Open Knowledge Foundation blog

Empowering Portugal’s bombeiros with open data

Posted September 21, 2018

How Fogos.pt is providing an accessible fire map This blog has been reposted from the Mapbox blog. In Portugal, a free, open source project is making official fire data more accessible to firefighters, emergency workers, journalists, and the public. Fogos.pt has gained significant traction, receiving as many as a million views a day and half a million unique […]

Open Data

The next target user group for the open data movement is governments

Posted September 18, 2018

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 […]

Open Economics

Ubernomics: Platform Monopolies & How to Fix Them

Posted September 6, 2018

First version: Dec 2016, updated Feb 2018. This blog is a summary of the full article at http://rufuspollock.com/ubernomics Around the world countries have struggled to work out how to deal with Uber, AirBnB and their like. Are these new apps something to be welcomed or something to be stopped? But how we treat Uber-like companies […]

Open Spending

How to publish budget and spending data openly

Posted August 31, 2018

At the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) and Open Knowledge International (OKI) we believe that governments’ budget and spending data should be made available to all, so that anyone can see how their tax money is spent,what priorities their governments make, and governments can be held accountable. Increasingly governments make their budget data already […]

Germany

Prototype Fund round 5: Letting machines learn

Posted August 22, 2018

The Prototype Fund is a public program run by Open Knowledge Foundation Germany that focuses on emerging challenges and radically new solutions. Individuals and small teams can apply for funding to test their ideas and develop open source tools and applications in the fields of civic tech, data literacy, data security and more. The 5th […]

Open Data

A short story about Open Washing

Posted August 20, 2018

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. […]

Frictionless Data

Frictionless Data and FAIR Research Principles

Posted August 14, 2018

In August 2018, Serah Rono will be running a Frictionless Data workshop in CopenHagen, congregated by the Danish National Research Data Management Forum as part of the FAIR Across project. In October 2018, she will also run a Frictionless Data workshop at FORCE11 in Montreal, Canada. Ahead of the two workshops, and other events before […]

Research

New research to map the diversity of citizen-generated data for sustainable development

Posted August 13, 2018

We are excited to announce a new research project around citizen-generated data and the UN data revolution. This research will be led by Open Knowledge International in partnership with King’s College London and the Public Data Lab to develop a vocabulary for governments to navigate the landscape of citizen-generated data. This research elaborates on past […]

Open Data Census

Help us find the world’s electoral boundaries!

Posted August 7, 2018

mySociety and Open Knowledge International are looking for the digital files that hold electoral boundaries, for every country in the world — and you can help. Yeah, we know — never let it be said we don’t know how to party. But seriously, there’s a very good reason for this request. When people make online […]

Belgium

Open Summer of Code is growing beyond the Belgian borders!

Posted August 2, 2018

Authors: Dries van Ransbeeck, David Chaves and Astrid Sercu To some of you, Open Summer of Code – also known as osoc – is a name that rings a bell, to others this is a new concept. So, for the latter group: osoc is an originally Belgian summer programme organised by Open Knowledge Belgium which has been […]

News

Welcoming our new Open Knowledge International Board

Posted July 23, 2018

We have a series of important announcements regarding our Open Knowledge International governance. With the organisation having been through significant developments over the past years, we are now at a point of stability, with good systems in place and great staff driving the mission. The current updates to our Board of Directors reflect the new […]

Open GLAM

Are you working in the OpenGLAM arena? Tweet about it!

Posted July 19, 2018

Starting today, community members from Open Knowledge International, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons, will be facilitating a rotating curation of the @openglam twitter account to highlight and reflect on the impact of “OpenGLAM” (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) in their respective contexts. OpenGLAM is a global network of people and organizations who are working to […]

Open Data

SaveOurAir: An experiment in data-activation

Posted July 17, 2018

Contemporary cities seem to be in a race to be increasingly ‘smart’ and data-driven. At smart city Expos around the world, visitors are presented with new visual modes of modes of knowing and governing. Dashboards providing birds-eye views of the real-time movement of objects in the city, are perhaps the most iconic of these visualizations. […]

Frictionless Data

Sloan Foundation Funds Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research

Posted July 12, 2018

We are excited to announce that Open Knowledge International has received a grant of $750,000 from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for our project “Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research”. The new funding from Sloan enables us to continue work over the next 3 years via enhanced dissemination and training activities, as well as further iteration […]

Events

Closing feedback loops for more & better open data in Switzerland

Posted July 10, 2018

Last week, the annual open data conference in Switzerland took place in St. Gallen. In this post, Oleg Lavrovsky, activist for Open Knowledge and board member of the Swiss Chapter, shares a look back at the event showcasing the latest developments in the country, with results of the first Open Data Student Awards. For more […]

Open Education

Changing Minds by Using Open Data

Posted July 2, 2018

This blog has been rewritten from the original post on our Open Education Working Group blog and is co-authored by Javiera Atenas, Erdinç Saçan & Robert Schuwer. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras once said: “if you want to multiply joy, then you have to share.” This also applies to data. Who shares data, gets a […]

School of Data

Introducing the 2018 Class of School of Data Fellows!

Posted June 27, 2018

This blog has been reposted from the School of Data blog. School of Data is delighted to announce its sixth class of fellows. From June until January 2019, the programme will allow fellows to deepen their data literacy skills and work alongside local partner organisations to enhance the data literacy network local to them. We were […]

Open Government Data

Europe’s proposed PSI Directive: A good baseline for future open data policies?

Posted June 21, 2018

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. […]

CKAN

CKANconUS and Code for America Summit: some thoughts about the important questions

Posted June 20, 2018

It’s been a few weeks after CKANConUS and the seventh Code for America Summit took place in Oakland. As always, it was a great place to meet old friends and new faces of technologists, policy experts, government innovators in the U.S. In this blogpost I share some of the experience of attending these two conferences […]

News

The Open Revolution: rewriting the rules of the information age

Posted June 12, 2018

Rufus Pollock, the Founder of Open Knowledge International, is delighted to announce the launch of his new book The Open Revolution on how we can revolutionize information ownership and access in the digital economy. About the book Will the digital revolution give us digital dictatorships or digital democracies? Forget everything you think you know about […]

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