Many efforts are being obstructed by the lack of IT infrastructure investment, lack of available, accessible datasets and lack of mature data organisation, data management and data governance.
Data that empowers: LAC perspectives on data governance
A few weeks ago we had a conversation in the Statistical Conference of the Americas about Data Governance. This brief post is a follow up of some of the concepts and ideas that we shared in the panel. Transparency as a Holistic Approach As citizens and members of the Civil Society, a huge challenge we […]
Take part in EU Open Data Days, an event focused on the benefits of open data and its reuse in the EU
Open Knowledge Foundation are partnering with the Publications Office of the European Union for EU Open Data Days, an event to bring the benefits of open data and its reuse to the EU public sector. Below you can find details about the event in a press release republished from the Publications Office. Participate in the […]
The UK’s National Data Strategy: first impressions and observations
After years of promises, the UK Government has finally announced the launch of a ‘framework’ National Data Strategy. The aim of the strategy is to “drive the UK in building a world-leading data economy while ensuring public trust in data use” and the government has set out five missions for this work: Unlocking the value […]
csv,conf returns for version 5 in May
Save the date for csv,conf,v5! The fifth version of csv,conf will be held at the University of California, Washington Center in Washington DC, USA, on May 13 and 14, 2020. If you are passionate about data and its application to society, this is the conference for you. Submissions for session proposals for 25-minute talk […]
Transforming the UK’s data ecosystem: Open Knowledge Foundation’s thoughts on the National Data Strategy
Following an open call for evidence issued by the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Open Knowledge Foundation submitted our thoughts about what the UK can do in its forthcoming National Data Strategy to “unlock the power of data across government and the wider economy, while building citizen trust in its use”. We […]
Missed opportunities in the EU’s revised open data and re-use of public sector information directive
Published by the European Union on June 26th, the revised directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information – or PSI Directive – set out an updated set of rules relating to public sector documents, publicly funded research data and “high-value” datasets which should be made available for free via application programming […]
What data counts in Europe? Towards a public debate on Europe’s high value data and the PSI Directive
This blogpost was co-authored by Danny Lämmerhirt, Pierre Chrzanowski and Sander van der Waal (*author note at the bottom) January 22 will mark a crucial moment for the future of open data in Europe. That day, the final trilogue between European Commission, Parliament, and Council is planned to decide over the ratification of the updated PSI Directive. […]
Paris Peace Forum Hackathon: A new chance to talk about open data
A few weeks ago we had the chance to attend the first edition of the Paris Peace Forum. The goal of this new initiative is to exchange and discuss concrete global governance solutions. More than 10,000 people attended, 65 Heads of State and Government were present, and 10 international organizations leaders convened for those three days […]
The next target user group for the open data movement is governments
Here’s an open data story that might sound a bit counterintuitive. Last month a multinational company was negotiating with an African government to buy an asset. The company, which already owned some of the asset but wanted to increase its stake, said the extra part was worth $6 million. The government’s advisers said it was […]
A short story about Open Washing
Great news! The International Open Data Conference (IODC) accepted my proposal about Open Washing. The moment I heard this I wanted to write something to invite everyone to our session. It will be a follow-up to the exchange we had during IODC in 2015. First a couple disclaimers: This text is not exactly about data. […]
Europe’s proposed PSI Directive: A good baseline for future open data policies?
Some weeks ago, the European Commission proposed an update of the PSI Directive**. The PSI Directive regulates the reuse of public sector information (including administrative government data), and has important consequences for the development of Europe’s open data policies. Like every legislative proposal, the PSI Directive proposal is open for public feedback until July 13. […]
New proposal for the re-use of government held data by the EC
TL;DR The European Commission proposed a new PSI Directive, that describes when and how publicly held data can be re-used by anyone (aka open government data). The proposal contains several highly interesting elements: it extends the scope to public undertakings (utilities and transport mostly) and research data, it limits the ways in which government can […]
Open Council Data of more than 100 Dutch municipalities reused in app WhereGovernment
This blog has been reposted from the Open State Foundation blog. More than a hundred Dutch municipalities release Open Council Data, including all documents of the municipal council – decisions, agendas, motions, amendments and policy documents – easily and collectively accessible. The data is now available for reuse in applications. Recently, the first app that […]
Using the Global Open Data Index to strengthen open data policies: Best practices from Mexico
This is a blog post coauthored with Enrique Zapata, of the Mexican National Digital Strategy. As part of the last Global Open Data Index (GODI), Open Knowledge International (OKI) decided to have a dialogue phase, where we invited individuals, CSOs, and national governments to exchange different points of view, knowledge about the data and understand […]
The state of open licensing in 2017
This blog post is part of our Global Open Data Index (GODI) blog series. Firstly, it discusses what open licensing is and why it is crucial for opening up data. Afterward, it outlines the most urgent issues around open licensing as identified in the latest edition of the Global Open Data Index and concludes with […]
Steady but Slow – Open Data’s Progress in the Caribbean
