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?: […]
Professor Hans Rosling, co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation and Advisory Board Member at the Open Knowledge Foundation, received a standing ovation for his keynote at OKFestival in Helsinki in September in which he urged open data advocates to demand CO2 data from governments around the world. Following on from this, the Open Knowledge […]
A Week to Remember After a few months of post-production work by the core crew and our ever-amazing organising partners, we are happy to release the official OKFest 2012 After package – a set of materials that commemorate what an amazing week we had with you in Helsinki and help set the scene for what’s […]
On February 15-16, the Open Research Data Handbook Sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. The Open Research Data Handbook aims to provide an introduction to the processes, tools and other areas that researchers need to consider to make their research data openly available. Join us for a […]
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 […]
You can follow all the goings-on today and tomorrow through the live stream. On 17-18 December, economics and law professors, data publishers, practitioners and representatives from international institutions will gather at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for the First Open Economics International Workshop. From showcasing the examples of successes in collaborative economic research and open data to […]
Living in Australia? Local Group organisers in the region are organising an all-day hackathon on Saturday, January 5th 2013 from 10 am onwards to create an OpenStreetMap-based bicycle map of Melbourne, and they want you to get involved. The OKFN Australia Local Group will need data geeks, cartographers, programmers, graphic designers, sysadmins and most importantly […]
The Finnish Institute in London and the Open Knowledge Foundation are publishing a book, and we want you to be a part of its history. The Open Book (publish date 2013, details here) is a crowd-sourced publication which will contextualise the international open knowledge movement in the words of those who are helping build it […]
The full story from Sarajevo can be found on the Open Spending blog A while back, we wrote about the kickoff of our project to deliver the budget of Bosnia and Herzegovina to its citizens in a form they can understand. Last week in Sarajevo we had the kickoff workshop, bringing together a group of […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Data-driven Journalism Blog. <img alt=”” src=”http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8199/8220416586_26ef2f90c6.jpg” style=”float: left;width: 250px;height: 375px;margin-left: 5px;margin-right: 5px” />Making sense of massive datasets that document the processes of lobbying and public procurement at European Union level is not an easy task. Yet a group of 25 journalists, developers, graphic designers and activists worked together […]
Expeditions into the Data Landscape: the School of Data goes to #MozFest. Find out what happened at MozFest – and see the tools and data sets to recreate it yourself! Saturday morning at MozFest. A sold out building, full of a thousand hackers, builders, makers, geeks, journalists, thinkers and more. And right at the top […]
As governments around the world start implementing open data initiatives, establishing a critical public able to analyse and contextualise the data released is paramount. To facilitate this the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Institute started to collaborate on a program to bring Data Bootcamps to places with Open Government Data initiatives. Data itself […]
For the past month since the last OKFestival 2012 pioneers departed from Helsinki’s misty shores, I’ve been wondering how to breach the topic of a “thank you” message to the remarkable community that made this highly experimental event, run on a shoestring budget with a crowdsourced programme, such a spectacular success for Finnish and international […]
In the first November weekend – 2-4 November – the UK Open Data Institute in London will host Hack4Health, organised by Coadec, Healthbox Accelerator, the Cabinet Office, NHS Hackday and the Open Knowledge Foundation. The event brings together entrepreneurs, developers and technical startups working on health and fitness data to create innovative solutions and products. […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog. This fall marked the five year anniversary of the collapse of UK-based Northern Rock in 2007. Since then an unknown number of European banks have collapsed under the weight over plummeting housing markets, financial mismanagement and other reasons. But how many European banks did actually […]
The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite you to the Open Interests Europe Hackathon to track the lobbyists’ interests and money flows which shape European policy. When: 24-25 November Where: Google Campus Cafe, 4-5 Bonhill Street, EC2A 4BX London How EU money is spent is an issue that concerns everyone who pays […]
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 […]
Here’s Julia Kloiber from OKFN-DE’s Stadt-Land-Code project, talking at the OKFest about the need for more citizen apps in Germany, the need for greater openness, and how to persuade companies to open up.
