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 […]
Where Do Development Questions Meet Development Data? Where: The Guardian (Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1P 2AP) When: Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26 2012 This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London. Join us at the Guardian for a weekend […]
As the comedians, acrobats and miscellaneous thespians prepare to leave the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for another year, it’s time for the open data crew to reclaim the city! Following on from the two successful meet-ups which took place in March and May this year, #OpenDataEDB will be returning for its third event of 2012. For […]
The Web Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) are looking to fund case study research on the emerging impacts of open data in developing countries. Open data policies are spreading across the world: but how does open data play out on the ground in different settings? What is needed for the potential transparency […]
We’re big on promoting open information: be that sonnets, statistics, genes or geodata. We’re big on it because we think it has the potential to improve the welfare of peoples around the world in a variety of ways, from making governments more accountable to improving research on cancer. At the same time I think it […]
Earlier this week the European Commission released a package of documents related to their nascent policies on access to scientific information. What will these mean for science and for public engagement with science? New open access policies have been in the headlines quite a bit recently, as politicians and policy makers respond to the wave […]
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 […]
Mythology held that the world rested on the back of four elephants. In the connected 21st century we think there’s a fifth: data. The Fifth Elephant is a community-powered two-day event around the Big Data ecosystem. We hope to enable inter-disciplinary learning between technology, analytics and design along with inter-domain learning between Technology, Media, Retail, […]
We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project. ##LOV Project in 5 points LOV is about vocabularies (aka. metadata element sets or ontologies) in OWL / RDFS used to describe linked data. LOV provides a single-stop […]
Last week I gave a quick introduction to OpenSpending and Where Does My Money Go at Activate 2012. Here are the video and slides. Slides
At Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw last year, much discussion took place about academic research around Open Data. In response to these conversations, a specific ‘Open Data Academic Research’ session will be taking place at OKFest this year. The session will bring together a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines who are […]
Open Data is an idea that continues to gain momentum, and one of the signs of this is that the world has more and more data catalogs. This is great for many reasons but it also brings its own problem especially around interoperability and standardization — the lack of standard schema and interfaces is something […]
Last week I was at the European Data Forum and gave a Keynote entitled Open Data, Where We’ve Come From, Where We’re Going. Here are the slides.
Mining for Information by JD Hancock on Flickr (CC BY) In the early days of photography there was a great deal of optimism around its potential to present the public with an accurate, objective picture of the world. In the 19th century pioneering photographers (later to be called photojournalists) were heralded for their unprecedented documentary […]
The following is a draft content mining declaration developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Access In brief: The Right to Read Is the Right to Mine ##Introduction Researchers can find and read papers online, rather than having to manually track down print copies. Machines (computers) can index the papers and extract […]
The debate around data in our community has been densely concentrated around the question of openness. That’s not surprising. Words like “free” and “open” have dominated the conversations in the digital commons for most of its existence, mainly because most of the digital commons has been centered on copyrightable works. Software, text, photos, videos, music […]
John Wilbanks, co-author of the Panton Principles and past OKFN Advisory Board Member, just launched a petition to ask the White House to mandate free access to publicly funded research in the US. Here’s what it says: We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results […]
How do we measure social progress? Academics and international institutions have struggled with employing measures of human development which go beyond GDP per capita: education, health the the economy, but then what values do we attach to these? In countries like Italy stark regional differences have dominated over time. Particularly in times of fiscal austerity […]
Brighton was buzzing with wise, whacky and innovative ideas for Open Data on Friday – even more than usual – as about 150 people converged on the city for the first Open Data Cities Conference. So passionate was the organiser, Greg Hadfield, about the potential of Open Data in cities that he gave up his […]
This month Wikidata, a new project of Wikimedia Germany, finally started. The ambitious goal of the project is to create an open data repository for the world’s knowledge that can be accessed and edited by everyone, humans and machines alike. Wikidata will be a place where Wikipedia’s editors and others will be able to collect […]
The following post is cross-posted from Jeni’s blog – http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/ Over the last few months, the UK Government has been running a consultation on its Open Standards policy. The outcome of this consultation is incredibly important not only for organisations and individuals who want to work with government but also because of its potential knock-on […]
We’re in the planning stages of a conflict prevention project called PAX and open data perspectives have fed into our thinking in its processes and structures. PAX aims to provide early warnings of emerging violent conflict, through an online collaborative system of data sharing and analysis. We’re still in the early stages of exploration and […]
A more detailed version of this post can be found on the Finnish Institute blog. The Finnish Institute in London has recently completed a five-month research project on the British open data policies. The report looks at how the open data ecosystem has emerged in the UK and what lessons can be drawn from the […]
Freelance infographic designer Lulu Pinney has kindly designed a wonderful poster which illustrates some of the topics covered in the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, open source reference book which shows how journalists can use data to improve the news. She uses a process diagram to represent different aspects of the data journalist’s workflow – […]