This blog post was co-authored with Denique Ferguson and Alesha Aris of the SlashRoots Foundation Over the last two years, the SlashRoots Foundation has supported the Caribbean’s participation in the Open Knowledge International’s Global Open Data Index, an annual survey which measures the state of “open” government across the world. We recently completed the 2016 survey […]
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 […]
Civic Tech or Civic Business? Digital technology will not help democracy without adopting its foundations
This blog originally appeared on RegardsCitoyens.org and has been translated by Pierre Chrzanowski and Samuel Goëta (Open Knowledge France). Civil society did not wait for the buzzword “Civic Tech” to implement digital technology to serve democratic innovation. But since the boom of this trendy term, there have been many initiatives claiming to belong to what it […]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of #OGP16 Summit
This blog originally appeared on Medium and is reposted with permission. This post is a reflection of a long and intense week in Paris for the Open Government Partnership summit. I feel after this week like I have seen so much, but missed out on a lot of things (including a couple of meals!). All […]
How is our economy ordered by information? Reflections from the Open Knowledge International monthly reading group
Danny Lämmerhirt and Mor Rubinstein share team reflections from the inaugural meeting of the Open Knowledge International Reading Group. This month’s topic examined the role that knowledge and data play for political and economic coordination. The team looked at Friedrich Hayek and Hernando de Soto and drew parallels from their work to how government information is managed […]
How to ‘unlock’ the value of fiscal data for civil society: experiences from the OpenSpending community
OpenSpending is one of Open Knowledge International’s current projects. It is a free and open platform for citizens looking to track and analyse public fiscal information globally. Over the years, we have learned about numerous examples of fiscal data uses from the OpenSpending community. Also, we learned that obtaining fiscal data can be the most […]
Join Open Data from Around the World session at the Paris OGP summit
Open Government Data from around the world session is back at the OGP summit, this time with a twist! Come and join as active participants and share open data updates from your country on Thursday, December 8th on 12 pm! What is Open Government Data from around the world session? In this one hour session, […]
What is the Open Fiscal Data Package?
This post looks at the Open Fiscal Data Package – an open standard for publishing fiscal data developed by Open Knowledge International, GIFT and the World Bank. In September of 2016, Mexico became the first country to officially endorse the OFDP, by publishing Federal Budget data in open formats using OpenSpending tools. OpenSpending is one of […]
Who Will Shape the Future of the Data Society?
This piece was originally posted on the blog of the International Open Data Conference 2016, which takes place in Madrid, 6-7th October 2016. The contemporary world is held together by a vast and overlapping fabric of information systems. These information systems do not only tell us things about the world around us. They also play […]
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 […]
New Report: “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?”
Following on from our discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, today we’re pleased to announce the release of a new report titled “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?”. Undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge and the CIVICUS DataShift, […]
New Initiative: Open Data for Tax Justice #OD4TJ
Every year countries lose billions of dollars to tax avoidance, tax evasion and more generally to illicit financial flows. According to a recent IMF estimate around $700 billion of tax revenues is lost each year due to profit-shifting. In developing countries the loss is estimated to be around $200 billion, which as a share of […]
Open: A Short Film about Open Government, Open Data and Open Source
This is a guest post from Richard Pietro the writer and director of Open. If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with the terms Open Government, Open Data, and Open Source. You probably understand how civic engagement is being radically transformed through these movements. Therein lays the challenge: How can we reach everyone else? The […]
New Discussion Paper: “Democratising the Data Revolution”
“New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are […]
UK Crime Data: Feeling is Believing
Latest crime data shows that the UK is getting significantly more ‘peaceful’. Last month, the Institute for Economics and Peace published the UK Peace Index, revealing UK crime figures have fallen the most of all EU countries in the past decade. Homicide rates, to take one indicator, have halved over the last decade. But the […]
Pioneering Fellowships Will Help Rewire Africa’s Governments
Open Knowledge and Code for Africa launch pilot Open Government Fellowship Programme. Apply to become a fellow today. This blog announcement is available in French here and Portuguese here. Do you want to help us build African governments and societies that are more accountable and responsive to citizens? We are looking for the best ideas […]
Joint Submission to UN Data Revolution Group
The following is the joint Submission to the UN Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution from the World Wide Web Foundation, Open Knowledge, Fundar and the Open Institute, October 15, 2014. It derives from and builds on the Global Open Data Initiative’s Declaration on Open Data. To the UN Secretary General’s […]
Brazilian Government Develops Toolkit to Guide Institutions in both Planning and Carrying Out Open Data Initatives
This is a guest post by Nitai Silva of the Brazilian government’s open data team and was originally published on the Open Knowledge Brazil blog here. Recently Brazilian government released the Kit de Dados Abertos (open data toolkit). The toolkit is made up of documents describing the process, methods and techniques for implementing an open […]
A Data Revolution that Works for All of Us
Many of today’s global challenges are not new. Economic inequality, the unfettered power of corporations and markets, the need to cooperate to address global problems and the unsatisfactory levels of accountability in democratic governance – these were as much problems a century ago as they remain today. What has changed, however – and most markedly […]
Open data for Development Training Starts Tomorrow!
