We’re thrilled to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) has achieved NGOsource Equivalency Determination (ED) certification, formally establishing our recognition as equivalent to a US public charity. This status represents a major milestone for OKFN and opens new avenues for partnerships and support from US-based donors and foundations.
The Open Knowledge Foundation team closely followed this process and shares the experience in this short text.
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 […]
For the past few years, the USA has been an example of how governments can manage open government initiatives and open data particularly. They have done this by introducing positions like federal chief information officer and chief data officers. With datasets being opened on a massive scale in a standardised format, it laid the ground […]
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 […]
Every two years the International Budget Partnership (IBP) runs a survey, called the Open Budget Survey, to evaluate formal oversight of budgets, how transparent governments are about their budgets and if there are opportunities to participate in the budget process. To easily measure and compare transparency among the countries surveyed, IBP created the Open Budget […]
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 […]
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 […]
You are incredibility diverse and passionate. Last fall over 320 of you participated in our first OKF community-wide survey. You gave us an incredible view into you, your needs and how we at OKF can better support you. This is the first of three posts to show you: who you are, some analysis on your […]
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 German Federal Ministry of the Interior has sent a cease and desist order to the Freedom of Information (FOI) portal FragDenStaat.de for publishing a document received under the German federal FOI law. The document – a five page study written by government staff – analyses a ruling by the German constitutional court in November […]
Tonight the Open Knowledge Foundation will be honoured as a leading civic innovator at the National Democratic Institute’s thirtieth birthday celebrations (see the press release here). Other honourees will include Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia, Beth Noveck, founder of the Governance Lab in the U.S., and Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. The […]
Today the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency are co-launching a petition endorsed by a group of transparency and civil society organisations, asking the UK government to rewrite the lobbying bill to give citizens a proper register of lobbyists in the UK As we’ve written about before, the lobbying register proposed in […]
This is a cross-post by Julia Keserű, Lisa Rosenberg and Greg Brown from the Sunlight Foundation, originally published on the Sunlight Foundation blog. With more and more civil society organizations in the open government universe recognizing that “thorny issues” — such as political finance transparency or surveillance — need to be tackled somewhat more vehemently, […]
The following post is from Alan Hudson, Policy Director (Transparency & Accountability) at ONE and Jonathan Gray, Director of Policy and Ideas at the Open Knowledge Foundation. A few weeks back, we launched a new global “Follow the Money” network of organisations pushing for the transparency needed to enable citizens to hold decision-makers to account […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation has joined more than 30 civil society organisations and experts in signing an open letter asking leaders for greater transparency around the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. The controversial negotiations have been covered in The Guardian and The Washington Post over the past few days following the leaking of a draft chapter […]
UPDATE: there is now a dedicated page for the Nigeria Extractives Data Expedition here Who operates the often poisonous wells in the Niger Delta? How does the money flow between the contractors running the oil fields and the government? Join us for an online Data Expedition to Investigate the Extractive Industries of Nigeria, December 7, […]
Unprecedented amounts of information on the financial resources available to fight poverty are now being released through the efforts of multi-stakeholder transparency initiatives in sectors like aid, construction, contracting, and extractives. Unleashing this data’s potential will mean joining it up, following the money by merging and comparing datasets from different sources. Transparency initiatives have the […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation are teaming up to convene a new global group on lobbying transparency. We want civil society organisations, journalists and citizens around the world to be able to use information about lobbying to understand and report on the influence of big money on politics and to push for […]
The UK government must use the Open Government Partnership summit in London next week to end the secrecy surrounding who really owns millions of UK companies, campaigners said today. Discussions are underway right now at the highest levels of government and campaigners are expecting a decision to be made by the end of this week. […]
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