The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Several key open data organisations in France – including Regards Citoyens, Creative Commons France and Veni Vidi Libri – have clubbed together to draft a Declaration on Open Data in France: The declaration emphasises the importance of a legal and licensing […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re thrilled to announce that our proposal for Spending Stories has been chosen as a winner for the Knight News Challenge. What is Spending Stories about? News stories about government finances are common, but readers often find it challenging to place […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Last week I participated in an event called Visualizing Europe organised by the folks at visualizing.org in association with the Open Knowledge Foundation and Infosthetics. There were lots of really interesting talks and demos on data visualisation projects from across Europe […]
This post was written by participants of the LOD-LAM Summit which was held on June 2nd/3rd in San Francisco and is crossposted on the Creative Commons blog and the Open bibliography and Open Bibliographic Data blog. For author information see the list below the document. The library, archives and museums (i.e. LAM) community is increasingly […]
Open Government Data Camp 2011 is coming soon! You can find more at: We’re currently working with the excellent Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt:Polska to finalise logistics for the event, which is currently scheduled to take place on 21st October 2011. As with last year’s event, we will have lots of developers, designers, data journalists, public servants, […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today we’re pleased to announce the winners of the Open Data Challenge, Europe’s biggest open data competition. The 1st prizes for each category will be awarded later today by European Commission Vice President, Neelie Kroes at the Digital Agenda Assembly in […]
The following guest post is from Augusto Herrmann, Christian Miranda and Nitai Bezerra, from the Open Data team at the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management. They are all members of the Open Knowledge Foudation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. We are a team of three people working on open data at the Brazilian […]
Jens Finnäs is a freelance journalist based in Helsinki, the author of Dataist, a blog about data journalism, and a member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data. Parliamentary elections in Finland are usually rather dull. Rarely does the rest of the world bother to pay any attention. But […]
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. When the amazing Emer Coleman first approached me a year and a half to get feedback on the plans for the London datastore, I told her that the gold standard […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Earlier today the new French open government data initiative, data.gouv.fr, posted a letter of support for the OpenDataChallenge from Séverin Naudet, who heads up the initiative and works with the French Prime Minister’s Office. Here’s an excerpt: I would like to […]
On Saturday and Sunday (4th and 5th June) I was in Sofia, Bulgaria to run a Open Data Workshop on the Saturday and speak at the OpenCamp on the Sunday. Separate notes on the workshop are here: http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/06/06/open-data-workshop-in-sofia-bulgaria-4th-june/ with results of mapping of Bulgarian gov data on CKAN wiki: http://wiki.ckan.net/Bulgaria. Slides (fullsize): Open Data: What, […]
The following guest post is from Jim Michalko, VP in charge of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Karen Calhoun, former VP of Metadata Applications, who has previously been working on these issues, has recently left OCLC to relocate and begin the first phase of her retirement. She has transitioned her role as OCLC’s spokesperson for […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are now around 36 hours left to enter the OpenDataChallenge.org, Europe’s biggest open data competition! There are €20,000 worth of awards and prizes for ideas, applications, visualisations, and datasets. If you have: an idea for a useful service that could […]
The following guest post is from Lilliana Bounegru at the European Journalism Centre (EJC). The EJC in collaboration with Mirko Lorenz at Deutshe Welle have created a survey that aims to gather the opinion of journalists on the emerging practice of data-driven journalism and understand their training needs in this field. Data has always been […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. This weekend developers all over the world will get together for a series of events as part of Random Hacks of Kindness, which aim to use “practical open technology to make the world a better place“. We imagine that many of […]
The following guest post is from Owen Stephens, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Discovery is a new JISC funded initiative to help realise a vision set out in 2010 by the JISC and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) ‘Resource Discovery Taskforce’ (RDTF). The RDTF Vision is […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data. Three months ago, the French Prime Minister announced officially the creation of the EtaLab governmental team, dedicated to the future data.gouv.fr. On Friday May 27th, two official texts have been published: a decree (fr) that defines new juridic rules regarding […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock is going to speak at Open Camp Sofia 2011 on the 5th June. Just before we’re going to be running a workshop/hackday on open government data. If you’d like to come along, please register here: From the […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Guardian recently published an interesting article on open data in science, including interviews with OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock and other leading voices from the world of open science. Here’s Rufus: “The litmus test of openness is whether you can have […]
Jo Walsh, Service Manager at EDINA and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation board, writes: Yesterday I gave a last-minute talk on open data, the work of OKF and EDINA to a Census Microdata workshop in Edinburgh. The slides consist of screenshots with links and cover the following. CKAN – the Data Hub and […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are currently 10 days left to enter the Open Data Challenge, Europe’s biggest open data competition to date! You can submit ideas, applications, visualisations and datasets until the 5th June 2011 via the following link. We’d be very grateful for […]
Jo Walsh, who works as a project manager at EDINA and sits on the Open Knowledge Foundation board, writes: These thoughts on sustaining open data business were provoked by ORCID, a not-for-profit business set up by a group of large academic publishers and a few leading universities. Its aim is to provide a central directory […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data. For about a year, Regards Citoyens has been working together with the French chapter of Transparency International in order to bring more transparency in the processes of influence and lobbying within the French parliament. Lobbying is a very controversial subject […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re currently looking for more people to help map copyright law in countries around the world – so we can make it easier for people to find and reuse works which have entered the public domain. We’re particularly keen to contact […]
