This piece was co-written with Eric King of Privacy International and comes as Privacy International launches a huge new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. It is cross-posted on the MediaShift PBS IDEA LAB and the OpenSpending blog. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies […]
On Saturday 3rd March we’re getting together for the Energy and Climate Hackday to data-wrangle and build apps around energy and climate data. All skills and interest groups are welcome: developers, data journalists, economists, climate scientists, environmentalists and interested citizens. When? Saturday 3rd March, 11am GMT (12pm CET/6am EST) to ~7pm GMT (8pm CET/3pm EST) […]
We are delighted to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the development of an Open Economics Working Group. The aim of the working group is to encourage more […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation are proud to announce the launch of version 1.0 of the Open Data Handbook (formerly the Open Data Manual): Read the Open Data Handbook now! » The Handbook discusses the ‘why, what and how’ of open data – why to go open, what open is, how to make data open and […]
We’re pleased to announce a simple new service from the Open Knowledge Foundation as part of the Open Definition Project: the (Open) Licenses Service. The service is ultra simple in purpose and function. It provides: Information on licenses for open data, open content, and open-source software in machine readable form (JSON) A simple web API […]
Last month, the glorious Public Domain Review celebrated its first birthday. The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is […]
Do you speak another language apart from English? Have you got a little bit of spare time over the next week? CKAN 1.6 is set to release in one week’s time and all the new features need translating. Can you help us complete it in time? If you can spend 15 minutes filling in the […]
The following post is by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jonathan Gray and is cross-posted from his personal blog. A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain. As was announced last […]
The following post is by Rufus Pollock, Director and Co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Philip Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University. Today, we’re announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We […]
The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme. TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public […]
The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator javascript library and the AnnotateIt service. Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations. We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others. Together we can create […]
The European Commission is to make its data publicly and openly available through a new data portal, along the lines of those already used by national governments such as http://data.gov.uk/. Like http://data.gov.uk/ the new site will be based on the open-source CKAN Data Portal Software developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Foundation will also be […]
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on the OpenSpending project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re excited to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the Open Society Foundations, OKFN’s activities around financial transparency will expand to include a second pillar: next to the OpenSpending platform, we have just started a 6 […]
As we head into 2012, there’s lots going on at the OKFN and we’re looking for some more people to come help us build and scale the open data ecosystem. In particular, we’re looking for a great project manager to deliver a portfolio of CKAN-related projects, and also an awesome front end web developer who […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is […]
The following guest post is by Juan Carlos de Martin, from the the Politecnico of Torino, Italy, one of the organisers of the annual Public Domain Day of which the OKF is a proud supporter. Every January a growing number of people throughout the world gather to celebrate the new year. But not for the […]
This post is by Mark Brough, Research Officer at Publish What You Fund, Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending, and Irina Bolychevsky, Product Owner for CKAN. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending Blog and the CKAN blog and Mark Brough’s contribution is also featured on aidinfolabs.org. Saturday, December 3rd was Open Data Day, and London […]
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. So a number of things have started to really come together for this Saturday Dec 3rd. I’ve noticed a number of new cities […]
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor. We are pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Definition has now been translated into Telugu (తెలుగు), thanks to the hard work of Sridhar Gutam. You can find this at: http://opendefinition.org/okd/telugu/ The definition has now been translated into 27 languages. If you’d like to […]
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on OpenSpending. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending blog. On Friday, the Guardian Poverty Matters blog published a piece on the Uganda visualisation that the OpenSpending team had been working on with Publish What You Fund. From the article “The Publish What You Fund campaign group and […]
The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog. With the International Open Data Hackathon getting closer, I’m getting excited. There’s been a real expansion on the wiki of the […]
The following post is by David Read, on behalf of the CKAN team. We’re proud to announce a major new release of CKAN! Version 1.5 brings major improvements including: Major user experience upgrades around dataset publication and access plus a new theme Integrated structured and blob data storage, with associated with data previewing and visualization […]
By James Harriman-Smith and Primavera De Filippi On the 11th July, the Open Literature (now Open Humanities) mailing list got an email about a competition being run by the University of Bologna called ‘Inventare il Futuro’ or ‘Inventing the Future’. On the 28th October, Hvaing submitted an application on behalf of the OKF, we got […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It was originally posted on his blog. If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with […]
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Thanks to the hard work of the OpenSpending team getting the software to an exciting stage of development that we are happy to write about and some aesthetic love from our brilliant designer, Kat Braybrooke, the OpenSpending blog was officially launched yesterday. […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Earlier this year at OKCon 2011 in Berlin we launched datacatalogs.org to make a comprehensive list of open data catalogs around the world. We’ve just upgraded it to run on the latest version of CKAN, our open source data hub software, […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The world’s biggest open data event to date, Open Government Data Camp 2011, is taking place in Warsaw next week. Our dedicated team of organisers has been busy working around the clock to prepare a veritable feast of all things open […]