The Open Knowledge Foundation will be hosting some of its first meetups in the US next week. On Wednesday 3rd October you can join others interested in open data, open content and the public domain in Boston and San Francisco. The Boston meetup is focusing on “global annotation, web caching, and shared data initiatives” and […]
Gapminder is one of the best known examples of a project which uses open data to improve public understanding of big global issues and trends. Yesterday Gapminder Founder Hans Rosling, who is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board, gave a spectacular keynote talk at OKFestival, for which he received a standing ovation. In […]
If you have more than a passing interest in EU policies related to the internet, digital content and digital technologies then you’ve probably heard of Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. Today Neelie gave a virtual address for participants at OKFestival, one of the largest open knowledge […]
This is the final post in the Open Data in India series. Our visit to India wasn’t just about meetups… the following post deals with the individuals and organisations that Lucy and Laura met whilst in India, the questions they were asked and the projects they were introduced to. It is cross-posted on the OKFN […]
Public sector data lives a short life. Its life spans the life of applications that are hidden deep inside of public bodies. Tied to application-specific data formats, the data dies with the application that hosts it. During its lifetime the data stays within the public sector, serving a few predetermined purposes, while the ability to […]
supported by The Open Economics Working Group is inviting PhD students and academics with relevant experience and research focus to participate in the first Open Economics Workshop, which would take place on December 17-18, 2012 in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop is to build an understanding of the value of open data and […]
Amidst the kerfuffle and cacophony of the Fringe Festival packing up for another year, the Edinburgh contingent came together again to meet, greet, present and argue all aspects of Open Data and Knowledge. OKFN Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together to share and debate all areas of openness. Depending on […]
Ignite Event in London This Thursday in London, Cleanweb UK invites you to their first Ignite evening, hosted by Forward Technology. Come along and see a great lineup of lightning talks, all about what’s happening with sustainability and the web in the UK. From clean clouds, to home energy, to climate visualisation, there will plenty […]
When: 19th-20th of September Where: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Hämeentie 135 C Helsinki (Hack workshop 3) Welcome to two days of hacking for openness and sustainability at the OKFestival in Helsinki. This is an opportunity to meet great developers and sustainability experts and to help out our planet with some innovative […]
This guest post was submitted by Bob Kerr of Openstreetmap.org. Openstreetmap.org has just had its 8th Birthday. For those new to the name, Openstreetmap is the wikipedia of maps or rather a single map, the map of our world. Initially born because the cost of licensing Ordnance Survey data was £5000 for a single use, […]
A Special Gift for Festival Participants… For the 600+ brave souls already registered for the world’s first-ever Open Knowledge Festival, here’s our first-ever participant bulletin! The gems and secrets below have been built from the weekly-curated, community-written summaries we’ve been sharing behind the scenes with our teams of Guest Programme Planners around the globe – and with less than two weeks left until […]
On August 24-25, another edition of OpenDataMx took place: a 36-hour public data hackathon for the development of creative technological solutions to questions raised by the civil society. This time the event was hosted by the University of Communication in Mexico City. The popularity of the event has grown: a total of 63 participants including […]
GOAL: You have six hours to make a working news app. There are three of you, a coder, a graphic designer and a journalist. Is it possible? Yes. Five times in the last two years the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, has invited people to do just this, at HS Open hack days, which I […]
Over the weekend of 25th and 26th August, the second event in a series of ‘Development Data Challenges’ took place at the Guardian’s offices in London. What is a ‘Development Data Challenge’? Development Data Challenges are an interesting concept. They draw together a disparate group of people (we had development experts, coders, designers, data wranglers, […]
This guest post is by Scott Hubli and Andrew G. Mandelbaum from the National Democratic Institute (NDI). NDI is partering with the Sunlight Foundation and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency to enhance networking among parliamentary monitoring organizations on issues of parliamentary openness and democratic reform, with the support of the Omidyar Network, the […]
At the OKFestival in Helsinki next month, the Open Heritage and Open Science streams will be kicking off their three days of activities with a joint hackday dedicated to working with and building things with open cultural and scientific data. The day will involve a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a digital humanities coding sprint working with tools […]
