Open Knowledge International is a member of OD4D, a global network of leaders in the open data community, working together to develop open data solutions around the world. Here, Simeon Oriko talks about his work carrying out an embedded data fellowship with Oxfam in Kenya as part of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) programme. For years, […]
Data sharing has come a long way over the years. With open source tools, improvements and new features are always quickly on the horizon. Serah Rono looks at the improvements that have been made to open source data management system CKAN through the course of the ROUTE-TO-PA project. In the present day, 5MB worth of […]
The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is one of our core projects at Open Knowledge International. The index measures and benchmarks the openness of government data around the world. As we complete the review phase of the audit of government data, we are soliciting feedback on the submission process. Tricia Govindasamy shares her experience submitting to […]
This week the Frictionless Data team at Open Knowledge International will be speaking at the International Digital Curation Conference #idcc17 on making research data quality visible. Dan Fowler looks at why the popular file format Excel is problematic for research and what steps can be taken to ensure data quality is maintained throughout the research […]
A new research report published today looks at the current state and future prospects of a global public database of corporate accounts. Shipyard of the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam, 1750. Wikipedia. The multinational corporation has become one of the most powerful and influential forms of economic organisation in the modern world. Emerging at […]
Recognizing that capacity building is central to economic growth, reductions in poverty and equal opportunities, Open Knowledge International with the support of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network is expanding its work with civil society organisations (CSOs) through the Embedded Fellowship Programme. In the last three months, I worked as an embedded fellow, consulting […]
Castillo de Lorca. Torre Alfonsina (Public Domain) Lorca, a city located in the South of Spain with currently 92,000 inhabitants, launched its open data initiative on January 9th 2014. Initially it offered 23 datasets containing transport, mobility, statistical and economic information. From the very beginning, OpenSpending was the tool selected by Lorca City Council because of its […]
Open State Foundation is a non-profit based in the Netherlands, working on digital transparency by opening up public information as open data and making it accessible for re-use. Last December, the organization received one of the seven Open Government Partnership 2016 Awards for its work on OpenSpending at the OGP Global Summit in Paris, France. The awards […]
On the 11th of January, OK Brazil launched its new Public Spending website. The website is part of a wider campaign to search, recruit and support new leaders that wish to work with transparency, mainly public spending, in Brazilian municipalities and is using OKI’s OpenSpending technical architecture. The support will be provided to mentors specializing in […]
PiMaa is an Internet of Things project in Kampala, Uganda that seeks to build low-cost environment monitoring stations and open-up any data collected. PiMaa is an initiative under Outbox, supported by Open Knowledge International through the Africa Open Data Collaboration Fund. Kampala is in a lot of growing pains. The current administration is doing their utmost […]
For immediate release Open data service provider Viderum is working with Energinet.dk, the gas and electricity transmission system operator in Denmark, to provide near real-time access to Danish energy data. Using CKAN, an open-source platform for sharing data originally developed by Open Knowledge International, Energinet.dk’s Energy DataStore will provide easy and open access to large […]
This blog post is part of our on-going Network series featuring updates from chapters across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the Open Knowledge Japan team. The OK Japan chapter has been active in the open data space in activities such as the promotion of open data use and policy discussions. Since we formed the team […]
The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is one of our core projects at Open Knowledge International. The index measures and benchmarks the openness of government data around the world. Brook Elgie shares a behind-the-scenes look at the technical design of how we gather the data for the Index through our extensive Open Data Survey and […]
OpenSpending is one of Open Knowledge International’s current projects. It is a free and open platform for citizens looking to track and analyse public fiscal information globally. Over the years, we have learned about numerous examples of fiscal data uses from the OpenSpending community. Also, we learned that obtaining fiscal data can be the most […]
Tampere, Finland (public domain) This piece is written by Jaakko Korhonen and Joonas Pesonen of Open Knowledge Finland At the end of October a team using OpenSpending tools held a pitch for high-ranking Finnish Government officials in “Hack the Budget 2016,” a competition organised by Open Knowledge Finland (OKFFI) and the Finnish Ministry of Finance. […]
Openness and collaboration go hand in hand. Scientists at PNNL are working with the Frictionless Data team at Open Knowledge International to ensure collaboration on data analysis is seamless and their data integrity is maintained. I’m a computational biologist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where I work on environmental and biomedical research. In […]
