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OK Sweden collaborates with the Internet Foundation (.SE)…and other updates

This blog post is part of our on-going Network series featuring updates from chapters across theOpen Knowledge Network and was written by the Open Knowledge Sweden Team.  We have a new collaboration with the Internet Foundation (.SE) in Sweden, which is an independent organisation which promotes a positive development of the internet for the benefit of […]

Open Data Day Buenos Aires – building open agenda for Argentina

Open data is not familiar with weekends! However, on Saturday, March 4th, 2017, public officials, civil society organisations, civic hackers and many interested citizens came together in Vicente López to share projects and ideas around open data. In this event, the community also began to discuss the present and future of open data in Argentina. […]

Open Knowledge Austria host Data Pioneers Create Camp

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 Austria team.  On February 2nd we held the first Data Pioneers Create Camp in Vienna. The goal of the Data Pioneers Program, which is run together with Wikimedia Austria as part […]

A summary of the last 8 months at Open Knowledge Brazil

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 Brazil (OKBR) team.   This post was written by Ariel Kogan, CEO of Open Knowledge Brazil and first appeared on OKBR website: https://br.okfn.org/2017/04/03/um-resumo-aconteceu-ultimos-oito-meses/ Open Knowledge Brazil (OKBR) seeks to build a more […]

OK Greece releases Key Performance Indicators Application… and other 2017 updates

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 Greece team Open Knowledge Greece (OK Greece) consists of a dynamic team of community members who are not only interested in open data, linked data technologies and coding; but are […]

MyData 2017, Hack your heritage and other updates from Open Knowledge Finland.

This blog post is part of our summer series featuring chapter updates from across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the team of Open Knowledge Finland. It’s been a busy start to the 5th year of Open Knowledge Finland as it coincides with the celebration of Finland’s 100 years of independence and 250+ […]

Making European Subsidy Data Open

One month after releasing subsidystories.eu a joint project of Open Knowledge Germany and Open Knowledge International, we have some great news to share. Due to the extensive outreach of our platform and the data quality report we published, new datasets have been directly sent to us by several administrations. We have recently added new data […]

Launch: Jedeschule.de promotes transparency within the educational system in Germany

This blog was written by Moritz Neujeffski, School of Data Germany team. School of Data Germany, a project by Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, helps non-profit organisations, civil rights defenders and activists to understand and use data and technology effectively to increase their impact on societal challenges. Profound knowledge in processing data allows individuals and organisations to […]

Open Access and Open Data gaining momentum in Nepal

This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2017. On Saturday 4 March, groups from around the world organised over 300 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. 44 events received additional support through the Open Knowledge International mini-grants scheme, funded by SPARC, the Open […]

Open Food Data and Open Transport Data: Two milestones in Switzerland’s Open Data History

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 Switzerland team. Open Knowledge Switzerland pursues the objective to make data freely available for everyone to use and republish in order to increase transparency, innovation and efficiency.  We are […]

Europe in the age of Tr… Transparency

For the past few years, the USA has been an example of how governments can manage open government initiatives and open data particularly. They have done this by introducing positions like federal chief information officer and chief data officers. With datasets being opened on a massive scale in a standardised format, it laid the ground […]

A look back at the work of Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland in 2016

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 Foundation Deutschland team. We are the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland (OKF DE), the German chapter of OKI. We advocate for open knowledge, open data, transparency, and civic participation and consider […]

Brazil’s Public Spending project is looking for leaders in various regions of Brazil to increase participation in the budgeting process.

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 […]

Season Greetings from OK Ireland and 2016 in review

This blog post is part of our on-going Community series featuring updates from chapters across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the team of Open Knowledge Ireland and edited by Flora Fleischer and Siobhan Denham. Our warm season greetings to all friends of Open Knowledge As we approach the final days of this year, we would […]

Nobody wants to become an activist!

