OKFestival Spotlight: Patrick Alley

This year, we have the great honour of welcoming Patrick Alley, co-founder and director of Global Witness, to the Open Knowledge Festival stage. Patrick Alley took part in the organisation’s first investigations into the Thai-Khmer Rouge timber trade in 1995 and  has since participated in over fifty field investigations in South East Asia, Africa and […]

Read more

Open Steps: Documenting open knowledge in South America

This is the fourth and (so far) final travel-guest blog post from Open Steps, an initiative by two young Berliners Alex (a software developer from Spain) and Margo (a graduate in European politics from France) who decided to leave their daily lives and travel around the world for one year to meet people and organizations […]

Read more

Why are patents and locked-up science seen as the way forward for growth and innovation?

This is a translated and edited version of a blog post originally appearing on the Danish denfri.dk blog. See the original post here. These past few weeks have highlighted the crossroads that we as a society are facing: Whether non-open data, siloed knowledge and patented ideas make up the best way for growth and innovation? […]

Read more

OKFestival Keynote Spotlight: Neelie Kroes

We are pleased to announce that Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission and a staunch supporter of open data, open government and open access, will join us in Berlin this year as a keynote speaker. Neelie Kroes is responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, one of seven flagship initiatives of Europe […]

Read more

The OKFestival keynote excitement begins!

This is a cross-post from the OKFestival blog, see the original here The time is now. The time is today! If you haven’t already, it’s time to buy your tickets because today, we announce the names of our four amazing keynote speakers! This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming this stellar line-up of activists, […]

Read more

Financial aid allocation completed for OKFestival 2014

This is a cross-post from the OKFestival blog, see the original here Thank you to everyone who applied for Financial Aid this year – we so appreciate your patience while we’ve worked hard with various partners and sponsors to allocate funding. Over the past few weeks we’ve been reaching out to successful applicants so while […]

Read more

Brazil’s Development Bank – The Elephant in the Stadium

This is a guest blog post by Andrew Simms analyst and campaigner at our StopSecretContracts.org coalition partner Global Witness. If you believe public contracts should be open contracts, sign our petition and let world leaders know. This article first appeared on Global Witness’s website. Symbolism doesn’t get much better than this – thousands of homeless […]

Read more

Stop the harassment of Hungarian NGOs by the government

The Hungarian government has started to target transparency and humanitarian NGOs. The political climate in Hungary has been deteriorating sharply since the re-election of the government led by Viktor Orban. The latest indication of a harsher political environment is the harassment of humanitarian and transparency NGOs. The Hungarian government accuses the targeted NGOs to be […]

Read more

Open Knowledge Festival streams, pt.1 – Knowledge

To create societies where everyone has both access to key information and the ability to use it to understand and shape their lives, we must build knowledge into the heart of all of our activities. This is a big task which requires not just a global shift in mindset, but also that we build the […]

Read more
cameras in baskets

Community Sessions: Video Skillshare and Open Education

Happy June! We have a few Community Sessions to announce. OKFestival is almost a month away. Videos are key for storytelling, so we are hosting a Video Skillshare to help us all learn. The Open Education Working Group will join us to talk about why open data matters in education. Join us for these two […]

Read more

Energy Buildings Performance Scenarios as Linked Open Data

This is a blog post by Martin Kaltenböck & Anne-Claire Bellec, cross-posted from the Semantic Puzzle Blog. Anne-Claire Bellec is Communications Manager at the Global Buildings Performance Network (http://www.gbpn.org), located at GBPNs headquarters in Paris, France, and Martin Kaltenböck is the responsible for web-based data tools at Semantic Web Company, a Linked Open Data specialised […]

Read more

Let’s try something new: unFestival!

