The Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign has set up a poll to help gather people’s opinions on the best entrants for the Show Us A Better Way competition run by the Power of Information Task Force. They also wrote about this in the Guardian a few days back. As we recently posted about, we entered […]
On Monday we hosted a virtual meeting on open textbooks. A transcript of the meeting is up on the wiki page. There is also a brief writeup on Wikibooks News. Several things to come out of the meeting: There was general agreement that it would great if people interested in and working with open textbooks […]
A final reminder for our open textbook meeting later today. Details from the wiki page: This will be an online meeting for anyone interested in open textbooks – including students, educators, authors, activists, funders, policy makers, distributors and publishers. The event will be an opportunity for people who work in this area to present projects, […]
We’ve recently updated Open Shakespeare. The project was started a while back as an open knowledge ‘exemplar project’ – i.e. as a simple ‘hello world’ type open knowledge package (for more on this see the FAQ). It aims to: Provide the complete works of Shakespeare, along with textual apparatus (introduction, notes) and tools (concordance, search […]
Since early 2007 we’ve had a project dubbed ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ on the backburner. In a sentence, the project would be a web application that interactively represented UK government budgetary information using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies. We recently submitted the project to the Show Us A Better Way and […]
Hjalmar Gislason recently wrote to us to tell us about an initiative to open up material from the Icelandic government and other public institutions. In The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data he writes: In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades […]
In addition to our Open Text Book project, we’re very interested in the creation, distribution, use and re-use of open textbooks. We’ve arranged a virtual meeting later this month for anyone interested. Details are as follows: When: Monday 29th September, 1000 PST, 1800 BST or 1900 CEST Where: #okfn IRC channel at oftc.net. To join […]
After discussions with Cameron Neylon of Open Wetware and Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons we’ve set up an open science mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-science As far as we could tell, there wasn’t a general mailing list for people interested open science. Hence the new list aims cover this gap, and to strengthen and consolidate the open […]
We’ve recently been in conversation with various individuals about starting a project to map open projects and groups. People who have been particularly keen include: Panagiota Alevizou, London School of Economics Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation Juan Carlos De Martin, COMMUNIA Heather Ford, iCommons David J Patrick, Linuxcaffe Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation and soon of the […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation now has an account on Identi.ca (an open service which we posted about last month): http://identi.ca/okfn There is also a group on (the pretty non-open) LinkedIn! http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=159750
We are pleased to welcome Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, onto the Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Advisory Council, as we announced in February is the body formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the opendefinition.org site – including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Software […]
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay recently published an excellent paper on open data in the life sciences in Nature Precedings entitled Check Your Data Freedom: A Taxonomy to Assess Life Science Database Openness. From the abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents […]
Last week I went to the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona for the Euroscience Open Forum Satellite Event organised by Science Commons. The event brought together together lawyers, scientists, policy makers, stakeholders and representatives from many different groups and organisations interested in open access and open data in scientific research from across Europe. The event […]
Over the past few days Evan Prodromou of Wikitravel and Vinismo launched two new open services: ur1.ca and Identi.ca. Evan got in touch to make sure that both services were compliant with the draft Open Service Definition and we’re pleased to say that they are both fully open services! Ur1.ca is a neat little service […]
We’ll be presenting at Open Tech 2008 which takes place next Saturday (5th July). Specifically there’ll be a talk (by Rufus Pollock) on “Opening Data”, and I’ll be speaking about CKAN. This is a great event with lots of open knowledge stuff going on so do come along. Details are as follows: When: Saturday 5th […]
Today the number of packages in the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) has passed the 200 mark! CKAN is an open registry of (open) knowledge packages – from genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics. CKAN currently includes basic metadata about each package – including title, URL, download URL, tags, license information and notes. Packages include […]
At the first Open Visualisation Workshop last month, we found there was significant demand for regular workshops. Hence, the second Open Visualisation Workshop will take place a week from Saturday! Details are as follows: When: Saturday 21st June 2008, 11am – 5pm Where: Trampoline Systems, 8-15 Dereham Place, London, EC2A 3HJ (view on OpenStreetMap) Wiki: […]
For a while we’ve been planning to help to produce a set of Public Domain Calculators – which each aim to indicate whether or not a given work is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. The idea arose in relation to our Public Domain Works project (a registry of works in the public […]
We’ve just added an Italian translation of the annotated Open Knowledge Definition – thanks to Primavera De Filippi, Andrea Glorioso and Juan Carlos De Martin at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino! If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in […]
The first Open Visualisation Workshop took place on Saturday as we mentioned last week. Details, notes and links are available on the event’s wiki page. The event took place at Trampoline Systems’ new site in East London. To make sure the event was as informal as it was billed to be – we left the […]
As we mentioned last month we’ve been organising an informal, hands-on workshop focusing on open source visualisation technologies. This will take place on this coming Saturday in London. Details are as follows: When: Saturday 24th May 2008 from 11 am until whenever people need to leave (probably 4 or 5 pm); Where: Trampoline Systems, 8-15 […]
Over the past week or so there has been a flurry of posts about ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ open access, including the following: Strong and weak OA, Peter Suber What’s in a Name? Strong and Weak Open Access, Glyn Moody The Two Forms of OA Have Been Defined: They Now Need Value-Neutral Names, Stevan Harnad Lower […]
The first Open Knowledge London meetup will take place this Wednesday at the London Knowledge Lab. The meetup should be great opportunity for informal discussion of open knowledge projects and issues. If you’d like to participate or present, please add details to the wiki page! When: Wednesday 30th April, 19:00-21:00 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 […]
SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have just announced a new SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals. In order for journals to be approved, they must use a Creative Commons Attribution license – which is compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition. It is great […]
Dr. Paolo D’Iorio recently invited me to attend the first meeting of an EU funded Working Group “devoted to analyzing the current debate on the legal, economic and social conditions for setting-up open scholarly communities on the web”. The meeting was part of COST: COST – European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical […]
We are currently in the process of organising an informal, hands-on workshop for those who work with, or are interested in, open-source visualisation technologies: http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenVisualisation/Workshop http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenVisualisation The event will take place somewhere in central London on a weekend in May. If you are interested in participating, please add your name to the wiki page and […]
Make Textbooks Affordable, a campaign composed of Student Associations and Public Interest Research Groups from across the US, yesterday released a statement in support of open textbooks signed by 1000 academics. From the press release: Open textbooks are complete, reviewed textbooks written by academics that can be used online at no cost and printed for […]
We’re pleased to announce that audio, images and slides from OKCon 2008 are now available at the Post-Event Information page. Most of the material can be obtained from the OKF subversion repository. If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll post a link from the Post-Event […]
Jordan Hatcher, of opencontentlawyer.com and chair of the Advisory Council for the Open Knowledge Definition took the Public Domain Dedication & License out of beta on Saturday at OKCon. The PDDL (which we blogged about in December) was initially sponsored by Talis and is specifically aimed at providing a suitable license for open data — […]
Jordan Hatcher, of opencontentlawyer.com and chair of the Advisory Council for the Open Knowledge Definition took the Public Domain Dedication & License out of beta on Saturday at OKCon. The PDDL (which we blogged about in December) was initially sponsored by Talis and is specifically aimed at providing a suitable license for open data — […]
We’ve just added a Basque translation of the Open Knowledge Definition – thanks to Gotzon Egia. If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Following on from a spate of fresh translations of the Open Knowledge Definition last week, we’ve just added translations in Spanish and Catalan – thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan of CC Spain and CC Catalonia. Once again – if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, […]
We’re on a bit of a roll with translations of the Open Knowledge Definition! We’ve now got a Polish translation thanks to JarosÅ‚aw Lipszyc. Again – if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the […]
We’ve now added a Danish translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) to opendefinition.org – thanks to Peter Froberg. We look foward to adding more translations in the near future. If you would like to help out translating the Definition into another language – please don’t hesitate to get in touch on our discuss list.
Yesterday Creative Commons announced that their Attribution and Attribution Sharealike licenses will feature a seal of approval and link to Freedom Defined – the Definition of Free Cultural Works. We’ve been in touch with Freedom Defined since May 2006 (we blogged about the project last year) as their aims are so similar to that of […]
We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site – including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to […]
Andrew Vickers, a biostatistician at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, recently published an article in the New York Times about his experiences trying to get hold of raw data for cancer research: Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It. In it he describes various difficulties he has encountered trying to get hold of the […]
Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin. COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. […]
Today the Free Knowledge Institute is officially launched in the Netherlands: The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly […]
On Saturday I attended a ‘BarCamp’ on the Power of Information Review Recommendation 8 – which suggests there should be a re-use request service for UK Public Sector Information (we blogged about this in October). The event was organised by John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information and was attended by representatives from […]
A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments. The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge […]
Last night Science Commons announced the release of the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data: The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to […]
Last week the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at the Library of Congress released their Draft Report. They are soliciting for public comment until the 15th December, in good time for final submission on the 9th January. The aim of the working group is to: Present findings on how bibliographic control and […]
I’ve just been poking around at the Big Art Mob website which was launched by Channel 4 earlier this year and picked up a Royal Television Society Innovation Award earlier this month. It aims to “create the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art” using user-submitted camera phone pictures and a Google maps API. Though […]
As followers of the mailing list will know we are now planning to join forces with Creative Commons on the Internet Archive’s Open Library project. Our first step is to develop ‘public domain calculators’ for the different jurisdictions across Europe. Here a calculator is just an algorithm for determining whether a given work is Public […]
We’ve recently started looking into how much environmental data made available on the web is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a Data Distribution Centre (DDC) – which is a good start to see what data is available. The DDC “offers access to baseline and […]
Just a quick note to say that the study of usage of and attitudes towards open content licenses in cultural heritage organisations (which we blogged back in August) has now been published. The final report is available here. 107 organisations responded to the survey. The executive summary lists the following key findings: Only 4 respondents […]
A few weeks ago, Rufus and I attended the annual Gerald Aylmer Seminar, jointly organised by the National Archives and the Royal Historical Society. The topic for the event was ‘Digital Horizons: how the digital revolution changes the relationship between historians and their historical sources’. Here are some belated jottings… Opening talk by Natalie Ceeney, […]
Last week I went to the OpenLearn 2007 conference hosted at the Open University. A lot was packed into the couple of days, and there was representation from different OER (Open Educational Resources) groups from around the world. There were an abundance of new projects, papers, groups and initiatives mentioned, and a recurring sentiment was […]
Recently the Agile Knowledge and Semantic Web research group (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig launched Cofundos.org. Confundos aims to help people share, refine, fund and realise new ideas for open software and knowledge projects. It was founded and developed by Sören Auer, who leads the AKSW research group (and is on the OKF’s advisory board). The […]
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