The following post is from Lisa Evans, who is doing research on UK public finance data sources as part of our Where Does My Money Go? project. Freedom of information: sharing our experiences I’ve been reading some debate on the extent to which Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are a drain on public resources. A […]
Following is a guest post from Daniel Dietrich, Chairman of the Open Data Network, Official Representative of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany and Researcher at the centre for Computers and Society at the Technical University Berlin. In this post I will try to give you an overview and update on what is happening on open […]
Open Knowledge Scotland “brings together interested parties from across the open knowledge spectrum based in Scottish educational institutions, Scottish research organisations, Scottish local and national government, and members of the public for the purposes of teaching, learning and discussion”. OKCon in London is now in its fifth year. It seemed like time to put together […]
The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on EU Open Data. At the government data project at the University of Bergen, we see the Norwegian language version of CKAN, launched this week, as a significant step on […]
Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week – today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public. More information is available in the following report, […]
The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, an open data activist, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data, and founder of structured data start-up, DataMarket. The Wave of Open Data Open access to public sector information, or simply “Open Data” is gathering a lot of momentum these days. High […]
Today, in a speech on “Building Britain’s Digital Future”, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced wide-ranging plans to open up UK government data. In addition to a general promise to extend the existing commitments to “make public data public” the PM announced: The opening up of a large and important set of transport data (the […]
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, founded in 2006 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms. What follows is […]
I’ve been investigating data for use in the project ‘Where Does My Money Go’. One of the first reports we looked at was the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) — it looks like this:
http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/
So an obvious question is where does the data in the PESA report come from, I mean, where is the PESA data stored?
The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, who recently worked on a report on open government data in Norway. A loose community is forming, slowly pushing open data higher on the agenda of Norway’s politicians and civil servants. But these developers, journalists, academics, and IT business […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation and Access Info are currently seeking information on open government data initiatives around the world, as part of a scoping paper supported by the Open Society Institute: With major announcements from the UK and and the US in the past few months, and numerous open government data catalogues popping up around […]
We’ve been working hard to set up instances of CKAN for open government data – most notably in data.gov.uk but also for open government data in Germany, France, Canada and elsewhere. We are currently soliciting for feedback on how we can improve CKAN’s user interface and for suggestions for new features. We’re also in touch […]
Nat Torkington recently wrote the following piece on O’Reilly Radar. He kindly gave us permission to republish it on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog… In the last year I’ve been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I’ve seen some signs recently that other […]
When data.gov.uk was launched, I had a quick browse around the data, to get a feel for what was in it. Most data sets that I randomly looked at were from statistics.gov.uk (from the Office for National Statistics). Today, I decided to investigate, and work out some basic statistics about the source of the data. […]
Data.gov.uk goes public today, and we’ve very proud that it is using CKAN, our open source registry of open data, to list official UK government datasets (as we announced in October): We’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office team to get this out the door, and over 2500 datasets have been released via the […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French association of citizens with a shared interest in opening up information about the functioning of democratic institutions in France. France is lagging behind… There is no doubt about it: compared to other countries, France is definitely late in opening up its data. For a country […]
Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project – to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release. We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas – and the release was covered in the BBC […]
As you may well have seen, last Thursday the Greater London Authorities announced the new London Datastore: From the press release: The Mayor of London will unveil plans for the capital’s first open data project which will see large amounts of previously unavailable information from City Hall released online. Similar to the hugely successful ‘Apps […]
Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is spent at local level: It is critical […] that information on public expenditure should be […]
Recent BBC news coverage stated that UK postcode data will be made freely available under an open licence from April 2010. Colleagues at EDINA pointed out that some of the coverage assumes that the open data will be the same as that contained in the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File – but this is uncertain. […]
We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]
So far its been a good week for open government data (and its only Tuesday)! After yesterday’s announcement from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, today the US Government’s Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra gave a live webcast from the Whitehouse to announce the release of the new Open Government […]
This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans to open up lots more UK Government data! His speech describes plans to put much more detailed information online under open licenses in 2010. This includes: public services performance data – including on crime, hospitals and schools new transport data geospatial data from Ordnance survey (as […]
With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen starting on Monday, it is of vital important that there is consensus on the scientific evidence about climate change, in order to inform debates about the best course of action for the international community. Sharing the same basic picture about the climate, global warming and the […]
