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OKFN Energy Lab: Call for Partners

OKFN Labs is launching Labs Sprints, a new initiative to create data-driven applications around a specific topic within a very short timeframe – a single week. As we start this, we’re looking for partners to help us frame the questions that our apps will aim to explore. To create such high-impact apps which can serve […]

Managing Expectations

We’re big on promoting open information: be that sonnets, statistics, genes or geodata. We’re big on it because we think it has the potential to improve the welfare of peoples around the world in a variety of ways, from making governments more accountable to improving research on cancer. At the same time I think it […]

Open Science Hackday – with donuts, the Queen, and a whole lot of rain…

This is a post by Jenny Molloy, coordinator of the OKFN Open Science Working Group, and Laura Newman, community coordinator. The blog post is also featured on the Open Science blog. It was a day of ‘firsts’ for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Science working group at their summer hackday on Saturday: the first hackday […]

Science, data and the public

Earlier this week the European Commission released a package of documents related to their nascent policies on access to scientific information. What will these mean for science and for public engagement with science? New open access policies have been in the headlines quite a bit recently, as politicians and policy makers respond to the wave […]

Data Wrangling Handbook Sprints: July 18th in Portland! July 19th everywhere!

We’re taking the Data Wrangling Handbook on the road! We’ll be in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday, July 18th from 3-7 pm at Collective Agency, 322 NW Sixth Ave (between Everett and Flanders), Suite 200. (Buzz “200″ when you arrive.) View Map Then, to keep the ball rolling, we’re following up with a virtual sprint on […]

The Fifth Elephant, 27-28 July 2012, Bangalore

Mythology held that the world rested on the back of four elephants. In the connected 21st century we think there’s a fifth: data. The Fifth Elephant is a community-powered two-day event around the Big Data ecosystem. We hope to enable inter-disciplinary learning between technology, analytics and design along with inter-domain learning between Technology, Media, Retail, […]

Announcing: Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), enabling the vocabulary commons

We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project. ##LOV Project in 5 points LOV is about vocabularies (aka. metadata element sets or ontologies) in OWL / RDFS used to describe linked data. LOV provides a single-stop […]

BiblioHack-ed

Last month we ran the Open Knowledge Foundation’s largest celebration of open bibliographic data to date. The main focus of the two-day event was to get some hacking done and use the tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has helped to build, or is currently building, for working with bibliographic data, such as BibServer, TEXTUS and […]

The Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, April – June 2012

It’s been another hectic few months here at the Open Knowledge Foundation! We’re getting really excited about this year’s inaugral OKFest in Helsinki (more later), but there’s so much going on across the world of openness that it’s hard to see when we’re going to find time to pack our suitcases! From the launch of […]

Open Media Challenge, September, Bucharest

The Open Media Challenge (OMC) is a two-day event, laying the groundwork for improving data journalism in Eastern Europe. The aim is to write code for free software which will solve real-world media problems around data aggregation and visualization. It will be a collaborative effort focused on Eastern European information collection and dissemination, and will […]

‘En boca cerrada….’: open data in Catalunya today

There is a popular expression in Spanish that says, ‘en boca cerrada no entran moscas.’ Its equivalent in English is ‘loose lips sink ships,’ basically meaning that you are better off just keeping quiet. This culture of secrecy, some would say discretion, is particularly true in Spain’s public administration, being traditionally pervasive at all levels. […]