From small beginnings in a hackathon, here’s a great story from Oakland of how OpenSpending can be deployed to improve civic engagement on a local level. The beta version of Open Budget Oakland went public last week with the release of our mayor’s proposed budget for the next two years. Her announcement was made Wednesday […]
It’s with great excitement that we can announce that OKFN Greece, after 1.5 years as a Local Group in our global network, have established themselves as an official Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. This means that our Greek friends are now through their own legal entity a more integral part of the organization. The last […]
Earlier this week we published the first in a series of posts on small data: “Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution”. In this second in the series, we discuss small data in more detail providing a rough definition and drawing parallels with the history of computers and software. What do we mean […]
The Public Domain Review Fundraiser ends on Wednesday 1st May, just 5 days away! Since we launched the fundraising campaign 7 weeks ago we’ve seen a fantastic response which has got us so far to an amazing 98% of our target… very very nearly there. We are making a final push in these remaining days […]
School of Data is hiring a Workshop and Project Coordinator! See below for details about the role and how to apply. ###About School of Data School of Data works to empower civil society organizations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively in their efforts to create fairer and more sustainable […]
Exciting news: The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenGLAM initiative and Wikimedia NYC have today unveiled the first ever Open Data Fellowship for cultural heritage institutions starting this summer. The paid 8-week placement will combine two roles: Facilitator for institutions interested in pursuing broader open data initiatives […]
Open (Government) Data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen Open Data flourishing all over […]
Frictionless Data is now in alpha at http://data.okfn.org/ – and we’d like you to get involved. Our mission is to make it radically easier to make data used and useful – our immediate goal is make it as simple as possible to get the data you want into the tool of your choice. This isn’t […]
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 […]
This is the first in a series of posts. The next posts in the series is What Do We Mean by Small Data There is a lot of talk about “big data” at the moment. For example, this is Big Data Week, which will see events about big data in dozens of cities around the […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. Another economics scandal made the news last week. Harvard Kennedy School professor Carmen Reinhart and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff argued in their 2010 NBER paper that economic growth slows down when the debt/GDP ratio exceeds the threshold of 90 percent of GDP. These […]
A closer look at the new PSI Directive by Ton Zijlstra and Katleen Janssen image by European People’s Party CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons On 10 April, the European Commission’s Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, announced that the European Union (EU) Member States have approved a text for the new PSI […]
Tomorrow is the official launch date for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). If you’ve been following it, you’ll know that it has the long term aim of realising “a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all”. More specifically, Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University […]
Europe’s data league convened in Dublin last week – Open Data increasingly taking the stage Over 500 data professionals gathered last week at European Data Forum conference in Dublin. This is the annual meeting place for industry, research, policy makers, and community initiatives to discuss the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in Europe. One of […]
The Panton Fellowships have come to an end. The work that our two Panton Fellows, Ross Mounce and Sophie Kershaw have done over the past year to promote openness in the sciences has far surpassed what any of us expected. Here Ross details his wide-ranging experiences and achievements over the past year, and you […]
Sign up now for next week’s Data Explorer Mission on Carbon Emissions Data, a pilot initiative of our School of Data and P2PU, to help people explore a topic, while at the same time building their data skills through experimentation and doing. Image CC-By-SA J Brew on Flickr At the School of Data, we teach […]
Cape Town City Hall, Felix Gottwald It seems somewhat absurd to me that publicly funded institutions in South Africa should be allowed to copyright data produced using public funds. Of course, it is reasonable to expect that physical assets such as buildings, vehicles or machinery should appear on their balance sheets and be reserved for […]
We continue our new monthly digest showcasing initiatives from our local communities across the globe, this time proudly featuring Brazil, Spain, Czech Republic, Nepal, Iceland and Belgium. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s many (30+!) Local Group communities stand behind a myriad of different activities every month. As you may also have read in our first edition of […]
The OKF Open Research Data Handbook – a collaborative and volunteer-led guide to Open Research Data practices – is beginning to take shape and we need you! We’re looking for case studies showing benefits from open research data: either researchers who have personal stories to share or people with relevant expertise willing to write short […]
What kinds of energy are we producing, and what kinds are we consuming? How much comes from renewable sources? What is our energy dependency on other countries? Energy policy is today at the heart of every country’s agenda, but can citizen discuss it fairly? Do even policymakers have enough reliable information to implement new energy […]
On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits […]
Earlier this week the Guardian and the BBC reported on a landmark ruling in India which will hopefully pave the way for greater access to lifesaving generic drugs in developing countries. The Indian supreme court has rejected a new patent on a “slightly altered” version of Glivec, a cancer treatment drug developed by the pharmaceutical […]
Coding is expensive and slow, journalism should be cheap and fast. This is the main problem I face as a data journalism producer. My responsibility is to produce news apps for Helsingin Sanomat, a main daily newspaper in Finland. When there is a breaking news event, we have about five hours to come up with […]
Sign up on the right to receive our newsletter straight into your inbox every couple of months! It’s exciting times at the Open Knowledge Foundation! We’re determinedly ignoring the never-ending winter here in Europe – Spring has definitely sprung for us, with more activity than ever across the network, creating change by educating, empowering, evangelising […]
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