This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. We are very happy to announce that the Open Economics Working Group is releasing the datasets of the research project “Small Artificial Human Agents for Virtual Economies“, implemented by Professor David Levine and Professor Yixin Chen at the Washington University of St. Louis and […]
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 […]
On Friday, to coincide with Saturday’s International Open Data Day, the European Commission (EC) unveiled a new data portal, which will be used to publish data from the EC and other bodies of the European Union. This major project was announced last year, and it went live in December for testing before today’s announcement. The […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. For years now, the practice preregistering clinical trials has worked to reduce publication bias dramatically (Drummond Rennie offers more details). Trying to build on this trend for transparency, the Open Knowledge Foundation, which runs the Open Economics Working Group, has expressed support for All Trials […]
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 […]
On February 15-16 we are updating the Open Research Data Handbook to include more detail on sharing research data from scientific work, and to remix the book for different disciplines and settings. We’re doing this through an open book sprint. The sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. […]
Opening up public sector data is becoming a top priority for governments throughout Europe and North America. We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Greek open data hub, developed and hosted by OKFN Greece. The data hub integrates the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open source data cataloging software CKAN, which is also the […]
###The foundations of the Foundation The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) was one of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s very first projects: drafted in 2005, 1.0 in 2006. By stipulating what Open means, the OKD has been foundational to the OKF’s work, as illustrated by this several-years-old diagram of the Open Knowledge “stack”. Knowing your foundations seems […]
You may have seen hints of it before, but the US government data portal, data.gov, has just announced officially that its next iteration – “data.gov 2.0” – will incorporate CKAN, the open-source data management system whose development is led and co-ordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF itself is one of the organisations helping […]
This blog post is written by Esther Hoorn, Copyright Librarian, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. If Roald Dahl were still alive, he would certainly be tempted to write a book about the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. For not only did he make up the research data […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. Sign up to the Open Economics mailing list for regular updates. Throughout the Eurozone, credit rating agencies have been under attack for their lack of transparency and for their pro-cyclical sovereign rating actions. In the humble belief that the crowd can outperform the credit rating […]
It’s our pleasure to invite you to join the Citizen Science Open Technical Workshop to be held Wednesday 30th January 16:00 CET virtually using Google Hangout. You can attend the meeting and send all your comments in this Youtube channel or this twitter account. Over 2 hours, we’ll have expert talks and open discussions about […]
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 first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the […]
Saturday 23rd February is Open Data Day 2013! Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. […]
This past Friday, American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist Nina Paley announced she was releasing her landmark animated film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons CC0 license. Sita Sings the Blues is quite possibly the most famous animated film to be released under an open license. The 82 minute film, which is an autobiographical story […]
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 […]
This blog post is written by Eustáquio Reis, Senior Research Economist at the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea) in Brazil and member of the Advisory Panel of the Open Economics Working Group. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. The project Statistical Memory of Brazil aims to digitize and to make freely available […]
To celebrate the season our Public Domain Review project has put together a digest of festive public domain images and texts – including a selection of Christmas diary entries, a pictorial history of Santa Claus, and a beautiful book of snowflake illustrations. From all of us at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we wish you festive […]
This blog post is written by Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi, PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, University of Maryland. This past spring, I spent a few months at the crowdfunding company Kickstarter, studying a number of aspects of the firm from what makes some projects succeed while others fail, preferences among backers, predictors of fraud, and […]
This blog post is written by Sven Vlaeminck | ZBW – German National Library of Economics / Leibniz Information Center for Economics Background In Economics, as in many other research disciplines, there is a continuous increase in the number of papers where authors have collected their own research data or used external datasets. However, so […]