This is a guest post written by Justyna Krol of the UNDP and originally posted on the UNDP blog. >> Is data literacy the key to citizen engagement in anti-corruption efforts? Access to open data is transforming the way we live of our lives, and the conversation in our region is just beginning. Governments are […]
Open Government countries ranking 2013 (based on OGP data)
This is a guest post by Alberto Abella, head of the Spanish Chapter of Open Knowledge, and originally appeared at gobernamos.com. Open Government (ogov) is possibly next democracy’s milestone. Should you care about open government? Possibly, because it guarantees transparency and accountability. But not only IMHO. In 2014 this passive role for the citizens is […]
Open Knowledge Ireland celebrate FOI victory
Open Knowledge Ireland are this week celebrating partial victory in their campaign against application fees for FOI requests. Here is their press release. Open Knowledge Ireland welcomes Minister Howlin’s announcement that Government has approved the removal of an application fee for Freedom of Information Requests Open Knowledge Ireland welcomes the announcement by the Minister that […]
Stop the harassment of Hungarian NGOs by the government
The Hungarian government has started to target transparency and humanitarian NGOs. The political climate in Hungary has been deteriorating sharply since the re-election of the government led by Viktor Orban. The latest indication of a harsher political environment is the harassment of humanitarian and transparency NGOs. The Hungarian government accuses the targeted NGOs to be […]
Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches
At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]
Opening up governance: OpenMENA joins public consultation process in Tunisia
This is a cross-post from the OpenMENA blog. Find the original here. Civil society group OpenGovTN have asked our OpenMENA collaboration of Local Groups to join a forthcoming national public consultation in Tunesia. This aims to build an action plan which will bring greater openness and more collaborative governance to Tunisia, and the process, referred […]
All-star wrap-up of a month of Open Knowledge events all around the world – April 2014
Last month we asked the Open knowledge community to start sharing more details about the events we all run, to discover how many people are rocking Open Knowledge events all around the world! The community has been great at responding the call and now we’re glad to feature some of the April events we got […]
VozData – new Argentinean citizen platform for opening data
This is a guest blog post by Florencia Coelho from La Nation in Argentina. LA NACIÓN recently launched VozData, a collaborative platform that allows users to transform public documents from PDFs into a comprehensible structured database. In its first project, the site allows users to check and classify more than 6500 renditions of Senate’s expenses […]
Draft Open Data Policy for Qatar
The following post was originally published on the blog of our Open MENA community (Middle East and North Africa). The Qatari Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (generally referred to as ictQATAR) had launched a public consultation on its draft Open Data Policy. I thus decided to briefly present a (long overdue) outline of Qatar’s […]
From Health in the UK to Education in Nigeria – Stop Secret Contracts
Today it was announced that fraud and error in the UK National Health Service are leading to the loss of around £7 billion each year. This could pay for about 250,000 new nurses, and comes at a time when the service is struggling more than ever under the pressures of austerity. One of the main […]
Open Data 1-day training on 28 March
The Open Knowledge Foundation will be re-running its one-day Introduction to Open Data on Friday 28 March. Local governments and other organisations are looking at how they can release data they hold – unleashing creativity from local entrepreneurs, researchers, journalists, third-sector organisations and citizens, and helping to build economic activity as well as accountability and […]
Gauging the needs and challenges of the global open data community
This is a guest blog post by Julia Keserü, International Policy Manager at the Sunlight Foundation, which partners alongside ao. the Open Knowledge Foundation in the Global Open Data Initiative. Originally featured on the blog of the initiative. A few months back, the Global Open Data Initiative (GODI) sought input from the transparency community to […]
River level data must be open
My home – as you can see – is flooded, for the second time in a month. The mighty Thames is reclaiming its flood-plains, and making humans – especially the UK government’s Environment Agency – look puny and irrelevant. As I wade to and fro, putting sandbags around the doors, carrying valuables upstairs, and adding […]
Britain ‘shines light of transparency’ on secret lobbying. Just kidding.
The following article is cross-posted from OpenDemocracy. David Cameron’s lobbying bill exposes the hollowness of his muscular claims about cracking down on crony capitalism. Britain’s democracy remains under corporate capture. Image: Government wants to register Lobbying Agencies alone (Alliance for Lobbying Transparency) Today the government’s proposed Lobbying Bill will go into parliamentary ping-pong between the […]
The best data opens itself on UK Gov’s Performance Platform
This is a guest post by Francis Irving (@frabcus), CEO of ScraperWiki, who has made several of the world’s first civic websites such as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow. This is the third in a series of posts about the UK Government’s Performance Platform. Part 1 introduced why the platform is exciting, and part 2 described how […]
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