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 […]
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 […]
Harvard University’s Berkman Center, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute recently released a report on copyright and open licensing for private philanthropic foundations. The report examines: […] the copyright licensing policies and practices of a group of twelve private foundations. In particular, it looked at the extent […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just over a week ago was the 2nd Communia Workshop, which took place in Turin. The theme was ‘Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions’ – and there was a great line up of scientists, economists, and legal scholars, as well as representatives from various research bodies and NGOs. Papers, slides and audio will […]
EUTransparency, who created FarmSubsidy and organised the European Open Data Summit have launched a new site with data on payments made under the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. From the press release: Today sees the launch of fishsubsidy.org, a new transparency website from the farmsubsidy.org stable. It presents data on 97,260 payments totalling 8.5 billion euro […]
INSPIRE, the directive establishing a spatial data infrastructure for environmental information in Europe, is heading into UK law at last. DEFRA is doing a consultation on the transposition of the law and OKFN will hopefully co-submit a response by 26th May with the Open Rights Group, a summary of the responses is on the okfn-discuss […]
The US governments new data.gov site (which we blogged about last month) is now live! There are currently a selection of core datasets available – from information about World Copper Smelters to results from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Raw data is available in XML, Text/CSV, KML/KMZ, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. As well […]
Last week was the first European Open Data Summit in Brussels (which we blogged about here) organised by EU Transparency, who created farmsubsidy.org. The event brought together journalists, researchers, civic hackers, and representatives from European institutions for two days of documenting and building on documents and datasets from European institutions and member states. At the […]
The 5th Communia Workshop took place last month at the London School of Economics. It brought together researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from across Europe, the United States and Australia for two days of talks and discussions about reusing public sector content and data. In the afternoon of the first day, participants co-drafted a simple […]
I just saw this transcript of US CIO Kundra’s first conference call where he states: VK: One of the things we want to do is embark on launching data.gov which would democratize data and give data access to the public and based on that challenge whether it is citizens, NGOs the private sector to help […]
The 5th COMMUNIA Workshop will take place in London next week – on the 26-27th March. There’s a great programme of speakers – and details of which are below. There are a handful of tickets left – so if you’d like to come along, make sure and register now! If you aren’t able to make […]
I was recently asked to write a piece for Berlin-based think tank Das Progressive Zentrum on public interest information policy in Germany: Wem gehört das Wissen? Informationspolitik in Deutschland (Shorter German version) Public Interest Information Policy in Germany (Longer English version) The piece finishes with three policy suggestions: Support legislation as well as licensing and […]
Here I briefly comment on the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data as the protocol strongly advocates a position of ‘PD’-only. As will be apparent from the earlier essay on Open Data: Openness and Licensing I do not entirely share this view. The Protocol gives 3 basic reasons for preferring the ‘PD’ approach […]
Last Saturday was BarCamp UKGovWeb at the Ministry of Justice. There were plenty of new faces in addition to the usual suspects! Three sessions that we found particularly interesting: Directgov and Innovation: Directgov have launched a new innovate part of their site, and are keen on supporting innovation around government data (mashups, services, etc.) from […]
Why does this matter? Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share. However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open […]
With the inauguration of US President-Elect Barack Obama later today – we thought we’d prepare a brief list of things he can do to promote openness in his new role. Open government data. Make core government data open (as in opendefinition.org) – so that it can be re-used in mashups, visually represented, used in semantic […]
Update (2009-02-23): registration for this workshop is now open. There is also a provisional programme. We are pleased to announce that the 5th COMMUNIA Workshop, “Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data” will take place in London in March 2009. Details are as follows: When: 26-27th March 2009 Where: New Academic Building, London […]
In just over a week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release a new version of their website – which will mostly be under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. From the announcement: Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – […]
We’re pleased to announce that (subject to final confirmation) the Open Knowledge Foundation is now a member of the EU funded COMMUNIA network, which is “the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain”. (We blogged about the first workshop in January and the third workshop in October.) As it says on the goals page: […]
The Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources (cf. last week’s announce) took place on Saturday at the London Knowledge Lab. The day started with a discussion of various aspects of openness in educational and research materials – alluding to open access, open data and the Open Knowledge Definition. This was followed by brainstorming […]
Last week I went to the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona for the Euroscience Open Forum Satellite Event organised by Science Commons. The event brought together together lawyers, scientists, policy makers, stakeholders and representatives from many different groups and organisations interested in open access and open data in scientific research from across Europe. The event […]
Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin. COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. […]
On Saturday I attended a ‘BarCamp’ on the Power of Information Review Recommendation 8 – which suggests there should be a re-use request service for UK Public Sector Information (we blogged about this in October). The event was organised by John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information and was attended by representatives from […]
A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments. The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge […]
Nick Holmes of Binary Law wrote to tell us about the Office of Public Sector Information’s forum for a new PSI re-use request service. His blog post about the forum is here. As noted in the forum description, the service is being built in response to recommendation 8 in the Power of Information Review by […]
John Gray has recently been conducting some rather interesting research on the degree of re-use actually being achieved at local government level in the UK pursuant to the Euro Directive on the Re-Use of Public Sector Information (Statutory Instrument SI 2005/1515) which came into force in July 2005. The aim of the directive was to […]
I’ll be speaking on the Copyright Users panel at the Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences conference which takes place this Friday (30th March 2007) in Edinburgh. The event is being jointly organised by The British Academy and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation made a joint response in association with the [Open Rights Group](http://www.openrightsgroup.org and Free Culture UK) to OfCom’s Public Service Publisher consultation (officially titled: A new approach to public service content in the digital media age). The Response The founding of a Public Service Publisher (PSP) is an opportunity to make a […]
At Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s command (‘It’s your civic duty!’) I decided to accept an invitation to the riverside HQ of OFCOM, the UK’s independent regulatory body for television, radio, telcoms and wireless, to participate in a discussion about what the UK’s putative ‘Public Service Publisher’ (PSP) should be. It seems that […]
The inspiration for writing this, as well as much of the information contained herein, came from the search Roundtable which took place at the IDEI Toulouse ‘Conference on the Software and Internet Industries’ on January 20th 2007. An earlier version of this essay as well as notes from the Roundtable can be found in this […]
I was recently involved in some interesting discussion with John Wilbanks on the SPARC open-data list and thought it worth excerpting some of this here. Email 1: Reply to a message from John Wilbanks Source: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OpenData/Message/100.html Hi all, chiming in here…just joined the list. The lack of international consensus on data makes use of CC […]
The OKF has been very actively involved in the publicgeodata’s campaign on the INSPIRE directive. Now that it appears compromise between all of the parties — the European Commission, Council and Parliament — has been reached it is natural to ask ourselves both: Where next? and How did we do? Where Next The immediate point […]
On the 19th and 20th of last month I attended a roundtable organised by the AHRC Copyright Research Network and the Public Programmes Department of Tate Modern under the grand title “Future of Copyright and the Regulation of Creative Practice”. Of the approximately 20 participants there was a fairly even mix of artists, academics and […]
Below is the response that was submitted by the OKF to a WIPO consultation on the Economic, Social and Cultural Impact of Intellectual Property in the Creative Industries back in September. Despite its extremely broad mandate the main part of the consultation was about a more limited, methodological issue, namely how to do impact assessments […]
The British Academy has just published its report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences. They find a variety of problems (detailed below) and also provide an extensive set of recommendations (see the executive summary): The findings of the Review Copyright law generally provides exemptions for fair dealing for private study and […]
One of the good things about going to the IIC forum (see next post for details) was the opportunity to hear the debate on the other, more ‘telcoish’ panels which were extremely interesting — especially those that dealt with spectrum (albeit because it’s an area I don’t know that much about). Listening to the debate […]
Given my interest in metadata for cultural works when I cam across a copy of Who Wrote What?: A Dictionary of Writers and Their Works (ed. Michael Cox) [OUP 2001] in a secondhand bookshop I was immediately interested. After a quick browse of the data presented I took a look at the ‘restrictions’ information inside […]
Introduction Funding research and development for new drugs and treatments as well as the transfer of existing knowledge around the globe is essential to improving healthcare in the twenty-first century, especially for those in developing countries. However the current global innovation system for healthcare, heavily based on TRIPs and ever stronger intellectual property rights, is […]
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