National Bibliothek, the UK National […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re really exciting about our session on the future of data journalism at OKCon 2011 in Berlin. The session takes place on 30th June. From the blurb: In the past 2 years we have seen an explosion in the availability of […]
The following guest post is by Charles Armstrong, social scientist, entrepreneur, and Founder of the One Click Orgs project, which the OKF supports. Charles will be joining us at OKCon2011 for his talk, One Click Orgs: simple democratic organisation Along the shoreline of the North Atlantic marram grass plays a vital role in the coastal […]
The following guest post is by David Osimo, European policy analyst and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data Who are the civic hackers? What are their motivations and barriers? What impact are government 2.0 initiatives having? And most importantly, what policy choices should the EU make? To […]
The following post is from Kat Braybrooke, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKFN now has an open-concept office space in downtown London at the amazing Centre for Creative Collaboration, thanks to one of the Centre’s representatives, Brian Condon. And as the OKFN’s London Community Coordinator, I have to say we’re all excited […]
The following a joint post by Francois Grey and Rufus Pollock who are co-organizing the Open Science and Open Social Science workshop at OKCon. Remember that screensaver called SETI@home that was all the rage a decade ago? Over a million people downloaded it, so they could take part in a search for radio signals from […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Several key open data organisations in France – including Regards Citoyens, Creative Commons France and Veni Vidi Libri – have clubbed together to draft a Declaration on Open Data in France: The declaration emphasises the importance of a legal and licensing […]
The following guest post is by Roberta Borgognoni and Ben Wyss, from the GEM Foundation. They will be joining us at OKCon 2011. We are involved in the global collaborative effort GEM. GEM is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage a global community in the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art models and […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re thrilled to announce that our proposal for Spending Stories has been chosen as a winner for the Knight News Challenge. What is Spending Stories about? News stories about government finances are common, but readers often find it challenging to place […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Last week I participated in an event called Visualizing Europe organised by the folks at visualizing.org in association with the Open Knowledge Foundation and Infosthetics. There were lots of really interesting talks and demos on data visualisation projects from across Europe […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We are pleased to now have a Bulgarian translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Peio Popov. You can find this at: http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/bulgarian/ If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please […]
The following post is by Guo Xu, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group and research associate at DIW Berlin. Help make economics more open! The Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation is an informal, community-organized group working to ensure economics is built on sound, transparent foundations. We’re looking for people, especially students, to get involved […]
The following guest post is by Michael Gurstein from the Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training in Vancouver. Micheal will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his talk Open Data – Louder Voices? This post follows on from earlier posts on Michael’s blog here, here, and here. There is a great deal […]
In a letter presented to Congress last week, signed by individuals and organisations including the Open Knowledge Foundation, the US government has been urged to restore funding to the Electronic Government Fund, “which provides critical support for the construction of a more transparent and efficient government and serves as a building block for private-sector innovations […]
This post was written by participants of the LOD-LAM Summit which was held on June 2nd/3rd in San Francisco and is crossposted on the Creative Commons blog and the Open bibliography and Open Bibliographic Data blog. For author information see the list below the document. The library, archives and museums (i.e. LAM) community is increasingly […]
This post is by Friedrich Lindenberg, one of the core developers on the OpenSpending project. He describes some of the hurdles that had to be overcome to get to today’s online release of all UK central departmental spending data over £ 25k and some interesting questions stemming from the data. In November of last year, […]
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, […]
This guest post is from Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. Michel will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his talk No Open Society without Open Knowledge, no Open Knowledge without Open Infrastructures. To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today we’re pleased to announce the winners of the Open Data Challenge, Europe’s biggest open data competition. The 1st prizes for each category will be awarded later today by European Commission Vice President, Neelie Kroes at the Digital Agenda Assembly in […]
The following guest post is by Jürgen Neumann, from the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Jürgen will be joining us at OKCon 2011 as part of a panel on Open Hardware and Open Standards As the free open source paradigm is shifting towards open everything, there are still a few obstacles to completely shift […]
The following guest post is by Alek Tarkowski from the Centrum Cyfrowe, a think-and-do-tank fostering digital society in Poland. Alek will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his talk On the road to Open Data in Poland – Where Are We Now? “Open budget” is a project started by Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska, a […]
The following is a guest blog post from Prof. Philipp Mueller about his talk on Openness as Strategy at the Open Knowledge Conference, June, 30th & July 1st 2011 in Berlin. We live in a world where information and communication technologies have confronted us with new logics of collective action that allow new forms of […]
The following guest post is from Augusto Herrmann, Christian Miranda and Nitai Bezerra, from the Open Data team at the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management. They are all members of the Open Knowledge Foudation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. We are a team of three people working on open data at the Brazilian […]
Jens Finnäs is a freelance journalist based in Helsinki, the author of Dataist, a blog about data journalism, and a member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data. Parliamentary elections in Finland are usually rather dull. Rarely does the rest of the world bother to pay any attention. But […]
The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. When the amazing Emer Coleman first approached me a year and a half to get feedback on the plans for the London datastore, I told her that the gold standard […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Earlier today the new French open government data initiative, data.gouv.fr, posted a letter of support for the OpenDataChallenge from Séverin Naudet, who heads up the initiative and works with the French Prime Minister’s Office. Here’s an excerpt: I would like to […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Next week some of Europe’s leading information designers and data visualisation experts will descend on Brussels for a one-day event showcasing projects and applications which visually represent Europe’s data. The event is organised by Visualizing.org in association with the Open Knowledge […]
This post comes from Lucy Chambers: Community Coordinator at the OKF. This week, she will be collecting designs for OKF T-Shirts We are in the process of creating some new OKF T-Shirts and would like to know what you would like to see on them! Whether you have a witty slogan, beautiful version of the […]
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, […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock recently interviewed at Open Tech 2011 about WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org and OpenSpending.org. You can watch the video on blip.tv or YouTube, or you can download it by right clicking here.
The following guest post is from Jim Michalko, VP in charge of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Karen Calhoun, former VP of Metadata Applications, who has previously been working on these issues, has recently left OCLC to relocate and begin the first phase of her retirement. She has transitioned her role as OCLC’s spokesperson for […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are now around 36 hours left to enter the OpenDataChallenge.org, Europe’s biggest open data competition! There are €20,000 worth of awards and prizes for ideas, applications, visualisations, and datasets. If you have: an idea for a useful service that could […]
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 […]
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 following post is from Hauke Johannes Gierow who is on the OKCon 2011 organising team, and is a Community Coordinator at OKF Deutschland. At the Open Knowledge Foundation we work towards an open society with open content, open data, and free/open source software all over the world. We work with developers, designers, civil servants, […]
The following guest post is from Owen Stephens, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Discovery is a new JISC funded initiative to help realise a vision set out in 2010 by the JISC and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) ‘Resource Discovery Taskforce’ (RDTF). The RDTF Vision is […]
The following guest post is from Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen, Founder of ItsYourParliament.eu and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. Most people are unaware that the political parties they know from their national parliaments behave differently in an European context. Two Danish parties for example belong to […]
The following post is from Esa Mäkinen, an open data advocate, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. Finnish novels used to be 200 pages long in the 1910s. A few hundred years later and the novels are longer: nowadays they are […]
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