Berlin, November 21, 2016 – Today, the beta version of OpenBudgets is officially released to the public. The Horizon 2020-funded project seeks to advance transparency and accountability in the fiscal domain by providing journalists, CSOs, NGOs, citizens and public administrations with state-of-the-art tools needed to effectively process and analyze financial data. For the beta version, […]
We are happy to announce that The Global Open Data Index (GODI) 2016 is officially live! After months of hard work, taking the community feedback and building it into the new methodology, and redesigning the whole survey from the questions to interface and how you interact with it. This is the fourth year that we […]
Code for South Africa just launched https://municipalmoney.gov.za/, a New Municipal Money project for South Africa, in partnership with the National Treasury. This is a step forward in collaboration with government. Code for South Africa’s goal is to empower citizens to hold their municipal officials to account. The focus of the portal is on municipal financial […]
Transparency, at best, makes for unity and positive development in democracies around the world. There are elaborate commentaries on what transparency entails, but for me, transparency translates to open. Think open doors. In any given building in a public space, an open door often turns to an invitation to come in and look around, while […]
This post looks at the Open Fiscal Data Package – an open standard for publishing fiscal data developed by Open Knowledge International, GIFT and the World Bank. In September of 2016, Mexico became the first country to officially endorse the OFDP, by publishing Federal Budget data in open formats using OpenSpending tools. OpenSpending is one of […]
The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is one of our core projects at Open Knowledge International. The index measures and benchmarks the openness of government data around the world, and presents this information in a way that is easy to understand and easy to use. It’s been a couple months since we updated the community […]
Report from International Data Week: Research needs to be reproducible, data needs to be reusable and Data Packages are here to help. International Data Week has come and gone. The theme this year was ‘From Big Data to Open Data: Mobilising the Data Revolution’. Weeks later, I am still digesting all the conversations and presentations […]
The Sinar Project in Malaysia is exploring ways of making critical information public and accessible to Malaysian citizens. The project is supported by the Open Data for Development (OD4D) programme and has been run in collaboration with OpenSpending at Open Knowledge International. In our previous blog post, we provided an overview of the Sinar Project’s work opening budget data […]
Open Knowledge International is a member of Open Data for Development (OD4D), a global network of leaders in the open data community, working together to develop open data solutions around the world. In collaboration with the OD4D program, Open Knowledge International coordinates the Africa Open Data Collaboration Fund which is designed to provide seed support […]
Open Knowledge International is coordinating the Open Data for Tax Justice project in partnership with the Tax Justice Network to create a global network of people and organisations using open data to inform local and global efforts around tax justice. Tax evasion, corruption and illicit financial flows rob countries around the world of billions in […]
OpenSpending is one of Open Knowledge International’s current projects. It is a free and open platform for citizens looking to track and analyse public fiscal information globally. While the OpenSpending team was busy revamping the platform over the last year we have been fortunate to have a community of users actively involved in testing the […]
On September 8, 2016, Mexico became the first country to formally adopt the Open Fiscal Data Package, an international open data standard promoted by the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), in collaboration with Open Knowledge International and the World Bank, with the support of Omidyar Network. This collaboration is a pioneering step for […]
The most important thing for the Network team at Open Knowledge International is the community we build around data. The tools we build to achieve this are crucial as well since they allow people to make even more and better plans and projects. To continue doing this, we are restructuring a bunch of technological tools […]
“Open Spending Data in Constrained Environments” is a project being lead by Sinar Project in Malaysia aimed exploring ways to of making critical information public and accessible to Malaysian citizens. The project is supported by the Open Data for Development programme and has been run in collaboration with Open Knowledge International & OpenSpending In Malaysia, […]
Since last year Open Knowledge has been developing OpenTrials, an open, online database linking the publicly available data and documents on all clinical trials conducted – something that has been talked about for many years but never created. The project is funded by The Laura and John Arnold Foundation and directed by Dr. Ben Goldacre, an internationally known […]
The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is one of the core projects of Open Knowledge International. Originally launched in 2013, it has quickly grown and now measures open data publication in 122 countries. GODI is a community tool, and throughout the years the open data community have taken an active role in shaping it by reporting […]
