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 […]
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 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 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 Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock is going to speak at Open Camp Sofia 2011 on the 5th June. Just before we’re going to be running a workshop/hackday on open government data. If you’d like to come along, please register here: From the […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Guardian recently published an interesting article on open data in science, including interviews with OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock and other leading voices from the world of open science. Here’s Rufus: “The litmus test of openness is whether you can have […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are currently 10 days left to enter the Open Data Challenge, Europe’s biggest open data competition to date! You can submit ideas, applications, visualisations and datasets until the 5th June 2011 via the following link. We’d be very grateful for […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re currently looking for more people to help map copyright law in countries around the world – so we can make it easier for people to find and reuse works which have entered the public domain. We’re particularly keen to contact […]
Welcome to the seventeenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 17 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 17 Contents: Announcing… The Open Data Challenge! OKCon 2011: Call for Participation New Working Group on Open Economics launches Yourtopia.net GetTheData.org […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over the past 48 hours or so we’ve been busy loading 12 years of Italian spending data into Open Spending. Further details on the project and the data are below. This project was put together by Stefano Costa, Friedrich Lindenberg, Luca […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce the release of #opendata, a new short film clip about open government data. The film includes interview footage with numerous open government data gurus and advocates, which we shot at last year’s Open […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. For a long while our Working Group on EU Open Data has been very keen to run a pan-European open data competition. Hence we’re very pleased to announced the opening of the Open Data Challenge, which is precisely such a competition. […]
The following post is from Professor Nigel Shadbolt, who is on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. This article was originally published in Think Quarterly and is reproduced here with permission from the author. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been defined by our insatiable demand for information. It has led to […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As many of you will know, the Public Domain Calculators aim to make it easier to find out which works are in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. There are two main parts of the project: A collection of flowcharts, […]
The following post is from Mark Hahnel, founder of the Science 3.0 network and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. An unprecedented amount of freely reusable government information is currently being released by public bodies around the globe. This is being consumed and reused by numerous stakeholders – including civic developers, data literate citizens, data journalists, NGOs, researchers, and companies. There […]
Welcome to the sixteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 16 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 16 Contents: Open Government Data Camp 2010 Launch of PublicData.eu Europe’s Energy CKAN keeps on growing – new releases, and launch […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re proud to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is part of a new team which will take on the maintenance of ePSIplatform project for the next two years. As many of you will know ePSIplatform is a key resource for […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. A few weeks back we ran a small workshop in Berlin for Public Domain Day 2011. It was attended by a mix of artists, scholars, legal experts, technologists, and passers by. We started out with a general conversation in which the […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We submitted a proposal for a project called Spending Stories to the Knight News Challenge back in December but in the rush before Christmas we didn’t get a chance to post about here! The News Challenge aims to “advance the future […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As you may well have heard, in December there were rumours that the Delicious social bookmarking service may be discontinued. This has caused a flurry of activity in the online world to back up bookmarks and to look for alternative similar […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The 1st of January every year is Public Domain Day, when new works enter the public domain in many (though unfortunately not all) countries around the world. To celebrate, the Open Knowledge Foundation is launching the Public Domain Review, a web-based […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today was the Eurostat Hackday, where coders and designers in several European cities gathered to dig into the Eurostat data, the biggest source of statistical information about Europe and European member states. We met at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in […]
A reminder that this Thursday 16th December is the Eurostat Hackday in a number of European cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Edinburgh, and London. More information is available at: From the blurb: What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the largest source of statistical information about European member states. It contains detailed comparative information on everything from […]
A report from an EU meeting on the “goals and requirements for a pan-European data portal” is now online (PDF). The meeting took place in Luxembourg last month. Participants included Nigel Shadbolt, one of four members of the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, and Jose Manuel Alonso, co-lead of the eGovernment Interest Group at […]