This is part 2 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. You can read the first post ‘Open Data – Bangalore’ on the OKFN blog. Chennai, formerly Madras, is only a short train ride away from Bangalore. Laura and I hadn’t been intending on travelling to Chennai on this trip, but a mail from […]
Where Do Development Questions Meet Development Data? Where: The Guardian (Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1P 2AP) When: Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26 2012 This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London. Join us at the Guardian for a weekend […]
With only 4 weeks left until the OKFestival week starts in Helsinki, here is our latest rundown of everything you need to know about the event. We’re very excited about what’s in store for participants this year! OVERVIEW New to OKFestival? We are delighted to invite you to this year’s event in Helsinki, Finland – […]
As the comedians, acrobats and miscellaneous thespians prepare to leave the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for another year, it’s time for the open data crew to reclaim the city! Following on from the two successful meet-ups which took place in March and May this year, #OpenDataEDB will be returning for its third event of 2012. For […]
If knowledge is power then data are the individual watts; one by itself is aesthetically pleasing, but functionally useless. It’s only when we add all the watts together that we produce enough power to move forward. Constitutionally we own this power, but the trickle of information provided to the public is practically useless – and […]
For those just arriving back to daily life after the summer holidays (and the Mars Curiosity landing!), we have some good news regarding OKFestival – our Early Bird ticket deadline has been extended to this Wednesday, August 8th, 2012. This will give you more time to get those tickets reserved well in advance so you […]
OKFN Labs is launching Labs Sprints, a new initiative to create data-driven applications around a specific topic within a very short timeframe – a single week. As we start this, we’re looking for partners to help us frame the questions that our apps will aim to explore. To create such high-impact apps which can serve […]
As the 2012 Open Knowledge Festival‘s organising team released Early Bird Tickets a few weeks ago from sunny Finland, we witnessed something exciting. The many experimental threads that have, until now, existed only as a complex web of planning based on two public Calls for Proposals (and a great deal of Skype meetings!) have starting […]
We’re taking the Data Wrangling Handbook on the road! We’ll be in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday, July 18th from 3-7 pm at Collective Agency, 322 NW Sixth Ave (between Everett and Flanders), Suite 200. (Buzz “200″ when you arrive.) View Map Then, to keep the ball rolling, we’re following up with a virtual sprint on […]
Mythology held that the world rested on the back of four elephants. In the connected 21st century we think there’s a fifth: data. The Fifth Elephant is a community-powered two-day event around the Big Data ecosystem. We hope to enable inter-disciplinary learning between technology, analytics and design along with inter-domain learning between Technology, Media, Retail, […]
Last month we ran the Open Knowledge Foundation’s largest celebration of open bibliographic data to date. The main focus of the two-day event was to get some hacking done and use the tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has helped to build, or is currently building, for working with bibliographic data, such as BibServer, TEXTUS and […]
The Open Media Challenge (OMC) is a two-day event, laying the groundwork for improving data journalism in Eastern Europe. The aim is to write code for free software which will solve real-world media problems around data aggregation and visualization. It will be a collaborative effort focused on Eastern European information collection and dissemination, and will […]
At Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw last year, much discussion took place about academic research around Open Data. In response to these conversations, a specific ‘Open Data Academic Research’ session will be taking place at OKFest this year. The session will bring together a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines who are […]
While the newly elected French National Assembly gets ready to choose its president, the question of its modernisation keeps arising. From the academic research world to the hacktivist perspective, parliamentary monitoring and studies are flourishing in France and all over the world. Methods and techniques may differ, but all share one common need: larger transparency […]
The next OKFN Open Science hackday will be taking place in a few weeks on Saturday 7th July. It would be great to see plenty of open-science folk either in London or online, wherever you are in the world! When: Saturday 7 July 2012, 1000-1700 UTC+1 Where: Centre for Creative Collaboration, London OR OKFN IRC […]
As faces filled the Panton Arms last week, it was great to see a healthy mix of the familiar and the new. The third meet-up in the #OpenDataCBG series proved to be one of the most friendly and interactive yet. The Setting Last Monday was a day of sudden torrential downpours. Perhaps for fear of […]
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