This is a guest blog post by the DATA (Datos Abiertos, Transparencia y Acceso a la información) Uruguay Team. This year’s OKFestival will play host to many new ideas, and this is one of them. We’ve created a space which allows “serendipity” to get to work, in contrast with the rest of the Festival; the […]

Read more

All-star wrap-up of a month of Open Knowledge events all around the world – May 2014

Last month flew by! It’s already June and time to turn the spotlight on the Open Knowledge community’s events which rocked the month of May! Bikestorming goes Pecha Kucha in Argentina Bikestorming is a mobile app to grow urban cycling in cities around the world, developed by members of Open Knowledge Argentina’s community. Matías Kalwill […]

Read more

Save the date: OKFestival Community Session

Save the Date: We are thrilled to announce that the Open Knowledge community is organising a community session on Tuesday July 15th, 2014 from 1pm – 4pm, before the festival officially starts. This will be taking place at the OKFestival Venue, situated in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. We are delighted that so many […]

Read more

Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches

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 […]

Read more

Introducing the new Open Development Toolkit site!

We’re very happy to launch today a new website for the Open Development Toolkit, which which includes a number of new features to help people make use of, and contribute to, the project. When the project began in early 2014, the project brief was fairly open; since then, after speaking to various members of the […]

Read more

Opening up governance: OpenMENA joins public consultation process in Tunisia

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 […]

Read more

All-star wrap-up of a month of Open Knowledge events all around the world – April 2014

Last month we asked the Open knowledge community to start sharing more details about the events we all run, to discover how many people are rocking Open Knowledge events all around the world! The community has been great at responding the call and now we’re glad to feature some of the April events we got […]

Read more

Making it Matter: open data, education and the developing world

What real-world problems are there related to education in the developing world that could potentially be solved by open data and technology solutions? How about: Insufficiently trained teachers, badly informed decision makers, lack of key data sets, the inferior quality of teaching resources and their poor discoverability, inadequate infrastructure meaning that education can rarely be […]

Read more

The “right to be forgotten” – a threat to Transparency and Open Data?

A recent European Court Justice (ECJ) ruling may affect how privacy, transparency, and open data interact and has a direct relation with growing discussion about the “right to be forgotten”. Roughly summarized the ruling finds that organisations which publish information may be obliged to “take down” and remove information when an individual requests that removal […]

Read more

Announcing our newest round of Local Groups

It is with great excitement that we can announce the establishment of a new round of Open Knowledge Local Groups, headed by new Ambassadors around the world. This time we welcome El Salvador, Hungary, Iran, Malta, Paraguay, Philippines and Romania to the family of Local Groups, which now stretch over 45 countries worldwide. In this […]

Read more

OKFestival 2014 Provisional Programme is now live!

Over the last few months we have received hundreds of terrific proposals for this year’s Open Knowledge Festival programme. Thank you for your ideas and your input! There have been more sessions proposed than we could possibly accommodate and as a result, we’ve had the incredibly difficult task of whittling down all of those great […]

Read more

Secret oil contract loses Nigerian people $1.1 billion

Royal Dutch Shell and the Italian oil company, Eni, have been implicated in a secret oil deal that enriched the former Nigerian oil minister to a staggering degree, and lost the Nigerian state $1.1 billion that could have been spent on vital and much needed services. As shareholders and investors gather today at Shell’s Annual […]

Read more

Bonding with Hong Kong and upcoming Open Spending

Learning and sharing across the global Open Knowledge community are the two core purposes of our regular Community Sessions. This week Mart van de Ven and Bastien Douglas joined us to share all about the Open Data Hong Kong community. Some of the key lessons they advised are: ask your community for help more, have […]

Read more

Opening Up EU Procurement Data

The following post is by Friedrich Lindenberg (and on Twitter), originally posted here. What is the next European dataset that investigative journalists should look at? Back in 2012 at the DataHarvest conference, Brigitte, investigative superstar from FarmSubsidy and co-host of the conference, had a clear answer: let’s open up TED (Tenders Electronic Daily). TED is […]