We’re happy to announce that a new, improved version of OpenSpending is now being launched as an Alpha Version. OpenSpending Next provides a set of tools enabling users to visualise, analyse and publish budget and spending data – all based on the open Fiscal Data Package standard. OpenSpending Next is designed, developed and maintained by […]
This blog post was written by Riyadh Al Balushi from the Sultanate of Oman. I recently co-authored with Sadeek Hasna a report that looks at the status of open data in the Arab World and the extent to which governments succeed or fail in making their data available to the public in a useful manner. We […]
We are excited to announce that Open Knowledge International has received $700,000 in funding from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation over two years to work on a broad range of activities to enable better research and more effective civic tech through our Frictionless Data initiative. The funding will target standards work, tooling, and infrastructure around […]
This blog post was written by the NDI election team -Michael McNulty and Benjamin Mindes How “open” are election results data around the world? Answering that question just became much easier. For the first time, the Global Open Data Index 2015 assessed election results data based on whether the results are made available at the […]
** This insight was written by TH Schee OK Taiwan ambassador ** Taiwan has surprisingly topped the Global Open Data Index 2015, and it’s not without questions as how this could be have been achieved without further examination. Even though Taiwan has been very active and recognised as one of the hotspot of open data, […]
*** This blog post was written by Hazwany Jamaluddin from Sinar Project in Malaysia *** There are few countries in Southeast Asia region – Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Lao PDR, Singapore, East Timor and Malaysia – that are falling behind in the global open data movement, while others – Indonesia and Philippines – are advancing as […]
his post was written by Arianit Dobroshi Kosovo is ranked 35th in the 2015 Open Knowledge Global Open Data Index , down from 31st place in last year’s measurement and marked as 43% open. In South East Europe, Albania ranked 37th and Macedonia, 69th. Others, such as Serbia and Bosnia, have not been scored since they […]
This post was written by Stephen Abbott Pugh from Code for Africa Rwanda’s jump in the Global Open Data index rankings from 74th to 44th comes at a time when the open data conversation is gathering pace in the country. As Rwanda’s cabinet prepares to debate the draft national open data policy in early 2016, […]
This post was written by Daniel Carranza from DataUY Uruguay has made headlines in the news lately. Mostly due to our unconventional former president José “Pepe” Mujica, and initiatives such as legalized abortion, regulated marijuana market and egalitarian marriage. It’s not the first time that our small country brings up innovative ideas ,as with divorce […]
This post was written by Owen Boswarva For a third year running the United Kingdom has come out at or near the top of the Global Open Data Index. Unlike many of the countries that did well in previous years, the UK’s overall standing has not been greatly affected by the addition of five new […]
We are excited to announce that we have published the third annual Global Open Data Index. This year’s Index showed impressive gains from non-OECD countries with Taiwan topping the Index and Colombia and Uruguay breaking into the top ten at four and seven respectively. Overall, the Index evaluated 122 places and 1586 datasets and determined […]
Open Knowledge project The Public Domain Review launches its second book of selected essays, featuring sea serpents, pirates, vampires, and more.
Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council are pleased to announce the release of version 2.1 of the Open Definition. The definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content” and continues to play a key role in supporting the growing open ecosystem. The Open Definition was first published […]
Background The mission of Open Knowledge International is to open up all essential public interest information and see it utilized to create insight that drives change. To this end we work to create a global movement for open knowledge, supporting a network of leaders and local groups around the world; we facilitate coordination and knowledge […]
We’re now in the final stretch for the 2015 Global Open Data Index, and will be publishing the results in the very near future! As a community driven measurement tool, this year we have incorporated feedback we’ve received over the past several years to make the Index more useful as an instrument for civil society […]
Getting together at a public event can be a fun way to contribute to the 2015 Global Open Data Index. It can also be a great way to engage and organize people locally around open data. Here are some guidelines and tips for hosting an event in support of the 2015 Index and getting the […]
The Global Open Data Index measures and benchmarks the openness of government data around the world, and then presents this information in a way that is easy to understand and easy to use. Each year the open data community and Open Knowledge produces an annual ranking of countries, peer reviewed by our network of local […]
After a two months, 82 ideas for datasets, 386 voters, thirteen civil society organisation consultations and very active discussions on the Index forum, we have finally arrived at a consensus on what datasets will be including in the 2015 Global Open Data Index (GODI). This year, as part of our objective to ensure that the […]
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