At the end of November, Open Knowledge, School of Data and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) wrapped-up their six-month data journalism training for media organisations in the Philippines, the first of its kind. Over 100 journalists and civil servants gathered at the Cocoon Hotel in Quezon City to see the twelve participating media […]
Open Knowledge has produced an interactive trade dashboard for anti-corruption NGO Global Witness to supplement their exposé on EU and US companies importing illegal timber from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC Timber Timber Trade Tracker consumes open data from DataHub.io to visualise where in the world Congolese timber is going. The dashboard makes […]
Open Knowledge in partnership with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism is pleased to announce the launch of Data Journalism Ph 2015. Supported by the World Bank, the program will train journalists and citizen media in producing high-quality, data-driven stories. In recent years, government and multilateral agencies in the Philippines have published large amounts of […]
Sam Leon, one of Open Knowledge’s data experts, talks about his experiences working as an School of Data Embedded Fellow at Global Witness. Global Witness are a Nobel Peace Prize nominated not-for-profit organisation devoted to investigating and campaigning against corruption related to the extractives industries. Earlier this year they received the TED Prize and were […]
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 […]
On Monday of this week, the Open Knowledge Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the BBC. The BBC also signed separate memorandums with the Europeana Foundation, the Open Data Institute and the Mozilla Foundation. Laura James, CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation, signs the MoU with James Purnell, BBC Director of Strategy and Digital. […]
A depiction of a banquet by 17th Centruy Italian artist, Morazzone, one of the many scans now in the public domain Cross-posted from the OpenGLAM Blog. Yesterday the J. Paul Getty Trust launched its Open Content Program which saw the release of 4,600 high-resolution scans of works from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles into […]
Earlier this year, as part of the DM2E project, we put out a call to humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source. We’re very pleased to announce that the winners […]
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 […]
We’re pleased to say that the Open Knowledge Foundation will be at SXSWi this year. I’ll be on speaking on the Culture Hack panel alongside my colleagues from Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America talking about why libraries, galleries, archives and museums should open up their content and data and what’s being done […]
A couple of weeks ago we announced the Open Humanities Awards a fantastic new initiative to support innovative projects that use open data, open content or open source to further teaching and research in the humanities. There are €15,000 of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects lasting up to 6 months. The winners will be […]
We are excited to announce the first ever Open Humanities Awards. There are €15,000 worth of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects that use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching and research. Whether you’re interested in patterns of allusion in Aristotle, networks of correspondence in the Jewish Enlightenment or digitising […]
The Guardian Data Blog and Google are teaming up to find the best open government datavis out there. There is a top prize of $2,000 on offer for the best visualisation of open government data. The Open Knowledge Foundation will be helping to judge the competition and we want to see imaginative, clear and beautiful […]
News just in that Boundless, the open source digital textbook provider, is releasing all of its 18 open source textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. We covered the progress of this brilliant initiative mid-way through last year. Boundless leverages open content on the web, whether that’s information on Wikipedia or digital copies […]
Last week Tim Gowers, Cambridge University mathematician and open access advocate who led the recent boycott of Elsevier, announced an exciting new open access initiative for mathematicians on his blog. The project, called the Episciences Project, will make it super quick and easy to set up open access journals called “epijournals”. Epijournals are electronic journals […]
The Wikimedia Foundation has just announced its newest project, Wikivoyage, a free, online travel guide that anyone can edit. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said of the launch: “There’s a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That’s about to change,” said Sue Gardner, […]
We’ve just announced 7 job vacancies at the Foundation. If you’re passionate about open knowledge and want to help us build the tools and communities that will make a difference, then apply! We’re hiring for a number of different roles, some technical and some more community focused. More information on each of them can be […]
Where?: Guys Campus, Hodgkin Building, London, SE1 1UL When?: 21st-22md November Sign up: Please fill in the sign-up form Humanities Hack is the first Digital Humanities hack organised jointly by the Kings College London Department of Digital Humanities, DARIAH, the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project and our Open Humanities Working Group. The London event […]
The following is a guest blog post by Harry Verwayen, Business Development Director at Europeana, Europe’s largest cultural heritage data repository. Last week, on September 12 to be exact, we were proud to announce that Europeana released metadata for more than 20 million cultural heritage objects under a Creative Commons Zero Universal Public Domain […]
