OpenCon 2015 is launched

This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Access Working Group blog. Details of OpenCon 2015 have just been announced! OpenCon2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data will take place in on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together students and early career academic professionals from across […]

India Open Data Summit 2015

This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Knowledge India blog and the Open Steps blog. It is written by Open Knowledge Ambassador Subhajit Ganguly, who is a physicist and an active member of various open data, open science and Open Access movements. Open Knowledge India, with support from the National Council of Education Bengal […]

Open Data Camp UK: Bursting out of the Open Data Bubble

“But nobody cares about Open Data” This thought was voiced in many guises during last weekend’s Open Data Camp. Obviously not entirely true, as demonstrated by the 100+ people who had travelled to deepest Hampshire for the first UK camp of its kind, or the many more people involving themselves in Open Data Day activities […]

#openbelgium15, the Open Data Discussion after Open Data Day

This is a guest blog post by Pieter-Jan Pauwels from Open Knowledge Belgium. This past weekend has been buzzing with activities around the world during #OpenDataDay. In Belgium however they saved their strength for this week in order to host the #openbelgium15 conference, featuring industry examples, community workshops and much more. Over 180 people are […]

A round-up of Open Knowledge Community events around the world!

One of the best opportunities that being part of a community offers is the chance to collaborate and make things happen together – and when we want this to happen in sync, what’s better than convening an (in person or online) event? Just before the end of the year, let’s collect a few highlights from […]

Storytelling with Infogr.am

As we well know, Data is only data until you use it for storytelling and insights. Some people are super talented and can use D3 or other amazing visual tools, just see this great list of resources on Visualising Advocacy. In this 1 hour Community Session, Nika Aleksejeva of Infogr.am shares some easy ways that […]

Open Humanities Hack: 28 November 2014, London

This is a cross-post from the DM2E-blog, see the original here On Friday 28 November 2014 the second Open Humanities Hack event will take place at King’s College, London. This is the second in a series of events organised jointly by the King’s College London Department of Digital Humanities , the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana […]

Connect and Help Build the Global Open Data Index

Earlier this week we announced that October is the Global Open Data Index. Already people have added details about open data in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile! You can see all the collaborative work here in our change tracker. Each of you can make a difference to hold governments accountable for open data commitments plus create […]

Matchmakers in Action – Help Wanted

Do you have a skill to share? Want to host an online discussion/debate about an Open Knowledge-like topic? Have an idea for a skillshare or discussion, but need help making it happen? Some of you hosted or attended sessions at OKFest. Why not host one online? At OKFestival, we had an Open Matchmaker wall to […]

OKFestival 2014: we made it! A write-up & Thank You note

Open Knowledge Festival 2014! We built it, made it and ran it – it was a blast, thank you! 1056 participants from 60 countries 215 facilitators and moderators 17 Programme Team members 70 volunteers made it all happen. Who says that numbers are dry? Just by writing them down, our hearts are melting. Group work! […]

September Community Summit On Air

We’re hosting a September Community Call. Join us to discuss a number of community programming ideas and help make a plan. All welcome. (Amazing drawing by Artepilpilean) What: September Community Summit On Air Date: Wednesday, September 10th Your Local time: 8:00 – 9:00 EDT, 13:00 – 14:00 BST, 14:00 – 15:00 CEST (Also see worldtimebuddy.com) […]

Revisiting OKFestival 2014

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 […]

Thank you for joining us at Open Knowledge Festival 2014!

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 […]

OKFestival: Day Two Highlights & Wrap Up

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 […]

#OKStory

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 […]

Make Some Story Noise

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. […]

OKFestival Keynote Spotlight: Beatriz Busaniche

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 […]

Capture your events

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, […]

OKFestival Spotlight: Patrick Alley

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 […]

OKFestival Keynote Spotlight: Neelie Kroes

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 […]

The OKFestival keynote excitement begins!

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, […]

Financial aid allocation completed for OKFestival 2014

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 […]

Community Sessions: Video Skillshare and Open Education

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 […]

Let’s try something new: unFestival!

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 […]

All-star wrap-up of a month of Open Knowledge events all around the world – May 2014

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: OKFestival Community Session

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 […]

Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches

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 […]

Making it Matter: open data, education and the developing world

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 […]

OKFestival 2014 Provisional Programme is now live!

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 […]

Bonding with Hong Kong and upcoming Open Spending

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 […]

OKFestival financial aid announcement delayed

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 […]

Community Session: Open Data Hong Kong

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 […]

Take a CKAN Tour

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 […]

Only 4 days left to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid!

