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Open Data – Mumbai
This is post 3 of 5 of the Open Data India series, following Lucy and Laura’s visit to learn about the challenges and opportunities for open data. Read previous posts from Bangalore and Chennai on the main blog. After joining forces with the DataMeet group in Bangalore and Transparent Chennai’s open data workshop, we were […]
Read moreUpdate to Open Knowledge Foundation Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
We’re posting this announce to let people know we’ve updated the Open Knowledge Foundation’s general privacy policy and terms of use. Updates to the privacy policy are fairly limited and largely around making the setup around email more explicit. The terms of use is somewhat new in that it consolidates in one place terms of […]
Read moreEnding Secrecy – Why Global Transparency Rules Matter
Earlier this week, the SEC voted on the final rules of Section 1504 of the Dodd Frank Act. Global Witness teamed up with the Open Knowledge Foundation to explain what these rules are about, and why they matter. View the infographic ‘Ending Secrecy – Why Global Transparency Rules Matter’ On August 22nd 2012, the U.S. […]
Read moreJISC Open Biblio 2 project – final report
This is cross-posted from openbiblio.net. Following on from the success of the first JISC Open Bibliography project we have now completed a further year of development and advocacy as part of the JISC Discovery programme. Our stated aims at the beginning of the second year of development were to show our community (namely all those […]
Read moreOpen Culture and Science Hackday at OKFestival
At the OKFestival in Helsinki next month, the Open Heritage and Open Science streams will be kicking off their three days of activities with a joint hackday dedicated to working with and building things with open cultural and scientific data. The day will involve a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a digital humanities coding sprint working with tools […]
Read moreOpen Data – Chennai
This is part 2 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. You can read the first post ‘Open Data – Bangalore’ on the OKFN blog. Chennai, formerly Madras, is only a short train ride away from Bangalore. Laura and I hadn’t been intending on travelling to Chennai on this trip, but a mail from […]
Read moreOpenDataMx: Open Data Hackathon in Mexico City
This weekend Mexico City will host OpenDataMx, a Hackathon of public open data lasting 36 hours, during which participants will develop creative technical solutions to solve various civil society problems. Programmers, designers, members of civil society organizations (CSOs) and government officials are invited to participate in OpenDataMx and collaborate in web and mobile solutions […]
Read moreDevelopment Data Challenge – London, August 25-26
Where Do Development Questions Meet Development Data? Where: The Guardian (Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1P 2AP) When: Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26 2012 This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London. Join us at the Guardian for a weekend […]
Read moreOpen Data – Bangalore
Laura and Lucy from the OKFN team recently travelled to India to learn where the challenges and opportunities for open data in India lay. This is part 1 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. The Bangalore data scene is huge. A bustling IT and data mining industry means that you are never far […]
Read moreA Brief Summary of the World’s First Open Knowledge Festival
With only 4 weeks left until the OKFestival week starts in Helsinki, here is our latest rundown of everything you need to know about the event. We’re very excited about what’s in store for participants this year! OVERVIEW New to OKFestival? We are delighted to invite you to this year’s event in Helsinki, Finland – […]
Read moreOpenData Edinburgh meets again – August 30th at the Informatics Forum
As the comedians, acrobats and miscellaneous thespians prepare to leave the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for another year, it’s time for the open data crew to reclaim the city! Following on from the two successful meet-ups which took place in March and May this year, #OpenDataEDB will be returning for its third event of 2012. For […]
Read moreThe very first Open Data and Democracy Initiative Hackathon, South Africa
If knowledge is power then data are the individual watts; one by itself is aesthetically pleasing, but functionally useless. It’s only when we add all the watts together that we produce enough power to move forward. Constitutionally we own this power, but the trickle of information provided to the public is practically useless – and […]