For a while now our network has been working on applications, tools and platforms for crowd-sourcing and micro-tasking. At the end of last year, we posted about a cute little app developed at a hackday called the Data Digitizer that was being used to transcribe Brazillian budgetary data. In recent months we’ve been working closely […]
THATCamps (The Humanities And Technology Camps) are a form of “unconference” focussed on the nascent discipline of the Digital Humanities that have risen rapidly in popularity since their invention by the folks over at George Mason University. I was lucky enough to be one of 50 participants at this year’s first THATCamp in Europe which […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation is delighted to announce that it will be leading the community work for a three-year EU funded project entitled Digitised Manuscripts to Europena (DM2E). The project consortium, which includes academic institutions, NGOs and commercial partners, will be led by Professor Stefan Gradmann at the Humboldt University. ##Europeana The project aims to […]
The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme. TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public […]
The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator javascript library and the AnnotateIt service. Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations. We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others. Together we can create […]
The following guest post is a guest post by John Cummings, Wikipedian and founder of the Monmouthpedia project. Monmouthpedia is the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town. The project aims to cover every single notable place, people, artefacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible. We will use […]
The following guest post is by Lori Byrd Phillips 2012 US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. She was the second person to become a Wikipedian in Residence, and has served in that role at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis for the past year and a half, where she is now also part time staff. […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data. As part of The Law Factory project we are running an international conference for hacktivists and academics working on parliamentary monitoring and legislative studies. The conference will take place on the the 6th and 7th of July in Paris. The […]
The following is a post by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator for The Public Domain Review and other Open Knowledge Foundation projects. It is cross-posted from the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Working Group Blog. At The Public Domain Review we’re always scouring the internet for public domain gems. It’s simply incredible how much of our […]
The following guest post is by Adam Green, editor of The Public Domain Review. It’s been a year since the launch of The Public Domain Review and we’ve now featured over 30 articles from prominent artists and scholars and displayed hundreds of curious, freely downloadable public domain delights. We’ve had contributions from the historian and […]
‘Tis the season to be jolly. This year when preparing your Christmas feast why not take some inspiration from Mrs Beeton and her legendary 1861 Book of Household Management… Words of wisdom from Mrs Beeton… “In December, the principal household duty lies in preparing for the creature comforts of those near and dear to […]
Take a look at the campaign being run by Carl Malamud and John Podesta called “Yes We Scan”. It’s an effort to encourage the US government to make plans to digitize the contents of all national libraries including the Library of Congress. In a letter addressed to President Barack Obama, John Podesta and Carl Malamud […]
The following guest post is by Anna Powell-Smith from the Open Domesday project. Anna is a member of our brand new Working Group on Open Humanities. Domesday Book might be one of the most famous government datasets ever created. Which makes it all the stranger that it’s not freely available online – at the National […]
The following post is by Jenny Molloy, coordinator of the Open Science Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We are very pleased to announce the publication of an article detailing the working group’s aims and achievements in PLoS Biology’s Community Pages. ‘The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science‘ has already had over […]
The following post is by Claudio Artusio who works for LAPSI, the European Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information. There is still 3 weeks left to apply to the 3rd LAPSI Award on the most user-friendly design of a PSI portal in the EU (http://www.lapsi-project.eu/news/award3). PSI (acronym for Public Sector Information) can be […]
The following post is by Eve Jackson who works for the Index on Censorship. Is the push for openness helping or hindering science? Index on Censorship will be debating the question on Tuesday 6 December at 6.30pm at Imperial College London, with Sir Mark Walport (Director, Wellcome Trust), George Monbiot (columnist, the Guardian), Professor David […]
The following post is by Sam Leon, who’s just joined the OKF as a coommunity coordinator! Read more about Sam here. Back in July of this year a crowd of coders, scientists and new media artists gathered in Berlin for the Open Science Workshop at OKCon. One of the projects to come out of this […]
The following post is from Primavera De Filippi, representative of Creative Commons France and coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Working Group. Many people recognise the value of works which are in the public domain (e.g. the works of Shakespeare, Italian renaissance paintings, classical music, etc). However, it is often difficult for people […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation Hangout will be running this coming Tuesday (and every Tuesday after that) from 5:00pm-7:00pm (UK time). The community team (Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Kat Braybrooke and Sam Leon) will be on IRC in order to help you with any questions or suggestions you have about OKF projects, or advise you on […]
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