Early last month I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation‘s annual governance weekend, including the celebrated Ibrahim Forum. The MIF, headed by the eponymous and irrepressible Mo, does amazing work promoting good governance in Africa. It’s perhaps best known for its incredibly comprehensive Governance Index. Despite the terrible score of his […]
What is the state of Open Data activities globally? Who is working on what and where? Where are opportunities to be fostered in the developing world? The Open Data Partnership for Development is a partnership between The World Bank, Open Data Institute (ODI) and Open Knowledge Foundation. Initial funding of $1.25 million in the first […]
The Public Domain Review gives it’s top pick of people whose works will, on 1st January 2014, be entering the public domain in those countries with a ‘life plus 70 years’ copyright term.
What does open data / open knowledge have to do with Crisismapping? Everything. In times of crisis, we live in open data / open government ecosystem. We seek, build and make it happen in real time – talk converts to action quickly. On Tuesday, November 19th, the School of Data hosted a full day pre-conference […]
This is a cross-post by Julia Keserü from the Sunlight Foundation, taken from both the Global Open Data Initiative blog and the Sunlight Foundation blog. Open Data has enormous unfulfilled promise to change how governments work and to empower citizenship. As more governments and issue experts discover new potential in the public release of data, […]
Spending Stories is a new way to put spending figures in their proper perspective. Developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Journalism++ with funding from the Knight Foundation, Spending Stories is an app that helps citizens and journalists understand and compare amounts in stories from the news. When we hear that the UK’s school meals […]
UPDATE: there is now a dedicated page for the Nigeria Extractives Data Expedition here Who operates the often poisonous wells in the Niger Delta? How does the money flow between the contractors running the oil fields and the government? Join us for an online Data Expedition to Investigate the Extractive Industries of Nigeria, December 7, […]
We are very excited to announce the birth of The Public Domain Review Store! To help raise some much needed funds for the project we have made some things to sell, returning a few select gems from a pixel-based existence back into the world of real physical objects from whence they once came. As well […]
We are pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation are now an approved supplier on the G-Cloud 4 Services Framework. This means that it’s now even easier for UK government organisations to commission the Open Knowledge Foundation. We are offering a range of services via G-Cloud including setting up and deploying a CKAN open […]
Calling all developers! Today the LinkedUp Project are launching the second of the LinkedUp Challenge competitions – the Vidi Competition. The LinkedUp Project aims to push forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational institutions and organizations. For Vidi we’re inviting you to design […]
Activating an Open Data Movement means building beyond the topics of ‘why open data?’ and ‘open data index’. We also need to dig into the ‘how?’ we get there globally. Since the Open Data Partnership for Development (ODP4D) was launched at OKCon we have been busy working behind the scenes planning the programme. The Open […]
We’re pleased to announce the launch of budzeti.ba, a new way to understand public spending in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). budzeti.ba is a joint project of Bosnian civil society advocates CPI and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It allows Bosnian citizens to navigate the complexities of the BiH tax system and to explore the distribution of […]
At the Open Knowledge Foundation we love festivals – and attending is just half of the fun, we really like making things happen. So as soon as our friends over at Mozilla started building up their fabulous Mozilla Festival we decided to roll up our sleeves and join the party! Mozilla Festival will take place […]
The Global Open Data Initiative partners, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, are excited today to share a draft Declaration on Open Data, and would welcome comments and feedback on its contents. Open Data has enormous unfulfilled promise to change how governments work and to empower citizenship. Even as more governments and issue experts discover new […]
We’ve seen how the Open Definition can apply to data and content of many types published by many different kinds of organisation. Here we set out how the Definition relates to specific principles of openness, and to definitions and guidelines for different kinds of open data. Why we need more than a Definition The Open […]
We’ve set out the basics of what open data means, so here we explore the Open Definition in more detail, including the importance of bulk access to open information, commercial use of open data, machine-readability, and what conditions can be imposed by a data provider. Commercial Use A key element of the definition is that […]
This post was written by Denis Parfenov, our Ireland Ambassador, and Flora Fleischer, a member of the new Local Group for Ireland. Last Saturday, the ‘Open Data Ireland’ community and the Open Knowledge Foundation Network held a ‘CKAN Hackathon’. This event was kindly sponsored by Fingal County Council, ESRI Ireland and The Irish Organisation for […]