The deadline to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid is this Sunday 4th May: hurry! Diversity and inclusivity are a huge part of our festival ethos and we are committed to ensuring a broad variety of participation from all corners of the world; creating a forum for all ideas and all people. To achieve this, we’ll […]

Upcoming Community Sessions: CKAN, Community Feedback

Happy week! We are hosting two Community Sessions this week. You have expressed an interest in learning more about CKAN. As well, We are continuing our regular Community Feedback sessions. Take a CKAN Tour: This week we will give an overview and tour of CKAN – the leading open source open data platform used by […]

Open Knowledge Festival Call for Volunteers Opens Today!

What: Join the Volunteers Team at OKFestival 2014! When: July 15-17th, Berlin, Germany Why? Lots of reasons! Find them here! The OKFestival team is launching our call for volunteers today, and we are excited to bring on board amazing members of our community who will help us to make this festival the huge success we […]

OKFestival 2014 Financial Aid Programme Launches Today!

The OKFestival 2014 Team is happy to announce that we are launching our Financial Aid Programme today! We’re delighted to support and ensure the attendance of those with great ideas who are actively involved in the open movement, but whose distance or finances make it difficult for them to get to this year’s festival in […]

Skillshares and Stories: Upcoming Community Sessions

We’re excited to share with you a few upcoming Community Sessions from the School of Data, CKAN, Open Knowledge Brazil, and Open Access. As we mentioned earlier this week, we aim to connect you to each other. Join us for the following events! What is a Community Session: These online events can be in a […]

Coding da Vinci – Open GLAM challenge in Germany

The following blog is by Helene Hahn, Open GLAM coordinator at Open Knowledge Germany. It is cross-posted from the Open GLAM blog More and more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are digitizing their collections to make them accessible online and to preserve our heritage for future generations. By January 2014, over 30 million objects […]

The School of Data Journalism 2014!

We’re really excited to announce this year’s edition of the School of Data Journalism, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, 30th April – 4th May. It’s the third time we’ve run it (how time flies!), together with the European Journalism Centre, and it’s amazing seeing the progress that has been made since we started […]

Happy Spring Cleaning, Community Style

Crazy about happy? Call it spring fever, but I am slightly addicted to the beautiful creativity of people around the world and their Happy videos (map). We are just one small corner of the Internet and want to connect you to Open Knowledge. To do this, we, your community managers, need to bring in the […]

How many people are rocking Open Knowledge events around the world? Let us know!

We’re getting to know each other more every day on mailing lists and through surveys, we know that plenty of you populate and build groundbreaking projects and communities through our network of 42 local groups, 20 working groups, infinite number of projects and beyond. Now, we’d like to know more about your Open Knowledge events […]

OKFestival Call for Proposals ending soon! Submit your proposal now!

We extended the deadline to give you an extra 2 weeks to come up with unusually brilliant, inventive, participatory session proposals for OKFestival 2014, but we’re getting very close to crunch-time now! This Sunday, March 30th, is the final deadline to submit the session you want to run at the festival. Then it’s over to […]

Deadline to submit your OKFestival 2014 session proposals extended to March 30!

Event: OKFestival – July 15-17, 2014. Berlin, Germany. Call for Proposals: Find the call, FAQs and the submission form here Deadline: Deadline extended! New deadline to submit your proposals is March 30, 2014. Tickets: Early Bird tickets are now on sale! This year’s OKFestival Call for Proposals was due to end on Sunday and our […]

OKFestival streams – concept and how to get help!

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we aspire to create environments that connect diverse audiences, thus enabling a diverse groups of thinkers, makers and activists to come together and collaborate to effect change. This year, the Open Knowledge Festival is fuelled by our theory that change happens when you bring together knowledge – which informs change […]

Tips & Tricks – A Hangout for OKFestival Session Planners

The Open Knowledge Festival call for session proposals is now open! The better the proposals, the better the festival, so we’re inviting you to put on your thinking caps and come up with revolutionarily brilliant ideas for sessions at OKFestival 2014. We know you can do it, and we know you’ll make this festival a […]

The Open Knowledge Festival 2014 website is now live!

We know you’re as excited as we are about this year’s Open Knowledge Festival, which will be taking place in Berlin from 15th – 17th July. Today, we’re pleased to unveil the new website for the event which includes the festival ticket shop, details of how to contribute to the programme and other key information […]