Hard to believe that a full month has passed since the end of a fantastic OKFestival 2014. While our team is hard at work following up on all the great ideas and impulses from the event, and evaluating what we can learn, we would like to highlight some of the magnificent write-ups and other documentation […]
This is a guest blog post by Fiona Krakenbürger, research associate at Open Knowledge Foundation DE and Community Manager at Code for Germany In July 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany launched its program “Code for Germany! Prior to the OK Festival in Berlin, we presented the project to the media, international partners, city representatives, […]
Photo by Heather Leson, CC-BY-SA Two weeks back, over 1,000 people gathered in Berlin to co-create the future of the open knowledge movement. Even before OKFestival had officially kicked off, over 50 people from over 25 countries piled into a crowded, hot room on a glorious Berlin afternoon, to work through the pressing issues, opportunities […]
This is a guest blog post by Kristina Olausson, Blog writer and editor for Open Knowledge Sweden. You can see the Swedish version it is based on here. Photo by Socialdemokrater, CC-BY-ND Part of the team of Open Knowledge Sweden, Kristina Olausson and Mattias Axell, visited the annual politicians week – the Almedalen week at […]
Thank you for joining us in Berlin and helping to shape OKFestival and the future of the open knowledge movement! We hope that the event provided you with the opportunity to learn, to share and to connect with open knowledge advocates from around the world. While we were excited and inspired by the collaborations and […]
What a Week! Between five incredible keynotes, 70+ participatory sessions, an unFestival and countless fringe events, not to mention informal strategizing in the courtyards of the Kulturbrauerei, I am sure that we are all still taking some time to process all the information. Last week, our incredible volunteers put together a Day 1 roundup, highlighting […]
It is hot hot hot here in Berlin, and the Festival is in full swing! In every corner, little groups are clustered, sharing ideas, plotting, and putting faces to profiles. From graffiti walls to linked budgets, from destroying printers to building a social contract for open data – the only problem is that you can’t […]
Once again we can proudly announce the establishment of a new round of Open Knowledge Local Groups, headed by community leaders around the world. This time we welcome Cameroon, Guernsey, Kenya, Bermuda and New Zealand to the family of Local Groups, which brings the global Open Knowledge community tally beyond the 50+ countries mark. In […]
This is a guest blog post by OpenCorporates. OpenCorporates is now 3 years old. Looking back our first blog on the Open Knowledge (Foundation) blog about reaching 20 million companies, it is heartening to see that we have come a long way. We now have over 70 million companies in 80 jurisdictions worldwide making us […]
Everyone is a storyteller! Just one week away from the big Open Brain Party of OKFestival. We need all the storytelling help you can muster. Trust us, from photos to videos to art to blogs to tweets – share away. The Storytelling team is a community-driven project. We will work with all participants to decide […]
Stories wanted! We’re building a community storytelling team starting with OKFestival. Whether you are in Berlin for the big event or across the globe, our goal is to co-create and compile all the best OKFestival Stories. Many of you tell stories with video, photo, images and text. Some of you are master wordsmiths and aggregators. […]
This is a guest blog post by Kersti from Open Knowledge Netherlands and Rayna from Open Knowledge France/OpenMENA. Both are leading the organisation of the Open Knowledge Community Summit with the support of the Open Knowledge Central team. Less than two weeks to go until the global open community will meet in Berlin and at […]
Open Knowledge Ireland are this week celebrating partial victory in their campaign against application fees for FOI requests. Here is their press release. Open Knowledge Ireland welcomes Minister Howlin’s announcement that Government has approved the removal of an application fee for Freedom of Information Requests Open Knowledge Ireland welcomes the announcement by the Minister that […]
This is a cross-post from the OKFestival blog, see the original here. Read also about the first stream we presented, the Knowledge Stream. In this 3-post series, we turn the spotlight to the the narrative streams of this year’s Open Knowledge Festival. We’ve already highlighted the Knowledge stream; today’s stream of choice is Society. This stream is […]
“What has open data got to do with education?” This was the question yesterday’s online community session attempted to unravel. During the session it was agreed that potential for open data in the education space is huge, with an increasing number of case-studies emerging and exciting data hackathons taking place. However there are also many […]
The Open Knowledge Festival team is thrilled to announce that Beatriz Busaniche will be joining us as a keynote speaker in Berlin this year. Beatriz Busaniche is a free software and culture expert and advocate, a board member of the Vía Libre Foundation in Argentina, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, a core […]