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 based on Christina’s paper, “The Myth of European Term Harmonisation – 27 Public Domains for 27 Member States”. This is a shortened version of the post – the full version is available on the OpenGLAM blog. Copyright is supposed to be a temporary right: once it has expired, works automatically fall […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“The big problem in economics is that it really matters in which journals you publish, so the reputation factor is a big hindrance in getting open access journals up and going”. Can the accepted norms of scholarly publishing be successfully challenged? This quotation is a line from the correspondence about writing this blogpost for the […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog Ever since BioMed Central (BMC) published its first free online article on July 19th 2000, the Open Access movement has made significant progress, so much so that many different stakeholders now see 100% Open Access to research as inevitable in the near future. Some are […]
This is a post from Michael Bauer a technologist, digital activist, and open data specialist with the Open Knowledge Foundation who is currently travelling around Tanzania and Ghana training people how to find, extract, and analyse public data. You can follow Michael’s travels in more detail on the School of Data Blog. I am on […]
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 […]
Students for Free Culture recently published two excellent pieces about why Creative Commons should drop their Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives license variants: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of the NC and ND clauses As the first post says: Over the past several years, Creative […]
Tropical forests provide habitat for most of the world’s known terrestrial plant and animal species. These ecosystems are under increasing threat worldwide. During the last few decades, several million hectares of humid tropical forest were lost each year. Despite the proliferation of new remote sensing technologies, information about the status of world’s forest is limited […]
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 […]
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 […]
Continuing in their mission to make spending data more accessible and comprehensible, the Spending Stories team and the team of Data.Gov.Uk are releasing a reporting tool today that will help journalists and analysts to pick the freshest and best departmental spending data to work with when exploring the UK central government expenditure. Spending data is […]
The notion of open access – or making research freely usable by all, without cost or legal barriers – has been in the news quite a bit this year. It received significant media coverage on the back on the so-called Academic Spring, and subsequent high profile activities and announcements in the UK, the US and […]
Open Street Map is probably the best example of a successful, community driven open data project. The project was started by Steve Coast in 2004 in response to his frustration with the Ordnance Survey’s restrictive licensing conditions. Steve presented on some of his early ‘mapping parties’ – where a small handful of friends would walk […]
A while ago, Augusto Hermann wrote on this blog about a unique civic engagement project: the participatory process of building a government data portal in Brazil. The site, dados.gov.br, is still going strong, and Augusto has now written over on the CKAN blog about the process of building and deploying it using CKAN, the Open […]
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 […]
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, […]
We’re posting this announce to let people know we’ve updated the Open Knowledge Foundation’s general privacy policy and terms of use. Updates to the privacy policy are fairly limited and largely around making the setup around email more explicit. The terms of use is somewhat new in that it consolidates in one place terms of […]
Earlier this week, the SEC voted on the final rules of Section 1504 of the Dodd Frank Act. Global Witness teamed up with the Open Knowledge Foundation to explain what these rules are about, and why they matter. View the infographic ‘Ending Secrecy – Why Global Transparency Rules Matter’ On August 22nd 2012, the U.S. […]
This is cross-posted from openbiblio.net. Following on from the success of the first JISC Open Bibliography project we have now completed a further year of development and advocacy as part of the JISC Discovery programme. Our stated aims at the beginning of the second year of development were to show our community (namely all those […]
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 […]
This weekend Mexico City will host OpenDataMx, a Hackathon of public open data lasting 36 hours, during which participants will develop creative technical solutions to solve various civil society problems. Programmers, designers, members of civil society organizations (CSOs) and government officials are invited to participate in OpenDataMx and collaborate in web and mobile solutions […]
Laura and Lucy from the OKFN team recently travelled to India to learn where the challenges and opportunities for open data in India lay. This is part 1 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. The Bangalore data scene is huge. A bustling IT and data mining industry means that you are never far […]
Over the last few months, Creative Commons has been working on the next version of its license suite, version 4.0. The goals of version 4.0 are wide-ranging, but the overall objective is clear: update the licenses so they are considerably more robust, yet easy to understand and use, for both existing communities and new types […]
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 […]
We’re pleased to announce Data Protocols, a community-driven effort to develop simple, light-weight protocols and formats for distributed and collaborative work with data. If you’re interested in the project got check out the Knight News Challenge Data Protocols application and give our proposal the thumbs up! What’s the Idea The civic and open data community […]
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