In May, the School of Data community got together in a Data Expedition to respond to the Rana Plaza catastrophe. They built a crowdsourced database on garment factories and used it to expose the bad safety standards and non-transparency that contributed to the disaster. Now we are taking the garment factory investigation to the next […]
Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. This is the summary of the full Open Definition which the Open Knowledge Foundation created in 2005 to provide both a succinct explanation and a detailed definition of open data. As the open data movement grows, and […]
The following is cross-posted from the Open Government Partnership blog A CKAN hackathon is taking place on Saturday, 28th September at TCube in Dublin, bringing together IT specialists, political representatives and members of the public with an interest in making data open. <img src=”http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2855/9963755924_63f78021c4_z.jpg” width=”350 alt=”dublin-TempleBar”> Developers, designers, journalists, academics, policy makers, creative thinkers, civil […]
We’re delighted to announce today the launch of a new portfolio of open data training programs. For many years the Open Knowledge Foundation has been working — both formally and informally — with governments, civil society organisations and others to provide this kind of advice and training. Today marks the first time we’ve brought it […]
We are really excited to announce a new partnership between us, the World Bank and the ODI, which was announced at OKCon in Geneva today. This important joint venture aims to bring open data projects and engagement to developing countries. Here’s the press release. Left to right: Laura James and Rufus Pollock, the Open Knowledge […]
The winners for the LinkedUp Veni Competition, organised by the LinkedUp Project were announced today at the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva. The LinkedUp Project, a multi partner consortium funded by Framework Programme 7, want to push forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by […]
Press Release: Geneva, 17 September 2013 Speaking at the Open Knowledge Conference, the world’s leading event on open data, Co-director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Rufus Pollock, announced today that the open-source platform Crowdcrafting has grown to accommodate over 120 projects, making it the world’s most diverse open-source platform for online citizen science and crowdsourced […]
We’ve just finished the second round of appointments for the Panton Fellowships, and this year we have three Fellows joining us: Rosie Graves (UK), Peter Kraker (Austria), and Sam Moore (UK). Peter will be joining us at OKCon this year, so please come and find him and introduce yourself! Left to right: Sam Moore, Peter […]
There is just one week left to chose a winner in the ‘People’s Choice’ strand of the LinkedUp Veni Competition. The Veni Competition is the first in the LinkedUp Challenge, a series of three consecutive competitions looking for interesting and innovative tools and applications that analyse and/or integrate open web data for educational purposes. Twenty-two […]
Yesterday seventeen open education experts came together to begin writing the Open Education Handbook. The handbook is part of the LinkedUp project, and the project team have chosen to also make it one of the first activities of the soon-to-be-launched Open Education Working Group. The handbook takes the form of an open, living document and […]
A year and a half ago we embarked on the Open Economics project with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and we would like a to share a short recap of what we have been up to. Our goal was to define what open data means for the economics profession and to become […]
Today sees the announcement of two exciting new developments on The Public Domain Review, changes which centre on better celebrating those institutions which have decided to open up their collections and helping users understand the different rights for reuse that apply to the content. New sources section The new sources page – http://publicdomainreview.org/sources/ – lists […]
This post is authored by Vitor Batista, who works as developer for the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Neil Ashton, Data Roundup Editor for the School of Data blog. It is cross-posted from the PBS Ideas and OpenSpending blogs. Brazilian NGO INESC (Institute of Socio-Economic Studies) and Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil want Brazilians to participate in […]
The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code. A year and a half ago the Open Economics project began with a mission of becoming central point of reference and support for those interested in open economic data. In the process of […]
This is a guest post by Marc Joffe of Public Sector Credit Solutions. Many have noticed that the United States last week was struck by its biggest municipal bankruptcy ever, when the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Less well known is the fact that Moody’s, the major credit rating agency, downgraded the City of Chicago […]
We were pleasantly surprised to learn that this morning the UK government launched a new tool to explore UK public spending. The ‘Government Interrogating Spending Tool’ (fear not – you the user are supposed to be the giver, not the receiver, of interrogation) or ‘GIST’ is, according to the Cabinet Office, “one of the first […]