This is a guest blog post by the French NGO Regards Citoyens, which actively promotes public Open Data principles in France since 2009 and lobbying transparency since 2010. They create web projects using public data to provide tools for a better dialogue between citizens and representatives. Their most known initiative is a parliamentary monitoring website: […]
We’re on a skillshare craze leading up to OKFestival. A few weeks ago we hosted a session all about how to create great videos with our guest Sam Muirhead. This week we are inviting you to join a Photography Skillshare. Events is one of the top ways that you are involved in Open Knowledge. So, […]
Martin Tisné, Omidyar Network’s director, policy (UK) and Nicholas Gruen, economist and CEO of Lateral Economics, last week unveiled in Canberra the report, Open for Business. It is the first study to quantify and illustrate the potential of Open Data to help achieve the G20’s economic growth target. Martin makes the economic case for open […]
This year, we have the great honour of welcoming Patrick Alley, co-founder and director of Global Witness, to the Open Knowledge Festival stage. Patrick Alley took part in the organisation’s first investigations into the Thai-Khmer Rouge timber trade in 1995 and has since participated in over fifty field investigations in South East Asia, Africa and […]
This is the fourth and (so far) final travel-guest blog post from Open Steps, an initiative by two young Berliners Alex (a software developer from Spain) and Margo (a graduate in European politics from France) who decided to leave their daily lives and travel around the world for one year to meet people and organizations […]
This is a translated and edited version of a blog post originally appearing on the Danish denfri.dk blog. See the original post here. These past few weeks have highlighted the crossroads that we as a society are facing: Whether non-open data, siloed knowledge and patented ideas make up the best way for growth and innovation? […]
We are pleased to announce that Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission and a staunch supporter of open data, open government and open access, will join us in Berlin this year as a keynote speaker. Neelie Kroes is responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, one of seven flagship initiatives of Europe […]
This is a cross-post from the OKFestival blog, see the original here The time is now. The time is today! If you haven’t already, it’s time to buy your tickets because today, we announce the names of our four amazing keynote speakers! This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming this stellar line-up of activists, […]
This is a cross-post from the OKFestival blog, see the original here Thank you to everyone who applied for Financial Aid this year – we so appreciate your patience while we’ve worked hard with various partners and sponsors to allocate funding. Over the past few weeks we’ve been reaching out to successful applicants so while […]
This is a guest blog post by Andrew Simms analyst and campaigner at our StopSecretContracts.org coalition partner Global Witness. If you believe public contracts should be open contracts, sign our petition and let world leaders know. This article first appeared on Global Witness’s website. Symbolism doesn’t get much better than this – thousands of homeless […]
The Hungarian government has started to target transparency and humanitarian NGOs. The political climate in Hungary has been deteriorating sharply since the re-election of the government led by Viktor Orban. The latest indication of a harsher political environment is the harassment of humanitarian and transparency NGOs. The Hungarian government accuses the targeted NGOs to be […]
To create societies where everyone has both access to key information and the ability to use it to understand and shape their lives, we must build knowledge into the heart of all of our activities. This is a big task which requires not just a global shift in mindset, but also that we build the […]
Happy June! We have a few Community Sessions to announce. OKFestival is almost a month away. Videos are key for storytelling, so we are hosting a Video Skillshare to help us all learn. The Open Education Working Group will join us to talk about why open data matters in education. Join us for these two […]
This is a blog post by Martin Kaltenböck & Anne-Claire Bellec, cross-posted from the Semantic Puzzle Blog. Anne-Claire Bellec is Communications Manager at the Global Buildings Performance Network (http://www.gbpn.org), located at GBPNs headquarters in Paris, France, and Martin Kaltenböck is the responsible for web-based data tools at Semantic Web Company, a Linked Open Data specialised […]
This is a guest blog post by the DATA (Datos Abiertos, Transparencia y Acceso a la información) Uruguay Team. This year’s OKFestival will play host to many new ideas, and this is one of them. We’ve created a space which allows “serendipity” to get to work, in contrast with the rest of the Festival; the […]
Last month flew by! It’s already June and time to turn the spotlight on the Open Knowledge community’s events which rocked the month of May! Bikestorming goes Pecha Kucha in Argentina Bikestorming is a mobile app to grow urban cycling in cities around the world, developed by members of Open Knowledge Argentina’s community. Matías Kalwill […]
Save the Date: We are thrilled to announce that the Open Knowledge community is organising a community session on Tuesday July 15th, 2014 from 1pm – 4pm, before the festival officially starts. This will be taking place at the OKFestival Venue, situated in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. We are delighted that so many […]