Read moreElva – Texting for Security
The 2008 war between Georgia and Russia has upturned the lives of thousands of citizens in the Georgian region of Shida Kartli. Four years after the intense five-day war, which saw Russia gain control over the neighbouring territory of South Ossetia, many inhabitants of Shida Kartli now find their villages lined by military checkpoints, […]
Read moreCC license version 4.0: Helping meet the needs of open data publishers and users
Over the last few months, Creative Commons has been working on the next version of its license suite, version 4.0. The goals of version 4.0 are wide-ranging, but the overall objective is clear: update the licenses so they are considerably more robust, yet easy to understand and use, for both existing communities and new types […]
Read moreCall for research proposals: open data in developing countries
The Web Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) are looking to fund case study research on the emerging impacts of open data in developing countries. Open data policies are spreading across the world: but how does open data play out on the ground in different settings? What is needed for the potential transparency […]
Read moreScotland focus
Following Edinburgh-based Meet-ups earlier this year, a small group of people interested in promoting openness recently met together to link-up ideas and projects, and explore possible areas of collaboration. The attendees were: Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh Sally Kerr, City of Edinburgh Council Sam Leon, Open Knowledge Foundation Naomi Lillie, Open Knowledge Foundation Jilly Mathews, […]
Read moreOKFestival Updates: Early Bird Ticket Extension, Developer Travel Bursaries and Open Data Cooking!
For those just arriving back to daily life after the summer holidays (and the Mars Curiosity landing!), we have some good news regarding OKFestival – our Early Bird ticket deadline has been extended to this Wednesday, August 8th, 2012. This will give you more time to get those tickets reserved well in advance so you […]
Read moreOKFN Energy Lab: Call for Partners
OKFN Labs is launching Labs Sprints, a new initiative to create data-driven applications around a specific topic within a very short timeframe – a single week. As we start this, we’re looking for partners to help us frame the questions that our apps will aim to explore. To create such high-impact apps which can serve […]
Read moreManaging Expectations
We’re big on promoting open information: be that sonnets, statistics, genes or geodata. We’re big on it because we think it has the potential to improve the welfare of peoples around the world in a variety of ways, from making governments more accountable to improving research on cancer. At the same time I think it […]
Read moreOpen Science Hackday – with donuts, the Queen, and a whole lot of rain…
This is a post by Jenny Molloy, coordinator of the OKFN Open Science Working Group, and Laura Newman, community coordinator. The blog post is also featured on the Open Science blog. It was a day of ‘firsts’ for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Science working group at their summer hackday on Saturday: the first hackday […]
Read moreScience, data and the public
Earlier this week the European Commission released a package of documents related to their nascent policies on access to scientific information. What will these mean for science and for public engagement with science? New open access policies have been in the headlines quite a bit recently, as politicians and policy makers respond to the wave […]
Read moreOKFestival 2012 Goes Global: Early-Bird Tickets, Travel Bursaries and the Metamorphosis of a Movement
As the 2012 Open Knowledge Festival‘s organising team released Early Bird Tickets a few weeks ago from sunny Finland, we witnessed something exciting. The many experimental threads that have, until now, existed only as a complex web of planning based on two public Calls for Proposals (and a great deal of Skype meetings!) have starting […]
Read moreData Protocols: community-based, light-weight data protocols for collaborative, distributed work with data
We’re pleased to announce Data Protocols, a community-driven effort to develop simple, light-weight protocols and formats for distributed and collaborative work with data. If you’re interested in the project got check out the Knight News Challenge Data Protocols application and give our proposal the thumbs up! What’s the Idea The civic and open data community […]
Read moreData Wrangling Handbook Sprints: July 18th in Portland! July 19th everywhere!