This post is by Martin Keegan, project lead on OpenSpending. We’ve released v0.10 of the OpenSpending code, and made it live on http://openspending.org/ Changes in v0.10: Data loading has been separated from the main web application. Web-based and command-line tools for data wranglers to load/reload datasets have been separated from the main end-user facing web […]
This is a cross-posting from Open Shakespeare to announce the culmination of a project run over the summer to encourage greater participation in the website and greater awareness of its goals of promoting open critical commentary. From Monday 12th September to Monday 10th October, Open Shakespeare will host a series of articles on the topic […]
The following post is from Guo Xu, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group Despite the increasing efforts in opening data and making information and knowledge accessible to a greater audience, there has not been an explicit way to measure openess in knowledge creation and dissemination. This has made it very difficult to compare country […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to announce that registration for Open Government Data Camp 2011 is now open! This will be the biggest international open data event to date. An quick overview in numbers: 2 days of talks, workshops and code sprints 10 days […]
The following guest post is by Maarten Zeinstra from KnowledgeLand. Maarten is a member of the OKF Working Group on the Public Domain. Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In theory that means that these works can be reused […]
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor. Fantastic news from our fledgling Austrian chapter, the Open Knowledge Forum Österreich! The cities of Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, and Graz, together with the Chancellor’s office, have established the “Cooperation OGD Austria” – a new alliance bringing together federal, state, and city governments, as well […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As part of our work to open up the wealth of cultural works which have entered the public domain, earlier this year we launched the Public Domain Review. Adam Green, the Public Domain Review‘s wonderful Editor, has been hard at work […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s first ever Text Camp will be taking place this Saturday 13th August, thanks to JISC offering us the use of their meeting rooms in London. Details Where? Brettenham House, 9 Savoy Street, WC2E 7EG, London. – Meet outside ‘The Savoy Tup’ Pub, Savoy Street, at 10am to be guided to the […]
Friedrich Lindenberg, data wrangler and member of OKF Germany, advocates for the creation of Data Patterns book to complement the existing Open Data Manual. How do you scrape a massive online archive? How do you fix a broken CSV file? How do you normalize entity names in a large collection of records? There is a […]
The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data One of the key types of data that affects all our lives in a multitude of ways is that on companies and corporate entities. As companies have changed from being single entities to multifaceted, […]
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending at the Open Knowledge Foundation The OpenSpending team is currently looking for volunteers for a crack-team of ‘spending cartographers’ to guide people with datasets through the OpenSpending loading process and to help them make the most of their data once it is loaded. Interested in […]
The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data Less than eight months ago, OpenCorporates : The Open Database Of The Corporate World launched with the rather ambitious goal of creating a URL for every company in the world. Five months later, it had […]
The following guest post is by Daniele Galiffa, CEO at Visup. Some weeks ago we had the opportunity to develop a 24-hour quick prototype regarding the way the Italian Public Administration spends our money. Our goal was to highlight the value of using simple and effective information visualization solutions to gain greater insight into data, […]
The following post is from James Harriman-Smith, coordinator of the OKF’s Open Literature Working Group, and Lecteur at the ENS de Lyon. The OKF’s first ever ‘Text Camp’ hopes to bring together many different people, all interested in the relationship between digital technologies and literature, with a strong focus on the creation of open knowledge. […]
The following guest post is by Maria Neicu, who’s studying at the University of Amsterdam. She’s a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently gave a video interview on the topic of open science. Here are the videos, and summaries of what he […]
The following guest post is by Dan Herbert, who works on our Where Does My Money Go and Open Spending projects. He is the Programme Manager for MSc Accounting at Oxford Brookes University. This week sees the publication of the first Whole of Government Accounts for the UK. WGA represents the end of a decade […]
The following post is the majority of the final report from our Open Bibliography Working Group‘s collaborative Open Bibliography project with JISC. Further information is available on the original report post Congratulations to all involved on the successful completion of the project! Bibliographic data has long been understood to contain important information about the large […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We need a set of international open government data principles. Why? Because as the ‘open data‘ meme travels around the world – unlocking information from local, regional and national public bodies as it goes – we want to make sure that […]
The following guest post is from Andrew Stott, who sits on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. In his former role as Director of Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office, Andrew helped to set up the UK’s open data initiative. Today’s announcement about the next year of the UK Government’s Transparency and Open Data programme […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. I’ve recently been thinking about the role the Open Knowledge Foundation can play in helping to open up the public domain. Ultimately I think we should help to rally existing stakeholders from around the world behind a simple vision, and encourage […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re very pleased to announce an alpha version of datacatalogs.org, a website to help keep track of open data catalogues from around the world. The project is being launched to coincide with our annual conference, OKCon 2011. You can see the […]
This post is by Gregor Aisch, graphic designer and visualisation architect on the OpenSpending project. Today, at the OpenSpending worksop at OKCon2011 he gave a sneak preview of some of the work he has been doing to create new visualisations for OpenSpending, including a re-adaptation of David McCandless’ famous bubble visualisation from ‘Where Does My […]
After several months of hard work, we are glad to announce the official launch of OpenSpending and turn to everyone interested in government accountability and financial transparency to help shape the future of the project. The OpenSpending project will make it easier for the global public to explore and understand government spending. Our developers have […]
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