The following guest post is from David Pidsley who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development. Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) on 12th and 13th May 2011 in Amsterdam focuses on how developers, practitioners and policy makers can harness open international development data more effectively. During […]
The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. The Open Knowledge Foundation has just launched the okfn-cz mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-cz The short URL is: http://bit.ly/okfn-cz The intent of the […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over the past 48 hours or so we’ve been busy loading 12 years of Italian spending data into Open Spending. Further details on the project and the data are below. This project was put together by Stefano Costa, Friedrich Lindenberg, Luca […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce the release of #opendata, a new short film clip about open government data. The film includes interview footage with numerous open government data gurus and advocates, which we shot at last year’s Open […]
The following guest post is from Sverre Andreas Lunde-Danbolt who works for the Department for ICT and renewal in the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs, and who is a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data The Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform have just sent a […]
The following guest post is by Matt Rosenberg of Seattle, founder of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest and the news knowledge base site Public Data Ferret, a Seattle Times local news partner. There’s no dispute that mandated public disclosure in accordance with freedom of information and open meetings laws is a cornerstone of any modern […]
The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. On the Saturday, March 19th, the Big Clean workshop took place as a twin event in two cities, Prague (Czech Republic) […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. For a long while our Working Group on EU Open Data has been very keen to run a pan-European open data competition. Hence we’re very pleased to announced the opening of the Open Data Challenge, which is precisely such a competition. […]
The following post is from Professor Nigel Shadbolt, who is on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. This article was originally published in Think Quarterly and is reproduced here with permission from the author. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been defined by our insatiable demand for information. It has led to […]
The following is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Present: A One-Way Street At the current time, the basic model for data processing is a “one way street”. Sources of data, such as government, publish data out into the world, where, (if we are lucky) it is processed by […]
This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. On Friday we at OpenCorporates announced an innovative (and frankly untested!) way for the open data community to work together in helping opening up one of the most important datasets there […]
The following post is from Stefan Wehrmeyer, who has worked on projects such as Mapnificent, and has recently joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as a developer! Public Transport Data is awesome! It’s one of the few datasets that people actually use every day when they ask for the next bus or the fastest route. And […]
The following post is from Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki. ‘Should Britain flog off the family silver to cut our national debt?‘ — that’s the question the UK current affairs documentary Dispatches tackled last Monday. ScraperWiki worked with Channel 4 News and Dispatches to make two supporting data visualisations, to help viewers understand what assets […]
The following guest post is by Cynthia O’Murchu, investigative reporter at the Financial Times, and previously their deputy interactive editor. She is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data At its inception, “Europe’s Hidden Billions”, a joint investigation by the Financial Times and the then newly formed Bureau of […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As many of you will know, the Public Domain Calculators aim to make it easier to find out which works are in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. There are two main parts of the project: A collection of flowcharts, […]
The following post is from Mark Hahnel, founder of the Science 3.0 network and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. An unprecedented amount of freely reusable government information is currently being released by public bodies around the globe. This is being consumed and reused by numerous stakeholders – including civic developers, data literate citizens, data journalists, NGOs, researchers, and companies. There […]
The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, founder of DataMarket.com, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. We‘ve just launched an offering of statistics from some of the world’s most important sources of open data on DataMarket.com. This enables users to find, compare, visualize and download statistics from […]
What can you do with open access to data? What great ideas do you have for utilising open access to bibliographic catalogues? Or what example prototypes can you come up with? We want to find out! 2 x £50 prizes for great ideas using bibliographic data 2 x £500 prizes for building prototype apps using […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re proud to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is part of a new team which will take on the maintenance of ePSIplatform project for the next two years. As many of you will know ePSIplatform is a key resource for […]
The following guest post is by Arlen Parsa, who works for Groundswell Educational Films, an American non-profit. In collaboration with the Northwestern University chemistry department, they’ve produced a brilliant example of how opening up data can have a real impact on people’s lives. ##The problem Many parts of the Navajo Indian reservation in the south-western […]
The following guest post is by Christopher Gutteridge, a Web & Systems Programmer and Open Data Architect at the University of Southampton. When he was young he wrote the “coffee stain” filter for GIMP, and is the developer of Graphite RDF PHP library & tools. He is a member of the OKF Working Group on […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ […]
The following post is from Guo Xu, economics researcher, member of the OKF’s fledgling Working Group on Open Information in Economics, and member of the Yourtopia project. Two weeks ago, we announced the Yourtopia.net project, a simple web application that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what “YourTopia”, they would like to live in. […]
The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). On Friday he mapped three possible futures for Open Public Data, and today he suggests ways to ensure we will avoid some of the dangers he highlighted. ###What triggers what? One may believe that one of the three scenarios […]
The following post is by Mark McGillivrary, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Last week the Open Biblio Principles were launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. The principles are the product of six months of development and discussion within the working group […]
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