We’re taking the Data Wrangling Handbook on the road! We’ll be in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday, July 18th from 3-7 pm at Collective Agency, 322 NW Sixth Ave (between Everett and Flanders), Suite 200. (Buzz “200″ when you arrive.) View Map Then, to keep the ball rolling, we’re following up with a virtual sprint on […]
Read moreThe Fifth Elephant, 27-28 July 2012, Bangalore
Mythology held that the world rested on the back of four elephants. In the connected 21st century we think there’s a fifth: data. The Fifth Elephant is a community-powered two-day event around the Big Data ecosystem. We hope to enable inter-disciplinary learning between technology, analytics and design along with inter-domain learning between Technology, Media, Retail, […]
Read moreAnnouncing: Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV), enabling the vocabulary commons
We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project. ##LOV Project in 5 points LOV is about vocabularies (aka. metadata element sets or ontologies) in OWL / RDFS used to describe linked data. LOV provides a single-stop […]
Read moreBiblioHack-ed
Last month we ran the Open Knowledge Foundation’s largest celebration of open bibliographic data to date. The main focus of the two-day event was to get some hacking done and use the tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has helped to build, or is currently building, for working with bibliographic data, such as BibServer, TEXTUS and […]
Read moreThe Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, April – June 2012
It’s been another hectic few months here at the Open Knowledge Foundation! We’re getting really excited about this year’s inaugral OKFest in Helsinki (more later), but there’s so much going on across the world of openness that it’s hard to see when we’re going to find time to pack our suitcases! From the launch of […]
Read moreOpen Media Challenge, September, Bucharest
The Open Media Challenge (OMC) is a two-day event, laying the groundwork for improving data journalism in Eastern Europe. The aim is to write code for free software which will solve real-world media problems around data aggregation and visualization. It will be a collaborative effort focused on Eastern European information collection and dissemination, and will […]
Read moreAnnouncing Recline.JS: a Javascript library for building data applications in the browser
Today we’re pleased to announce the first public release of Recline.JS, a simple but powerful open-source library for building data applications in pure Javascript. For those of you who want to get hands on right away, you can: Try out a demo – like this demo of the grid, graph and map components Dive in […]
Read more‘En boca cerrada….’: open data in Catalunya today
There is a popular expression in Spanish that says, ‘en boca cerrada no entran moscas.’ Its equivalent in English is ‘loose lips sink ships,’ basically meaning that you are better off just keeping quiet. This culture of secrecy, some would say discretion, is particularly true in Spain’s public administration, being traditionally pervasive at all levels. […]
Read more5m Intro to OpenSpending at Activate 2012
Last week I gave a quick introduction to OpenSpending and Where Does My Money Go at Activate 2012. Here are the video and slides. Slides
Read moreOn the way to the new market of information in Russia
On June 5th at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow a round table conference took place, devoted to the opening of state-collected datasets. It was convened by the Higher School of Economics (HSE) together with the Russian Office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Open data is the new trend in the state […]
Read moreCall for Papers: Open Data Academic Research at OKFest
At Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw last year, much discussion took place about academic research around Open Data. In response to these conversations, a specific ‘Open Data Academic Research’ session will be taking place at OKFest this year. The session will bring together a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines who are […]
Read moreUK Government Releases Open Data White Paper and new Data.Gov.UK
Today, the UK govenrment made a major announcement regarding Open Data and released a revamped Data.Gov.UK — its flagship open data site. Open Data White Paper The Cabinet Office is ushering in a new wave of open data releases with the publication of a new Open Data White Paper. The White Paper gestures at a […]
Read moreTaking “utmost transparency” to the next level – at4am for all!
What? When?? Where??? How?!?! were the questions that got me started some 10 years ago now, on my free software journey that’s taken me to the heart of the European Parliament. As a young Swedish musician, politically innocent and ignorant as the next, I got worked up together with a bunch of newborn stallmanites unleashing […]
Read moreThe OKF is recruiting!
The OKF team is growing, and we’d love to have you on board. There are a whole load of fantastic positions coming up – check out the jobs page for all the details! #Current Opportunities The following roles are open – Community Coordinator Labs Developer Front End Web Developer Data Visualization Developer Data Wrangler Web […]
Read moreInternational Open Legislative Data Conference, July 6-7, Paris!
