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 post is from Esa Mäkinen, an open data advocate, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. Finnish novels used to be 200 pages long in the 1910s. A few hundred years later and the novels are longer: nowadays they are […]
The following guest post is from Daniela B. Silva and Diego Casaes from the Transparency Hacker Community in Brazil. CONSEGI, an open source software and e-Government conference organized by (and mostly for) public IT departments and officers, took place on May 11, 12 and 13th, in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. For the first time, […]
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. 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 […]
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 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 […]
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 guest post is by Aman Grewal and Carlos de la Fuente, from the World Wide Web Foundation and CTIC Foundation Last year we witnessed an impressive expansion of Open Government Data initiatives all around the world. We can assert without any doubt that it was clearly the year when Open Government spread throughout […]
The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg, who is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation working on CKAN, PublicData.eu and Open Spending. Recently, there has hardly been a week in which there hasn’t been an announcement of a new local, regional or national open data initiative – including ever more extensive catalogues of data […]
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 guest post is by Zuzana Wienk, from the Slovakian watchdog the Fair Play Alliance. She is also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data When we started to build a data catalogue of all possible flows of public finances to the private sphere in 2003, we had no […]
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 Scott Primeau from Colorado Smart Communities, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data Just over a year ago, Kevin Curry started the CityCamp movement to bring together local government officials, government employees, private sector technology experts, journalists, and citizens to share perspectives and insights […]
The following guest post is from Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and internet entrepreneur, and founder of the Open-data Brighton and Hove group. Greg is also director of strategic projects at Cogapp, and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. Brighton and Hove is a special place. […]
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 […]
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 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 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 guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). Today he explores three possible futures for Open Public Data, and on Monday he will suggest ways to ensure that we are moving in the best direction. We tend to assume that the opening up of public data will […]
The following post is by Tony Hirst, who has been working with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge to create http://GetTheData.org/, a new question and answer site for data-related questions. Where can I find a list of airports with their locations? Where can I find historical weather data? How do I find the county from […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We submitted a proposal for a project called Spending Stories to the Knight News Challenge back in December but in the rush before Christmas we didn’t get a chance to post about here! The News Challenge aims to “advance the future […]
This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, a member of OKFN’s open government working group and creator of OpenlyLocal, who today launched a new website OpenCorporates in collaboration with Rob McKinnon (a project they first demoed at the Open Government Data Camp in November). Why OpenCorporates? Like most open data/open source projects, it was […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today was the Eurostat Hackday, where coders and designers in several European cities gathered to dig into the Eurostat data, the biggest source of statistical information about Europe and European member states. We met at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in […]
A reminder that this Thursday 16th December is the Eurostat Hackday in a number of European cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Edinburgh, and London. More information is available at: From the blurb: What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the largest source of statistical information about European member states. It contains detailed comparative information on everything from […]
A report from an EU meeting on the “goals and requirements for a pan-European data portal” is now online (PDF). The meeting took place in Luxembourg last month. Participants included Nigel Shadbolt, one of four members of the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, and Jose Manuel Alonso, co-lead of the eGovernment Interest Group at […]
A few weeks ago was the first international Open Government Data Camp in London. The event brought hundreds of people interested in open government data from around the world for two days of talks, discussions, planning and coding. You can now find videos, photos, notes and other material from the event online at:
This post was cowritten by Friedrich Lindenberg, CKAN developer, and Stefano Costa, lead of OKF Italia. Driven by the powerful combination of late-night espresso and a room full of italian open data enthusiasts, the Italian instance of CKAN received a major push of new pacchetti dati last thursday in Turin. Most of the data sources […]
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. I’m floored. As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely […]
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. I’m floored. As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely […]
We’re currently organising a ‘hackday’ on the Eurostat data, which will take place on Wednesday 16th December 2010: If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch on the euopendata mailing list, or drop us a line on eurostat at okfn dot org. From the website: Eurostat Hackday What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the […]
A quick note to announce (and celebrate!) the launch of a new community driven French open data catalogue, NosDonnees.fr last Friday in Paris. The catalogue is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Regards Citoyens. Efforts are currently underway to populate the catalogue with information about French public datasets, including legal information about […]
A brief reminder that this Saturday 4th December is the international open data hackathon! What is it? As says the blurb: It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and […]
As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data. We are […]
Tomorrow morning at 9.30 marks the start of the Open Government Data Camp, the first of it’s kind, and what we hope will be an annual event. People are already arriving from across the world to attend including representatives from the UN, White House and European Commission. But why all the fuss? We spoke to […]
We’re very excited to announce that we’re helping to organise an international series of events to convert not-very-useful, unstructured, non-machine-readable sources of public information into nice clean structured data. This will make it much easier for people to reuse the data, whether this is mixing it with other data sources (e.g. different sources of information […]
The folks over at Fish Subsidy (who are also behind the amazing Farm Subsidy project) have just released a new mapping tool to help people find out how €3.4 billion of European fisheries subsidies is spent: This is a great example of reusing European public data to make it easier to understand for citizens, journalists […]
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. Let’s do it. Last summer, I met Pedro Markun and Daniela Silva at the Mozilla Summit. During the conversation – feeling the drumbeat […]
The following guest post is from Jonathan Van Parijs at the Where’s My Villo? project. The context: bike-sharing schemes, public private partnerships and open data After Paris, Barcelona and a growing number of cities around the world, Brussels inaugurated its bike-sharing scheme in May 2009, called Villo!. By far the most convenient way to travel […]
As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources. […]
The following guest post is from Bart van Leeuwen, a firefighter in the city of Amsterdam who has been experimenting with governmental linked data on Open Street Map to help improve fire truck navigation. Working as a firefighter in the city of Amsterdam, will Linked Open Government Data help me fight fires? Probably not, but […]
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