Last week we had a workshop on Open Data and the Semantic Web in London. There were some excellent talks, demos and discussions – and documentation is now online! As a result of discussions we had at the workshop, we now have two new volunteer positions at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you’re interested in […]
In a press release earlier this week, it was announced that there will be moves to open up geospatial data produced by the Ordnance Survey: The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government […]
We’ve pleased to announce the alpha release of our Where Does My Money Go prototype. This is a web application that allows you to explore UK public spending – and you can take a look here: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-alpha/ Update: access underlying data here. This an “alpha” release and its still a way from finished – we’re […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Proposals is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (wrapped at 72 characters) Identi.ca post Twitter post Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: […]
Over the last few months there have been lots of exciting announcements about open data from cities around the world. We decided to take a look at what is currently out there – in particular taking note of: Whether datasets are open as in the Open Knowledge Definition – i.e. whether they explicitly say that […]
We recently blogged about some mockups for our Where Does My Money Go? project. We’ve now got some new mockups for the project which are show below (click through for full size). Again, we’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave a comment below, or pop a note to […]
Thanks to a pointer from the ever-aware Julian Todd we’re heartened to see these pledges being made at the Conservative Party Conference in the UK: Use open source software as much as possible Publish on a website details of all government spending over £25,000. [ed: great news for Where Does My Money Go] Allow the […]
European policy analyst David Osimo recently invited me to be on the steering committee of a new ‘Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0’. The background page says: Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry […]
We are currently building a prototype for the Where Does My Money Go? – and we’ve now got the first mockups of what the site will look like… For full size versions you can see: spending by region spending by function We’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave […]
The UK Government’s public sector data site launched last week in a private beta — and it’s using CKAN as its backend for storing all its dataset info! They’ve got more than a 1000 existing data sets, from 7 departments, all brought together for the first time in a re-useable form. They’re eager to get […]
Yesterday the Australian government announced its new MashupAustralia competition, with a prize fund of over $20,000 Australian dollars: Today the Government 2.0 Taskforce is launching its MashupAustralia contest […]. To fuel your innovative mashup juices, around 59 datasets from the Australian and State and Territory Governments have been released at data.australia.gov.au on license terms and […]
Where is your nearest postbox, and when is the post collected from it? Now you can get open data showing the locations and collection times of over 116,000 postboxes in the UK. You can browse relevant datasets on CKAN at: http://ckan.net/tag/read/postboxes The story behind this data reads like an inverted version of The Little Red […]
Opengov.se is a registry of open government data in Sweden: Opengov.se is an initiative to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. It contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. It makes a note of what percentage of the datasets are fully open – i.e. material that is free for anyone […]
The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has recently released data from the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database to be put on Open Street Map (OSM). As it says on the NaPTAN website: NaPTAN provides a unique identifier for every point of access to public transport in the UK, together with meaningful text descriptions […]
Last month Rufus Pollock, Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke at OpenTech 2009 in a session with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information. His talk gave a blueprint for how to open up government data: Opening Up Government Data: Give it to Us Raw, […]
Back in June the Australian Minister for Finance announced a new Government 2.0 Taskforce. Part of the work of this new taskforce includes: increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information Paralleling recent initiatives such as the UK’s Power of […]
The National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. has just published a new report, The Socioeconomic Effects of Public Sector Information on Digital Networks, edited by Paul Uhlir from the U.S. National Committee for CODATA. There are lots of interesting contributions in the report, including from OKF Advisory Board member Chris Corbin, Communia Coordinator Juan […]
Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”. There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK – particularly from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Cabinet Office and with […]
There have recently been several posts about what features are desirable in government data catalogues. The Sunlight Foundation recently announced they are planning to build on data.gov to allow “community participation so that people can submit their own data sources” (including support for adding data that is not open such as data with noncommercial restrictions). […]
Tomorrow I’ll be talking at OpenTech 2009 in a session on “Open Government Data” with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of OPSI. With the recent, and very welcome, news on opening up government data both here and abroad I’ll be giving some suggested dos and don’ts for this process under the […]
Recently, partly as an experiment regarding access to government data, partly out of genuine interest in the material itself, I looked into getting hold of some UK traffic count data — useful for, among other things, doing traffic analysis which is key to much road planning and policy (see e.g. this work by R J […]
Public Whip and TheyWorkForYou have been around for a few years now, grabbing data from the UK Parliament website and making it more useful, and accessible with better navigation, search and email alerts. It’s little known, but we also make all that open data available in a separate screen scraping project called parlparse. Rufus first […]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.