This post is by Chris Taggart, the co-founder and CEO of OpenCorporates, the largest open database of companies in the world, and a member of the Open Government working group. [Disclosure: I am on the UK Tax Transparency Board, which has not yet discussed these proposals, but will be doing so at the next meeting […]
Last weekend more than a hundred budget nerds and engaged citizens gathered at 20 spending data parties to open up city spending and budgets. From Lagos to Kathmandu groups dived into budget data across the OpenSpending community as part of this first global City Spending Data Party from July 19 to July 21. The spending parties helped […]
This post was jointly written by Jonathan Gray (@jwyg), Director of Policy and Ideas at the Open Knowledge Foundation and Tony Hirst (@psychemedia), Data Storyteller at the Open Knowledge Foundation’s School of Data project. It is cross-posted from the School of Data blog. Today OpenCorporates added a new visualisation tool that enables you to explore […]
The following post is by Aidan McGuire, co-founder of ScraperWiki. It is cross-posted on the ScraperWiki blog. ScraperWiki are looking for open data activists to try out our new “Open your data” tool. Since its first launch ScraperWiki has worked closely with the Open Data community. Today we’re building on this commitment by pre-announcing the […]
This week sees the launch of the “Curator’s Choice” series – a joint endeavour of The Public Domain Review and OpenGLAM – which aims to actively engage with and celebrate those cultural heritage institutions that have taken the exciting steps to open up their content. This new series shall consist of a monthly guest post […]
On Friday the UK National Archives launched a new version of the Open Government Licence, which is now the default licence used by the UK government to publish the lion’s share of its public sector information. While the announcement hardly made headlines, there is one small addition to the text of the licence that we […]
Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of School of Data in Spanish! The Website was launched at the AbreLatam, on the 24th June, with a workshop focusing on building the Latin American network. This follows a series of warm up events thanks to the wonderful generosity of our hosts, in particular – the Hacks […]
Next week, on June 11-12, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation will gather about 40 economics professors, social scientists, research data professionals, funders, publishers and journal editors for the second Open Economics International Workshop. The event will follow up on the first workshop held […]
This post is cross-posted from the School of Data blog On May 25-26 almost 50 participants from several teams set out on a data expedition to map the garment factories. This is a report from the team comprised of Roy Keyes, Naomi Colvin, Sybern, Bhanupriya Rao and Daniela Mattern. The team used a crowdsourced database […]
Want to dig deep into tax avoidance and evasion? We have gathered a wide range of data on this sensitive topic and for one afternoon we’ll guide you through some of the key decisions to think about when writing a story on the topics. With tax evasion and tax avoidance currently such a hot topic […]
The following post is co-authored by Stefan Verhulst and Beth Noveck. It is cross-posted from Forbes.com. If you’d like to learn more about tax data, check out our data expedition on tax evasion and avoidance on the 6th June! The core task for Danny Werfel, the new acting commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service […]
Today, we are excited to announce that our work with the US Federal Government (data.gov) has gone live at catalog.data.gov! You can also read the announcement from the data.gov blog with their description of the new catalog. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Services team, which deploys CKAN, have been working hard on a new unified catalog […]
The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight. At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state […]
CKAN is a powerful, open source, open data management platform, used by governments and organizations around the world to make large collections of data accessible, including the UK and US government open data portals. Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece […]
The following guest post from Martin Tisné was first published on his personal blog. Some thoughts which I hope may be helpful in advance of the ‘follow the data‘ hack day this week-end: The open data sector has quite successfully focused on socially-relevant information: fixing potholes a la http://www.fixmystreet.com/, adopting fire hydrants a la http://adoptahydrant.org/. […]
At 12:00pm BST today, as midnight struck over the Pacific island of American Samoa and the 1st of May truly ended all over the world, so did end the inaugural Public Domain Review Fundraiser. In 58 days, with the help of 676 wonderful supporters we managed to leapfrog our target of $20,000 and raise an […]
From small beginnings in a hackathon, here’s a great story from Oakland of how OpenSpending can be deployed to improve civic engagement on a local level. The beta version of Open Budget Oakland went public last week with the release of our mayor’s proposed budget for the next two years. Her announcement was made Wednesday […]
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