While the newly elected French National Assembly gets ready to choose its president, the question of its modernisation keeps arising. From the academic research world to the hacktivist perspective, parliamentary monitoring and studies are flourishing in France and all over the world. Methods and techniques may differ, but all share one common need: larger transparency […]
Read moreBibliographic References in Textus
Textus is the OKFN’s open source platform for working with collections of texts. It harnesses the power of semantic web technologies and delivers them in a simple and intuitive interface so that students, researchers and teachers can share and collaborate around collections of texts. Sites such as the upcoming openphilosophy.org and the existing openshakespeare.org contain […]
Read moreDenmark drops reform of EU access to documents rules as disagreements prove insurmountable
The Danish Presidency of the Council of the EU yesterday gave up on trying to reach an agreement between the European Commission, the Parliament and the Member States on reform of the rules that govern public access to EU documents. With the European Parliament standing firmly in favour of greater transparency for citizens, and the […]
Read moreOpening up scientific data with CKAN and the DataHub
The argument for open-access science has been won. The old model of scientific publishing was laid down when the costs of publishing were so great that charging for access was the sensible way to meet them. As scientists’ work moves online, it is the old model we can no longer afford: the costs to humanity […]
Read moreOpen Science Hackday, 7th July, in London and Online!
The next OKFN Open Science hackday will be taking place in a few weeks on Saturday 7th July. It would be great to see plenty of open-science folk either in London or online, wherever you are in the world! When: Saturday 7 July 2012, 1000-1700 UTC+1 Where: Centre for Creative Collaboration, London OR OKFN IRC […]
Read moreLaying Foundations for the School of Data
Recently, a small team gathered in Berlin for the School of Data kick-off sprint. After three days fueled by coffee, felt-tip pens and a multi-coloured array of post-it-notes, the sprint left us with a true appreciation of the amazing community we are working with, and an exciting new structure to underpin the School of Data. […]
Read moreData Catalog Schema and Protocol – Draft Specification
Open Data is an idea that continues to gain momentum, and one of the signs of this is that the world has more and more data catalogs. This is great for many reasons but it also brings its own problem especially around interoperability and standardization — the lack of standard schema and interfaces is something […]
Read moreTalk at European Data Forum: Open Data, Where We’ve Come From, Where We’re Going
Last week I was at the European Data Forum and gave a Keynote entitled Open Data, Where We’ve Come From, Where We’re Going. Here are the slides.
Read moreIntroducing PyBossa – the open-source micro-tasking platform
For a while now our network has been working on applications, tools and platforms for crowd-sourcing and micro-tasking. At the end of last year, we posted about a cute little app developed at a hackday called the Data Digitizer that was being used to transcribe Brazillian budgetary data. In recent months we’ve been working closely […]
Read moreAid Data: From XML to Visualisations – IATI data in OpenSpending
Are the World Bank and Department for International Development (DfID) spending money on projects in similar sectors and countries? Does all aid to Kenya go the North-East? How much aid in total did India receive last year? Until recently, it was impossible to know. But now, thanks to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), we’ve […]
Read moreWhat data can and cannot do
Mining for Information by JD Hancock on Flickr (CC BY) In the early days of photography there was a great deal of optimism around its potential to present the public with an accurate, objective picture of the world. In the 19th century pioneering photographers (later to be called photojournalists) were heralded for their unprecedented documentary […]
Read moreThe Right to Read Is the Right to Mine
The following is a draft content mining declaration developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Access In brief: The Right to Read Is the Right to Mine ##Introduction Researchers can find and read papers online, rather than having to manually track down print copies. Machines (computers) can index the papers and extract […]
Read moreAnnouncing the Open Science Podcasts
Since the start of the Panton Principles, we have had several different Panton Discussions with different people talking about Open Data in Science. A couple of them have been recorded on video. These recordings have now also been made available as podcasts which allow you to listen to them while travelling, working or just relaxing. […]
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