At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]
We’re very happy to launch today a new website for the Open Development Toolkit, which which includes a number of new features to help people make use of, and contribute to, the project. When the project began in early 2014, the project brief was fairly open; since then, after speaking to various members of the […]
This is a cross-post from the OpenMENA blog. Find the original here. Civil society group OpenGovTN have asked our OpenMENA collaboration of Local Groups to join a forthcoming national public consultation in Tunesia. This aims to build an action plan which will bring greater openness and more collaborative governance to Tunisia, and the process, referred […]
Last month we asked the Open knowledge community to start sharing more details about the events we all run, to discover how many people are rocking Open Knowledge events all around the world! The community has been great at responding the call and now we’re glad to feature some of the April events we got […]
What real-world problems are there related to education in the developing world that could potentially be solved by open data and technology solutions? How about: Insufficiently trained teachers, badly informed decision makers, lack of key data sets, the inferior quality of teaching resources and their poor discoverability, inadequate infrastructure meaning that education can rarely be […]
A recent European Court Justice (ECJ) ruling may affect how privacy, transparency, and open data interact and has a direct relation with growing discussion about the “right to be forgotten”. Roughly summarized the ruling finds that organisations which publish information may be obliged to “take down” and remove information when an individual requests that removal […]
It is with great excitement that we can announce the establishment of a new round of Open Knowledge Local Groups, headed by new Ambassadors around the world. This time we welcome El Salvador, Hungary, Iran, Malta, Paraguay, Philippines and Romania to the family of Local Groups, which now stretch over 45 countries worldwide. In this […]
Over the last few months we have received hundreds of terrific proposals for this year’s Open Knowledge Festival programme. Thank you for your ideas and your input! There have been more sessions proposed than we could possibly accommodate and as a result, we’ve had the incredibly difficult task of whittling down all of those great […]
Royal Dutch Shell and the Italian oil company, Eni, have been implicated in a secret oil deal that enriched the former Nigerian oil minister to a staggering degree, and lost the Nigerian state $1.1 billion that could have been spent on vital and much needed services. As shareholders and investors gather today at Shell’s Annual […]
Learning and sharing across the global Open Knowledge community are the two core purposes of our regular Community Sessions. This week Mart van de Ven and Bastien Douglas joined us to share all about the Open Data Hong Kong community. Some of the key lessons they advised are: ask your community for help more, have […]
The following post is by Friedrich Lindenberg (and on Twitter), originally posted here. What is the next European dataset that investigative journalists should look at? Back in 2012 at the DataHarvest conference, Brigitte, investigative superstar from FarmSubsidy and co-host of the conference, had a clear answer: let’s open up TED (Tenders Electronic Daily). TED is […]
Our Financial Aid applications closed on May 4th and we’ve been working hard to review all the applications and get word out to you as soon as possible if you’re one of those selected. However, we’ve had many more applications than expected and while we’re thrilled so many of you want to come, it does […]
Got data skills to share? Member of a community that wants to turn data into information? Know about a data journalism or civic activism project or organisation which need a push for using data more effectively? The School of Data needs you! We are currently broadening our efforts to spread data skills around the world, […]
Open Data Hong Kong is an open, participative, and volunteer-run group of Hong Kong citizens who support Open Data. Join Mart van de Ven, Open Knowledge Ambassador for Hong Kong, and Bastien Douglas of ODHK for a discussion about their work. How to Participate This Community Session will be hosted via G+. We will record […]
We are excited to announce the second round of the Open Humanities Awards, running from 30 April until 30 May 2014 (UPDATED) June 6. There are €20,000 worth of prizes on offer in two dedicated tracks: Open track: for projects that either use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching […]
We are very pleased to announce that Open Knowledge Ireland has become the newest Chapter of Open Knowledge! Building on their relentless work as an Open Knowledge Local Group over the last 1.5 years, the rapidly growing Irish group is now taking the big next step by becoming an independent, self-sustainable Chapter. The efforts of […]
From baby name datasets and apps via the South Australian government to new City of Surrey, B.C., (Canada) site, there are many instances of CKAN around the world. CKAN is the data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. It is used by various […]
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