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 […]
The following post is by Seember Nyager, CEO of the Public and Private Development Centre in Nigeria, one of our campaign partners in the Stop Secret Contracts campaign Every day, through secret contracts being carried out within public institutions, there is confirmation that the interest of the public is not served. A few days ago, […]
Hi! After last month’s launch-fest, March has been a thoughtful month, with reflective and planning pieces taking centre-stage on our blog. Of course OKFestival has been ramping up since its launch, giving more detail on topics and running sessions to help with submitting proposals; however we’ve also had more from the Community Survey results, as […]
Today it was announced that fraud and error in the UK National Health Service are leading to the loss of around £7 billion each year. This could pay for about 250,000 new nurses, and comes at a time when the service is struggling more than ever under the pressures of austerity. One of the main […]
Nesta, the UK innovation charity, has announced it’s Ten Tech Heroes for Good – and Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Rufus Pollock, is on the list! We’re really proud that the achievements of Rufus and the Open Knowledge Foundation have been recognised in this way: focusing on the power of openness to achieve positive […]
Sign up here for monthly updates to your inbox. Hi! What a month! February may be the shortest month (at least, for those using the Gregorian calendar), but we’ve sure made the most of it. It seems to be the month of “the launch”: the campaign to Stop Secret Contracts; OKFestival’s website, ticket sales and […]
Today we at the Open Knowledge Foundation are launching a new global campaign, Stop Secret Contracts. Secret contracting leads to fraud, corruption, and unaccountability. It means the loss of millions of dollars of public money every year. Join our call to world leaders to end secrecy in public contracting. Secrecy in contracting is leading to […]
We are really pleased to announce that Spain has become the latest Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Last night, during the inaugural I OKFN awards, organised by Open Knowledge Foundation Spain, the group announced to a packed room of open data advocates, government representatives, and community members that they have become an official Chapter […]
We’re delighted to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation Brazil has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to become a, full, official Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. You can read the official announcement on our press page, and here their coordinator, Everton Alvarenga, tells us more. In July 2011, during the Open Knowledge Conference in […]
The year is drawing to a close. Before we tumble headlong into the new year, let’s take a moment to reflect on the incredible success of 2013. Here’s our Top 10 Greatest Hits of the last year, in reverse order… Launch of data.gov In May, one of the most significant CKAN instances ever was launched, […]
Sign up here for monthly updates to your inbox. Hi! We hope your month has been swell! Thanks for tuning in to this month’s Open Knowledge Foundation update – read on to find out about some of the ways we’re making progress towards a more open world. This month’s highlights include key developments in financial […]
Sign up here for monthly updates to your inbox. Hello and welcome to this, your October newsletter. We hope you’ve been having an excellent month. Make sure you check out this post, Defining Open Data – and look out for more in a similar vein over the next week or two. As our movement grows […]
This October, the Open Government Partnership Annual Summit is coming to London. We’re helping to organise the Civil Society Day, which will take place on the 30th October at University of London Union, followed on the 31st October and the 1st November by the main conference. The draft agendas for both the main Summit and […]
OKFestival is back! As the banners are rolled up and the lights turned off in Geneva, we are already looking forward to the next time we’ll all come together. We are super-excited to announce that OKFestival 2014 will take place on the 15-18 July in Berlin, Germany. OKFestival is the biggest gathering of the open […]
The Open Knowledge Conference 2013 is go! Instagram: @nicolassierro, @okconstickers, @oliviertripet We come to you from the lovely shiny Centre International de Conferences Geneve. The first talks and workshops are already underway, and the lobby is filling with the buzz of greetings, reunions and introductions. Already we’ve seen the launch of a brand new portal […]
Sign up for monthly updates to your inbox here Howdy! And welcome to your monthly spotlight on the Open Knowledge Foundation. There’s a whole load of stuff coming up as always, with our community becoming ever more global and ever more active – find out some of it below. It’s just 2 weeks until we’ll […]
Sign up for monthly updates to your inbox here It’s been a month for big announcements on openness, and we’ve been at the forefront as ever. The G8 summit in Northern Ireland catalysed a whole load of activity around open government data, and we want to make sure that words are translated into effective action. […]
