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Season’s Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation
‘Tis the season to be jolly. This year when preparing your Christmas feast why not take some inspiration from Mrs Beeton and her legendary 1861 Book of Household Management… Words of wisdom from Mrs Beeton… “In December, the principal household duty lies in preparing for the creature comforts of those near and dear to […]
Read more“Yes We Scan”
Take a look at the campaign being run by Carl Malamud and John Podesta called “Yes We Scan”. It’s an effort to encourage the US government to make plans to digitize the contents of all national libraries including the Library of Congress. In a letter addressed to President Barack Obama, John Podesta and Carl Malamud […]
Read moreWe’re hiring!
As we head into 2012, there’s lots going on at the OKFN and we’re looking for some more people to come help us build and scale the open data ecosystem. In particular, we’re looking for a great project manager to deliver a portfolio of CKAN-related projects, and also an awesome front end web developer who […]
Read moreTEXTUS: an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is […]
Read moreIdeas for OpenPhilosophy.org
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, […]
Read moreLODLAM-NZ Round Up
The following guest post is by Jon Voss, whose projects include History Pin and Civil War Data 150. I recently traveled to Wellington, New Zealand to take part in the National Digital Forum of New Zealand (#ndf2011), which was held at the national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa. Following the conference, the amazing team […]
Read moreOpen Humanities Working Group Update
The following update is from the Open Humanities Working Group, courtesy of James Harriman-Smith. To help you keep up with everything that’s going on across the OKF, we are publishing weekly updates from different Working Groups. Salvete. Ahem. The latest and most important news from the Open Humanities Working Group is that we now have […]
Read moreOpening up Domesday Book
The following guest post is by Anna Powell-Smith from the Open Domesday project. Anna is a member of our brand new Working Group on Open Humanities. Domesday Book might be one of the most famous government datasets ever created. Which makes it all the stranger that it’s not freely available online – at the National […]
Read moreOpening Government Data in Bulgaria
The following guest post is by Boyan Yurukov, blogger and open government data activist. In the beginning of 2011 some open data was released by the Bulgarian government on www.parliament.bg. Visitors could export information of bills and members of parliament as XML or CSV. They could also download the votes of individual MPs or parliamentary […]
Read moreSNCF launches a debate on open transport data in France
The following guest post is by Pieter Colpaert from iRail npo and Pierre Chrzanowski, and was reviewed by Regards Citoyens. Pieter and Pierre are both members of our brand new Working Group on Open Transport – watch this space for a full announcement of the working group’s activities and details on how to get involved!” […]
Read moreOpen Data – Destination Hackney
The following guest post is by Duncan Ray, from Destination Hackney. In Summer 2012, the borough of Hackney in London will be opening its doors to millions of visitors flocking to the Olympic games. It’s an exciting time for this part of London, and through the Race for Apps competition it’s a fantastic opportunity for […]
Read moreUpdate from the Open Science Working Group
This week’s Working Group update comes from our Open Science group – thanks to Jenny Molloy for the post and for her great work coordinating the group! This follows on the recent updates from the Archaeology and EU Data groups – and next week we’ll have another… The open data in science working group have […]
Read morePublic Domain Day: January 1st 2012
The following guest post is by Juan Carlos de Martin, from the the Politecnico of Torino, Italy, one of the organisers of the annual Public Domain Day of which the OKF is a proud supporter. Every January a growing number of people throughout the world gather to celebrate the new year. But not for the […]
Read moreEuropean Commission launches Open Data Strategy for Europe
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. This morning Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda announced a new Open Data Strategy for Europe. I wrote a bit of background on the announcement on Friday for the Guardian Datablog, discussing what this […]
Read moreData = Seized, Sanitised and Sanity-checked. Open Data Day 2011
This post is by Mark Brough, Research Officer at Publish What You Fund, Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending, and Irina Bolychevsky, Product Owner for CKAN. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending Blog and the CKAN blog and Mark Brough’s contribution is also featured on aidinfolabs.org. Saturday, December 3rd was Open Data Day, and London […]
Read moreOpen Data Means Better Science
The following post is by Jenny Molloy, coordinator of the Open Science Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We are very pleased to announce the publication of an article detailing the working group’s aims and achievements in PLoS Biology’s Community Pages. ‘The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science‘ has already had over […]
Read more#OpenDataCBG – Open Data Meetup in Cambridge 15th December
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Cambridge-based Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Cambridge, it has been too long… The #OpenData meetups are returning to Cambridge, following on from the success of the London meetups (#OpenDataLDN) and the recent Helsinki meetup (#OpenDataFi). The Details When: Thursday, 15th December, 7pm-9pm Where: 37 Panton St, Cambridge […]
Read moreThe Czech Republic Joins our Global Open Data Community
Note: This post is by Jindřich Mynarz, one of the talented organisers of the OKFN’s newest Local Chapter in the Czech Republic. In Prague? Come to the Chapter’s first meetup next week. The year 2011 has seen a sustained growth of interest in open data and open knowledge in the Czech Republic. There’s been a […]
Read moreLAPSI Design Award Competition
The following post is by Claudio Artusio who works for LAPSI, the European Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information. There is still 3 weeks left to apply to the 3rd LAPSI Award on the most user-friendly design of a PSI portal in the EU (http://www.lapsi-project.eu/news/award3). PSI (acronym for Public Sector Information) can be […]
Read moreA Year in the Life of Open Archaeology (and some upcoming events to look out for)
This update from the working group on Open Data in Archaeology is brought to you by Nicole Beale and Leif Isaksen. Nicole is a PhD candidate based in the Archaeological Computing Research Group and the Web Science Research Group, University of Southampton. Leif is a Research Fellow in the Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of […]
Read moreCorruption-busting data releases in Croatia
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF’s blog editor. Government transparency has been making the headlines over in Croatia, thanks to the amazing work of Marko Rakar, Croatia’s leading transparency expert. He has secured the release of all the public procurement data for government spending, dating back to July 1st 2009 in a […]
Read moreWanted – Open Data practitioners to work with Charities for an ‘Open data-day’
The following guest post is by Ed Anderton from the Nominet Trust, who provide support to organisations to increase access to the internet, online safety and education. The Nominet Trust is providing funding for a set of 10 ‘data-days’ with a range of UK Charities – more details of our offer to Charities can be […]
Read moreInternational Open Data Hackathon, Dec 3rd. It’s coming together.