Read more

OKFestival financial aid announcement delayed

Our Financial Aid applications closed on May 4th and we’ve been working hard to review all the applications and get word out to you as soon as possible if you’re one of those selected. However, we’ve had many more applications than expected and while we’re thrilled so many of you want to come, it does […]

Read more

We need you! Become a School of Data Fellow

Got data skills to share? Member of a community that wants to turn data into information? Know about a data journalism or civic activism project or organisation which need a push for using data more effectively? The School of Data needs you! We are currently broadening our efforts to spread data skills around the world, […]

Read more

Community Session: Open Data Hong Kong

Open Data Hong Kong is an open, participative, and volunteer-run group of Hong Kong citizens who support Open Data. Join Mart van de Ven, Open Knowledge Ambassador for Hong Kong, and Bastien Douglas of ODHK for a discussion about their work. How to Participate This Community Session will be hosted via G+. We will record […]

Read more

Open Humanities Awards: second round

We are excited to announce the second round of the Open Humanities Awards, running from 30 April until 30 May 2014 (UPDATED) June 6. There are €20,000 worth of prizes on offer in two dedicated tracks: Open track: for projects that either use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching […]

Read more

Welcoming Open Knowledge Ireland as our newest Chapter

We are very pleased to announce that Open Knowledge Ireland has become the newest Chapter of Open Knowledge! Building on their relentless work as an Open Knowledge Local Group over the last 1.5 years, the rapidly growing Irish group is now taking the big next step by becoming an independent, self-sustainable Chapter. The efforts of […]

Read more

Take a CKAN Tour

From baby name datasets and apps via the South Australian government to new City of Surrey, B.C., (Canada) site, there are many instances of CKAN around the world. CKAN is the data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. It is used by various […]

Read more

VozData – new Argentinean citizen platform for opening data

This is a guest blog post by Florencia Coelho from La Nation in Argentina. LA NACIÓN recently launched VozData, a collaborative platform that allows users to transform public documents from PDFs into a comprehensible structured database. In its first project, the site allows users to check and classify more than 6500 renditions of Senate’s expenses […]

Read more

Only 4 days left to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid!

The deadline to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid is this Sunday 4th May: hurry! Diversity and inclusivity are a huge part of our festival ethos and we are committed to ensuring a broad variety of participation from all corners of the world; creating a forum for all ideas and all people. To achieve this, we’ll […]

Read more

Open Knowledge Brazil is a finalist of the Google Impact Challenge | Brazil!

This is a guest post by Everton Zanella Alvarenga, Executive Director of Open Knowledge Brazil. We are proud to announce we are finalists at the Google Global Impact Challenge | Brazil. Please, vote in our project to help us transform Brazil! About the project The Open Knowledge Brazil team works for a world in which […]

Read more

Upcoming Community Sessions: CKAN, Community Feedback

Happy week! We are hosting two Community Sessions this week. You have expressed an interest in learning more about CKAN. As well, We are continuing our regular Community Feedback sessions. Take a CKAN Tour: This week we will give an overview and tour of CKAN – the leading open source open data platform used by […]

Read more

Draft Open Data Policy for Qatar

The following post was originally published on the blog of our Open MENA community (Middle East and North Africa). The Qatari Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (generally referred to as ictQATAR) had launched a public consultation on its draft Open Data Policy. I thus decided to briefly present a (long overdue) outline of Qatar’s […]

Read more

Open Knowledge Festival Call for Volunteers Opens Today!

What: Join the Volunteers Team at OKFestival 2014! When: July 15-17th, Berlin, Germany Why? Lots of reasons! Find them here! The OKFestival team is launching our call for volunteers today, and we are excited to bring on board amazing members of our community who will help us to make this festival the huge success we […]

Read more

Building an archaeological project repository II: Where are the research data repositories?