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight A cow with its tail to the west makes the weather best Onion skins very thin, mild winter coming in Humans have always wanted to know what the weather has in store for them, and have come up with a whole load of ways to predict what’s coming; some […]
Sign up here to receive the monthly Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter by email. How time flies! May 20th was our 9th birthday, and to mark the occasion we allowed ourselves a little reminiscent birthday post, looking back on how we’ve been doing. Thanks so much for all your lovely messages and birthday wishes! And we […]
Heard of Big Data? How about #smalldata? There’s been loads of buzz this month around #smalldata, and the need to prevent the centralisation of data-power in the hands of the few. Redistributing knowledge power is what we’re all about at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and this month’s launch of data.okfn.org is doing just that – […]
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 […]
We’re really pleased by this week’s announcement from the Society of Cultural Anthropology that their influential journal, Cultural Anthropology will become open access by next year. The plan is that from the first issue of 2014, the journal will be available online globally under an open access license, along with 10 years’ worth of the […]
Our beautiful showcase for public domain works, The Public Domain Review, has just launched its major fundraising drive. It needs your help to stay alive. Here’s a delightful film telling the tale of our cash-strapped editor’s struggle to keep afloat – share it far and wide! With the initial funding for The Public Domain Review […]
One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry […]
The following guest post is by Stef. ###European Union legislation: In whose interest? Brussels is a globally important policy-making center. The European single market is advanced and huge, with industry interests competing with national politics and NGO values. Policy negotiations at this level attract powerful interests. The current Data Protection Regulation, for example, brings in […]
Great News! Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission, has sent her personal best wishes to the OKF team in Greece who launched their brand new open data portal last week! She said: “Open data is a very powerful lever for both a better economy and society. Open data is fuel for innovation, […]
The following post is by Maria Schröder and Christian Heise from the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. It is cross-posted (and slightly shortened) from the Open Government Partnership blog. Germany’s official policy on transparency and accountability is lacking commitment and leadership. Disappointed by the political elites, the community is continuously trying to make the case for […]
We’ve been following the case of Boundless Learning on the OKF blg (see here and here), in which the world’s most prominent producer of Open Access textbooks online is being sued by the world’s biggest producers of physical, copyrighted textbooks. In the latest twist to the tale, Boundless have filed their answer, requesting a trial […]
Sign up here to receive the Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter into your inbox every couple of months. We’re fresh back from our biannual summit, which brought together members from Open Knowledge Foundation Local Groups and Working Groups around the world. It was truly inspiring to hear about the vision and dedication of people in so […]
The editor of The Public Domain Review, Adam Green, recently gave a feature-length interview to Vice magazine Italy. You can find the original in Italian here, and an English version below! While there is a wealth of copyright-free material available online, The Public Domain Review is carving out a niche as strongly curated website with […]
The ePSI platform team have announced “three days of open data fun” in Warsaw next month. The big day is the 2013 ePSI platform conference on 22nd February, but you’re also all invited to a workshop on the 21st, and a hackday on the 23rd! ###At a glance What?: ePSI conference, workshop and hackday When?: […]
Natural England, in partnership with the Environment Agency, is launching a new web-portal service called My Environment. To celebrate its launch, My Environment is running an Apps competition. From the announcement: Could you create an app that will appeal to mobile device users and help them to engage with nature? The app that best helps […]
Calling all Transport Hackers! The Urban Data Challenge has launched, a semi-competitive open transport data hacking spree featuring datasets from San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich. The idea is to merge and compare the mobility datasets, and see what new insights can be drawn. From their website: Buses, trams, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars zoom about modern […]
So it came and it went, and we seem to all have survived the End of the World. It’s been a big year, so as we bid it farewell and head full throttle into the very futuristic-sounding 2013, here’s a little review of the 5 most popular stories from the blog in the last twelve […]