A few weeks ago was the first international Open Government Data Camp in London. The event brought hundreds of people interested in open government data from around the world for two days of talks, discussions, planning and coding. You can now find videos, photos, notes and other material from the event online at:
We’re currently organising a ‘hackday’ on the Eurostat data, which will take place on Wednesday 16th December 2010: If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch on the euopendata mailing list, or drop us a line on eurostat at okfn dot org. From the website: Eurostat Hackday What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the […]
A quick note to announce (and celebrate!) the launch of a new community driven French open data catalogue, NosDonnees.fr last Friday in Paris. The catalogue is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Regards Citoyens. Efforts are currently underway to populate the catalogue with information about French public datasets, including legal information about […]
A brief reminder that this Saturday 4th December is the international open data hackathon! What is it? As says the blurb: It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and […]
As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data. We are […]
We’re very excited to announce that we’re helping to organise an international series of events to convert not-very-useful, unstructured, non-machine-readable sources of public information into nice clean structured data. This will make it much easier for people to reuse the data, whether this is mixing it with other data sources (e.g. different sources of information […]
The folks over at Fish Subsidy (who are also behind the amazing Farm Subsidy project) have just released a new mapping tool to help people find out how €3.4 billion of European fisheries subsidies is spent: This is a great example of reusing European public data to make it easier to understand for citizens, journalists […]
We’re helping to organise an event (hopefully a series of events!) about data visualisation in Berlin later this November. We started doing workshops on open source visualisation technologies in London a few years ago and hope to pick up with more activity in this area very soon! If you’re interested in keeping in getting involved, […]
As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources. […]
The European Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive is intended to make it easier for everyone to find and reuse information produced by public bodies. The European Commission’s recognition of the value of PSI dates back to at least the late 1990s, well before the more recent wave of interest in open government data. The EC […]
Every year on January 1st hundreds of works enter the public domain around the world. So how do we know which works will come of age in 2011? Like last year we are keen to get a picture of this well in advance so we can start planning celebrations for Public Domain Day 2011 (see […]
Last week I sat down with Primavera De Filippi, our new coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain and we edited some footage we had shot at a meeting a while ago into a microshort film about the Public Domain Calculators. Public Domain Calculators from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. […]
Last Thursday we had a Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain in Berlin (as we blogged about here and here). It was a great opportunity for movers and shakers from the world of open bibliographic data to meet in person, and to discuss various projects, policies, standards and initiatives relating to making […]
Following is an interview with Hugh McGuire, Founder of the Librivox project and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. Could you tell us a bit about the project and its background? Why did you start it? When? What was the need at the time? There were some philosophical reasons, […]
So far it has a great week for open bibliographic data fans! Yesterday Konstanz University Library relicensed their data under CC0, as reported by Adrian Pohl, Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data: Mathias Schindler today tweeted that the University Library Konstanz eventually published its data under CC-0. This is the first […]
A brief reminder that our workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain (which we blogged about a few months ago) is taking place on Thursday 7th October. Details are as follows: Where? Rooms 108/108a, FU Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195 Berlin When? Thursday 7th October 2010 Registration? http://publicdomain.eventbrite.com/ Hashtag? #pdobd Notes? http://okfnpad.org/pdobd Here’s the […]
We’re very pleased to see that the Norwegian government will be using our CKAN software, an open-source registry of open data, to build their national data catalogue! From their announcement: During the next few months, data.norge.no will be set up as a national data catalog using CKAN, Drupal, and the integration module used by data.gov.uk. […]
We’re delighted to announce that our friends at the Open Data Network and OKF Deutschland last week released some work that they have been doing to collate and visualise information related to public spending in Germany: Infosthetics broke the news: Offener Haushalt [offenerhaushalt.de] (German for ‘open budget’) is another demonstration of the large potential behind […]
We’re pleased to announce that a new report on access to information and open government data is open for consultation! From the announcement: Access Info Europe and the Open Knowledge Foundation, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Information Program, are holding a public consultation on open government data and the right of access to […]
Many of you will be familiar with the now ubiquitous Linked Open Data cloud diagram, maintained by Richard Cyganiak. The diagram illustrates efforts to link together many different data sources, from the CIA World Factbook to DBpedia, a structured database of information extracted from Wikipedia. It looks like this: We’re very pleased that the diagram’s […]
Last week I attended the Data-driven journalism in Amsterdam (which we blogged about here) run by the European Journalism (who interviewed me here). My slides from the event are now up here: Open Data and Data Driven Journalism View more presentations from jwyg. Below are some lovely lofi graphical notes from Anna Lena Schiller: It […]
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