This is a guest post by Anthony Beck, Honorary fellow, and Dave Harrison, Research fellow, at the University of Leeds School of Computing Data repository as research tool In a previous post, we examined why Open Science is necessary to take advantage of the huge corpus of data generated by modern science. In our project […]

Read more

The Tragic Consequences of Secret Contracts

The following post is by Seember Nyager, CEO of the Public and Private Development Centre in Nigeria, one of our campaign partners in the Stop Secret Contracts campaign Every day, through secret contracts being carried out within public institutions, there is confirmation that the interest of the public is not served. A few days ago, […]

Read more

Why secret contracts matter in aid transparency

The following guest post is by Nicole Valentinuzzi, from our Stop Secret Contracts campaign partner Publish What You Fund. A new campaign to Stop Secret Contracts, supported by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and many other international NGOs, aims to make sure that all public contracts are made available in order to stop corruption […]

Read more

OKFestival 2014 Financial Aid Programme Launches Today!

The OKFestival 2014 Team is happy to announce that we are launching our Financial Aid Programme today! We’re delighted to support and ensure the attendance of those with great ideas who are actively involved in the open movement, but whose distance or finances make it difficult for them to get to this year’s festival in […]

Read more

Skillshares and Stories: Upcoming Community Sessions

We’re excited to share with you a few upcoming Community Sessions from the School of Data, CKAN, Open Knowledge Brazil, and Open Access. As we mentioned earlier this week, we aim to connect you to each other. Join us for the following events! What is a Community Session: These online events can be in a […]

Read more

Coding da Vinci – Open GLAM challenge in Germany

The following blog is by Helene Hahn, Open GLAM coordinator at Open Knowledge Germany. It is cross-posted from the Open GLAM blog More and more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are digitizing their collections to make them accessible online and to preserve our heritage for future generations. By January 2014, over 30 million objects […]

Read more

The School of Data Journalism 2014!

We’re really excited to announce this year’s edition of the School of Data Journalism, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, 30th April – 4th May. It’s the third time we’ve run it (how time flies!), together with the European Journalism Centre, and it’s amazing seeing the progress that has been made since we started […]

Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, April 2014

Hi! After last month’s launch-fest, March has been a thoughtful month, with reflective and planning pieces taking centre-stage on our blog. Of course OKFestival has been ramping up since its launch, giving more detail on topics and running sessions to help with submitting proposals; however we’ve also had more from the Community Survey results, as […]

Read more
Coffee smiley by spaceageboy

Happy Spring Cleaning, Community Style

Crazy about happy? Call it spring fever, but I am slightly addicted to the beautiful creativity of people around the world and their Happy videos (map). We are just one small corner of the Internet and want to connect you to Open Knowledge. To do this, we, your community managers, need to bring in the […]

Read more

How many people are rocking Open Knowledge events around the world? Let us know!

We’re getting to know each other more every day on mailing lists and through surveys, we know that plenty of you populate and build groundbreaking projects and communities through our network of 42 local groups, 20 working groups, infinite number of projects and beyond. Now, we’d like to know more about your Open Knowledge events […]

Read more

Tackling the Resource Curse: Civil Society’s Fight for Better Access to Information and Open Contracting in Côte d’Ivoire

This is a guest blog from our campaign partner Integrity Action, adapted from its original posted on their website here. This is the first in a series of blog posts from partner organisations of our #SecretContracts campaign. If you have stories to share about the problems of secrecy in contracting, get in touch with contact@stopsecretcontracts.org […]

Read more

OKFestival Call for Proposals ending soon! Submit your proposal now!

We extended the deadline to give you an extra 2 weeks to come up with unusually brilliant, inventive, participatory session proposals for OKFestival 2014, but we’re getting very close to crunch-time now! This Sunday, March 30th, is the final deadline to submit the session you want to run at the festival. Then it’s over to […]

Read more

From Health in the UK to Education in Nigeria – Stop Secret Contracts

Today it was announced that fraud and error in the UK National Health Service are leading to the loss of around £7 billion each year. This could pay for about 250,000 new nurses, and comes at a time when the service is struggling more than ever under the pressures of austerity. One of the main […]

Read more