Here is a preview of some illustrations for the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, open source reference book which shows how journalists can use data to improve the news. They were created by the talented Kate Hudson, based on the original designs she did for the book at MozFest 2011. If you want to be […]
I’m pleased to announce that the video of my talk, Open Data: How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, that I gave a few weeks ago at the LIFT 2012 conference has now been published: Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data with significant uptake in government, research […]
Last night was the first OKFN Meet-Up in Scotland* at the Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh, run in collaboration with DevCSI. 19 people attended from around the city and nearby, including Glasgow, and those visiting for the Open Biblio Sprint represented Cambridge, London, Wolverhampton and the Netherlands. The Auditorium was a beautiful venue, and there was a […]
Earlier this month, our Energy and Climate Hackday brought together about 50 people in London and online, joining from Berlin, Washington D.C., Amsterdam, Graz and Bogota. With participants working in the private sector, for NGOs, universities and the public sector, we had a good mix of people with different expertise and skills. Some people had […]
In the run to the upcoming ePSI Conference 2012 on 16th March in Rotterdam, Netherlands, we are very excited to announce the ePSI Trailblazers 2012. What are the ePSI Trailblazers? What if, instead of handing out another award, we could offer you both recognition from your peers and help in improving your work? At the […]
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 […]
The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group and Hristo Alajdov, Associate Professor at Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. One of the key problems in natural science research is the lack of effective collaboration. A lot of research is conducted by scientists from different disciplines, […]
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 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 […]
The following guest post is by Denise Recheis from reegle, the clean energy info portal. Offering multiple explanations for a concept increases understanding and using LOD allows both humans and machines to semantically connect related content. This is a huge advantage in our increasingly complex world! Especially in the field of clean energy, the increasing […]
This post is by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator for the Economics Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation. On Saturday 28th January we’re getting together for an Open Economics Hackday where we’ll be be wrangling data and building apps related to economics — all are welcome! Event home page: Sign up: on the MeetUp page When: […]
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 post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, […]
The following guest post is by Pieter Colpaert from iRail npo and Pierre Chrzanowski, and was reviewed by Regards Citoyens. Pieter and Pierre are both members of our brand new Working Group on Open Transport – watch this space for a full announcement of the working group’s activities and details on how to get involved!” […]
The following guest post is by Duncan Ray, from Destination Hackney. In Summer 2012, the borough of Hackney in London will be opening its doors to millions of visitors flocking to the Olympic games. It’s an exciting time for this part of London, and through the Race for Apps competition it’s a fantastic opportunity for […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. This morning Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda announced a new Open Data Strategy for Europe. I wrote a bit of background on the announcement on Friday for the Guardian Datablog, discussing what this […]
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF’s blog editor. Government transparency has been making the headlines over in Croatia, thanks to the amazing work of Marko Rakar, Croatia’s leading transparency expert. He has secured the release of all the public procurement data for government spending, dating back to July 1st 2009 in a […]
The following guest post is by Ed Anderton from the Nominet Trust, who provide support to organisations to increase access to the internet, online safety and education. The Nominet Trust is providing funding for a set of 10 ‘data-days’ with a range of UK Charities – more details of our offer to Charities can be […]
The following is the response the Open Knowledge Foundation submitted to the UK Government’s consultation on the public data corporation launched along with the consultation on open data in August 2011. The consultation document references the paper Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds (Newbery, Bentley and Pollock, 2007), commissioned by HM Treasury, […]
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Irina Bolychevsky, Product Owner for CKAN. On December 3, Open Data Day, for one day only we’ll have a crack-team of coders ready to break data out of its internet and load it into the Data Hub for you to use! […]
The following post is by Francois Grey and Rufus Pollock. Francois is a recent Shuttleworth Fellow, visiting professor at Tsinghua University working and coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. Rufus is a co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are two exciting open data and open knowledge events in Cape Town South Africa taking place […]
The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, one of OKFN’s London-based Community Coordinators and the contact point for incubating Local OKFN Chapters around the world. Fresh from days (and late nights) full of discussing open web communities in Barcelona at the Free Culture Forum, exchanging code and starting sites about information freedom with hackers in […]
The following post is from Federica Cocco, a freelance journalist and the former editor of Owni.eu, a data-driven investigative journalism site based in Paris. She has also worked with Wired, Channel 4 and the Guardian. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net and on the Data Journalism Blog. Ravensbourne College is an ultramodern cubist design school […]
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 […]
Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, Spain on behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation with an invitation from some of the amazing folk at Wikimedia Catalan and Creative Commons Spain. While the format of Forum itself was inspiring, with free admission for all attendants and a diverse […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation today proudly announces the launch of the Apps 4 Germany Contest. The Contest is organised by three civil society organisations (The Open Data Network, the Gov2.0 Network and the German Chapter of the OKFN) in cooperation with BITKOM (Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) under the auspices of […]
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