Hacking the Entry Point to Digital Participation During the recent Ultrahack 2016 tournament in Helsinki (one of the biggest hackathons in Europe for the development ideas and software), we formed a team called Two Minutes for My City that participated on the #hackthenation track. Our initial idea to improve the visualization of municipal decision processes evolved into a prototype of a mobile […]

Openbudgets.eu launches collection of fiscal transparency tools for journalists and civil society organisations.

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, […]

Open source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Bengaluru

The free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The group consisted of open source contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, […]

Building 2030-watch.de: measuring progress towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs)

For the last 15 months the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany has been working on 2030Watch, a prototype to monitor progress towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs) from an independent, civil society-led perspective. There’s a detailed blog post on why such independent monitoring is necessary at our blog. To give a quick example, the UN Commission agreed to […]

MyData 2016 – What we learned about personal data and where to go from here?

This piece is the final installment of a three-part series of posts from MyData 2016 – an international conference that focused on human-centric personal information management. The conference was co-hosted by the Open Knowledge Finland chapter of the Open Knowledge Network. Part 1 looked at what personal data has to do with open data and […]

Open Knowledge Finland Summer 2016 Update

This blog post is part of our summer series featuring chapter updates from across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the team of Open Knowledge Finland. Summer is a great time in Finland. It’s so sunny that everyone seems to be on holiday! However, there was no time for extended holidays at Open […]

What does personal data have to do with open data? Initial thoughts from #MyData2016

This piece is part of a series of posts from MyData 2016 – an international conference that focuses on human centric personal information management. The conference is co-hosted by the Open Knowledge Finland chapter of the Open Knowledge International Network. What does personal data have to do with open data? We usually preach NOT to open […]

Open Knowledge Switzerland Summer 2016 Update

The first half of 2016 was a very busy one for the Open Knowledge Swiss chapter, Opendata.ch. Just between April to June the chapter had 3 Hackathons, 15 talks, 3 meetups and 10 workshops. In this blog post we highlight some of these activities to update the Open Knowledge Community about our chapter’s work.   […]

Open Knowledge Brazil summer 2016 update

This blog post is part of our summer chapters updates and was written by the team of OK Brazil.  Brazil is not only about the Olympics. A lot has been going on in the Brazilian chapter of the Open Knowledge Network as well. Here we highlight the significant chapter developments, including some new faces and some […]

Opinion piece – Why Open Knowledge International should join ICANN

This is an opinion piece by an Open Knowledge network member. You can also publish your opinion on the blog by sending us an email to blog@okfn.org First, let me quickly tell you what kind of an organisation is ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), for I feel that albeit its burgeoning global importance, most people […]

Announcing the Legislative Openness Data Explorer

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is premised on the notion that sharing success stories can encourage further experimentation and reform. This is certainly true with parliaments, where the Legislative Openness Working Group (LOWG) has repeatedly witnessed the value of sharing information and experience.   To ensure that good practice is effectively captured and shared, the […]

Open Government: Participate, Propose and Be Heard! – The Process in Greece

The involvement and collaboration of governmental bodies, citizens and other stakeholders in order to promote open data and open government initiatives were one of the main achievements of the event “Open Government: Participate, Propose and Be Heard! Conformation of the Third National Action Plan 2016-2018.” The event was co-organized by the Ministry of Interior and Administrative […]

Introducing: MyData

this post was written by the OK Finland team What is MyData? MyData is both an alternative vision and guiding technical principles for how we, as individuals, can have more control over the data trails we leave behind us in our everyday actions. The core idea is that we, you and I, should have an […]

Open Knowledge Network and Community updates – First steps of 2016

2015 was a great year for Open Knowledge, full of opportunities and challenges. We started many exciting new projects such as Open Trials, Budgets EU and the Route to PA, we had personnel changes (and a new CEO, Pavel Richter), and also we’ve refined our name to Open Knowledge International. In addition, we developed a […]