A little note on behalf of Nelson Lah, Chair of the Open Data Society of British Columbia, Canada. The Open Data Society of BC is hosting the BC Open Data Summit on February 19, 2013 in downtown Vancouver at SFU Segal Graduate School of Business at 500 Granville Street. We want you to be part […]
Well here in the northern hemisphere the days are drawing in and winter is upon us. Autumn’s been ace though, and as busy as ever! OKFest went better than we could have imagined, and we got so excited that we started planning next year’s event in Geneva before we’d even left Helsinki! We’ve also been […]
Horizon 2020 is the EU’s proposed new programme for research and innovation, which would run from 2014 to 2020. The programme would create an “Innovation Union” with a budget of €80million, bringing together current research and innovation funding available through a number of sources. On 28th November MEPs are set to vote on the proposals, […]
Following on from our recent announcement of seven new jobs at the Foundation, we’re really pleased to say we’ve got even more opportunities available! CKAN, the world’s leading open-source data portal platform, is looking to recruit full and part-time Python developers, so if you’re a Python web-developer who’d like to help build exciting open data […]
A project at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) is making fantastic use of the Pybossa tool (a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre) in a citizen science project called ‘Feynman’s Flowers’, which launched this weekend. The project asks members of the public to help unlock the secrets of magnetism […]
Here’s an interesting project using slightly unorthodox means to get data out into the open: crowdfunding the purchase of US healthcare data for subsequent open release. The company behind the project is NotOnly Dev, a Health IT software incubator who describe themselves as a “not-only-for-profit” company. Earlier this year they released a Doctor Social Graph, […]
Loving this infographic, which explains and launches the Open Transport Data Manifesto: The Manifesto is the product of an ePSI workshop which took place in Helsinki in September in the run-up to OKFest, ‘Transport Data – fueling mobility of the future and smart cities’. 33 participants from 15 countries came together, to discuss the current […]
It is not an immediately obvious partnership, and yet open data and crisis response go together incredibly well. As storms have lashed the East coast of the US in recent days, causing tragic loss of life and enormous financial damage, many of the tools which have helped citizens to track its path and stay safe […]
At the start of this week, which is Open Access week, we heard from Martin Weller about some of his fears for the future of Open Access. We’ve been collecting a few opinions from around the OKFN on the future of OA. Here’s a selection. What do you think? ###Ross Mounce: The future of publicly-funded […]
Exciting news on open legislative data from the US. Eric Mills (from the Sunlight Foundation), Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us) and Derek Willis have been beavering away on a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov, the official source for legislative information for the US Congress. They’ve just hit a key milestone – the incorporation of […]
New research shows that the traditional arguments for copyright extension are as flawed as we always suspected. Copyright is generally defended in terms of the stimulus it gives to creative production: what motivation would anyone have to do anything ever if they don’t get decades of ownership afterwards? But then how do you justify the […]
Code for Europe is a new organization looking to enliven a culture of innovation in city government. This week they have launched a hunt for talented developers and app makers, “to help make a breakthrough in how government services its citizens.” The projects will take place in six European cities: Helsinki, Amsterdam, Rome, Berlin, Manchester […]
Sir Mark Walport, the new chief scientific advisor to the UK government, spoke on Radio 4 last night on his passion for Open Access. Walport has come from being Director of the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest provider of non-governmental funding for scientific research. “The bottom line is very simple: we want the science we […]
This newsletter comes to you on the eve of the world’s biggest ever open knowledge event, OKFest 2012. It has been an incredible journey getting to this point, as a movement and as an organisation. We really hope you’ll be making the physical journey with us to Helsinki next week, to create, innovate and celebrate […]
This newsletter comes to you on the eve of the world’s biggest ever open knowledge event, OKFest 2012. It has been an incredible journey getting to this point, as a movement and as an organisation. We really hope you’ll be making the physical journey with us to Helsinki next week, to create, innovate and […]
It’s been another hectic few months here at the Open Knowledge Foundation! We’re getting really excited about this year’s inaugral OKFest in Helsinki (more later), but there’s so much going on across the world of openness that it’s hard to see when we’re going to find time to pack our suitcases! From the launch of […]
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