The Open Data Utopia of the Pampas

An Ad Hoc Introduction to Argentine Affairs This post was written by Andres Snitcofsky an open government / data activist in Argentina. See Andres Medium account for more posts – https://medium.com/@rusosnith Since a new government took office in Argentina, a party alliance called #Cambiemos (Let’s Change), a lot of things have changed. Less than one month has […]

Open Data goes local in Nepal: Findings of Nepal Open Data Index 2015

The Local Open Data Index Nepal 2015 is a crowdsourced survey that examines the availability of Open Data at city level. The survey was conducted for the second time in Nepal by Open Knowledge Nepal. See our previous post that announced the local index here. Background For the decentralization of power from central authority to […]

Beauty behind the scenes

Good things can often go unnoticed, especially if they’re not immediately visible. Last month the government of Sweden, through Vinnova, released a revamped version of their open data portal, Öppnadata.se. The portal still runs on CKAN, the open data management system. It even has the same visual feeling but the principles behind the portal are […]

Document Freedom Day in Kathmandu, Nepal

On 2015’s Document Freedom Day, Open Knowledge Nepal organized a seminar on Open Standards at CLASS Nepal at Maitighar, Kathmandu. We intended to pitch openness to a new audience in Nepal and help them learn documentation skills. As we could not hope to teach documentation and spreadsheets in less than a day, we utilized the […]

We’re Hiring at Open Knowledge: Project Managers, Developers and Data Wranglers

Open Knowledge are delighted to advertise several new open positions: Project Manager – Open Data Python Developer Frontend Developer Data Wrangler A brief summary on each post can be found below. Full details and application forms can be found on http://okfn.org/about/jobs/.  Project Manager – Open Data We are looking for a professional and dynamic hands-on […]

Open Knowledge Russia: Experimenting with data expeditions

As part of Open Education Week #openeducationwk activities we are publishing a post on how Open Knowledge Russia have been experimenting with data expeditions. This a follow up post to one that appeared on the Open Education Working Group Website which gave an overview of Open Education projects in Russia. The authors of this post […]

How Open Data Can Change Pakistan

This is a cross-post from the brand new Open Knowledge Pakistan Local Group blog. To learn more about (and get in touch with) the new community in Pakistan, go here. Pakistan is a small country with a high population density. Within 796,096 square kilometres of its territory, Pakistan has a population of over 180 million […]

Walkthrough: My experience building Australia’s Regional Open Data Census

On International Open Data Day (21 Feb 2015) Australia’s Regional Open Data Census launched. This is the story of the trials and tribulations in launching the census. Getting Started Like many open data initiatives come to realise, after filling up a portal with lots of open data, there is a need for quality as well […]

India Open Data Summit 2015

This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Knowledge India blog and the Open Steps blog. It is written by Open Knowledge Ambassador Subhajit Ganguly, who is a physicist and an active member of various open data, open science and Open Access movements. Open Knowledge India, with support from the National Council of Education Bengal […]

New Open Knowledge Local Groups in Macedonia, Pakistan, Portugal and Ukraine

It’s once again time for us to proudly announce the establishment of a new batch of Open Knowledge Local Groups, founded by community leaders in Macedonia, Pakistan, Portugal and Ukraine, which we hereby welcome warmly into the ever-growing family of Local Groups. This brings the total number of Local Groups and Chapters up to a […]

#openbelgium15, the Open Data Discussion after Open Data Day

This is a guest blog post by Pieter-Jan Pauwels from Open Knowledge Belgium. This past weekend has been buzzing with activities around the world during #OpenDataDay. In Belgium however they saved their strength for this week in order to host the #openbelgium15 conference, featuring industry examples, community workshops and much more. Over 180 people are […]

Global Community Stories: January 2015

As some might remember, last year we ran a very popular blog post series called Global Community Stories, which highlighted activities in the ever-broadening Local Groups global community. Towards the latter half of the year lots of other projects demanded time and the series came to an unintended halt. With the turn of the year, […]