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. So a number of things have started to really come together for this Saturday Dec 3rd. I’ve noticed a number of new cities […]
Read moreWorking Group Update: EU Open Data
There’s always so much going on round the OKF community, and we want the blog to be the place where you can find out all about it! To that end, we’re going to start having updates from our different working groups, one each week. And here’s the first – from the working group on EU […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Definition translated into Telugu (తెలుగు)
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor. We are pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Definition has now been translated into Telugu (తెలుగు), thanks to the hard work of Sridhar Gutam. You can find this at: http://opendefinition.org/okd/telugu/ The definition has now been translated into 27 languages. If you’d like to […]
Read moreData & Journalism events in Vienna
The following guest post is by Markus ‘fin’ Hametner, a coder and organizer with a main interest in journalism. He works on an ambitious web journalism project and co-organizes the collide:vienna event series. A few days ago, I realized that Vienna’s normally-quiet landscape of events in the open data and journalism spaces will be quite […]
Read moreUK Government Public Data Corporation Consultation Response
The following is the response the Open Knowledge Foundation submitted to the UK Government’s consultation on the public data corporation launched along with the consultation on open data in August 2011. The consultation document references the paper Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds (Newbery, Bentley and Pollock, 2007), commissioned by HM Treasury, […]
Read moreSeize the (Data) Day for Open Data Day – 3rd December
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Irina Bolychevsky, Product Owner for CKAN. On December 3, Open Data Day, for one day only we’ll have a crack-team of coders ready to break data out of its internet and load it into the Data Hub for you to use! […]
Read moreSolving Uganda’s budget puzzle: OpenSpending & Publish What You Fund’s Uganda Visualisations Featured in the Guardian
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on OpenSpending. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending blog. On Friday, the Guardian Poverty Matters blog published a piece on the Uganda visualisation that the OpenSpending team had been working on with Publish What You Fund. From the article “The Publish What You Fund campaign group and […]
Read moreData Debate: Is transparency bad for science?
The following post is by Eve Jackson who works for the Index on Censorship. Is the push for openness helping or hindering science? Index on Censorship will be debating the question on Tuesday 6 December at 6.30pm at Imperial College London, with Sir Mark Walport (Director, Wellcome Trust), George Monbiot (columnist, the Guardian), Professor David […]
Read moreEuropean Commission to adopt Open Data Strategy
The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKFN Blog Editor. News in from the European Commission, which has announced that they will be adopting a new Open Data Strategy from the 29th November. The aims of the strategy are to increase government transparency, and hopefully generate overall economic gains of around €40 billion a […]
Read moreTwo Open Knowledge Events in Cape Town: Africa@Home and Open Knowledge Meetup
The following post is by Francois Grey and Rufus Pollock. Francois is a recent Shuttleworth Fellow, visiting professor at Tsinghua University working and coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. Rufus is a co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are two exciting open data and open knowledge events in Cape Town South Africa taking place […]
Read moreWork in progress: The Data Digitizer
The following post is by Sam Leon, who’s just joined the OKF as a coommunity coordinator! Read more about Sam here. Back in July of this year a crowd of coders, scientists and new media artists gathered in Berlin for the Open Science Workshop at OKCon. One of the projects to come out of this […]
Read moreFinland Joins our Global Open Data Community
The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, one of OKFN’s London-based Community Coordinators and the contact point for incubating Local OKFN Chapters around the world. Fresh from days (and late nights) full of discussing open web communities in Barcelona at the Free Culture Forum, exchanging code and starting sites about information freedom with hackers in […]
Read moreInternational Open Data Hackathon Updates and Apps
The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog. With the International Open Data Hackathon getting closer, I’m getting excited. There’s been a real expansion on the wiki of the […]
Read moreWork in progress: Public Domain Calculators
The following post is from Primavera De Filippi, representative of Creative Commons France and coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Working Group. Many people recognise the value of works which are in the public domain (e.g. the works of Shakespeare, Italian renaissance paintings, classical music, etc). However, it is often difficult for people […]
Read moreHacks and hackers gather to write the first Data Journalism Handbook
The following post is from Federica Cocco, a freelance journalist and the former editor of Owni.eu, a data-driven investigative journalism site based in Paris. She has also worked with Wired, Channel 4 and the Guardian. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net and on the Data Journalism Blog. Ravensbourne College is an ultramodern cubist design school […]
Read moreOpen Data Day – a project I’d like to be doing
The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog. As some readers and International Open Data Hackathon participants know, I’m really keen on developers reusing each others code. All too […]
Read moreMajor new CKAN release: v1.5!
The following post is by David Read, on behalf of the CKAN team. We’re proud to announce a major new release of CKAN! Version 1.5 brings major improvements including: Major user experience upgrades around dataset publication and access plus a new theme Integrated structured and blob data storage, with associated with data previewing and visualization […]
Read moreCarla’s Open Data Collage
Check out this great collage from 9 year old Carla, sent over to us by her Dad, Martin Kaltenböck! This makes Carla our youngest Open Data Ambassador yet ;-) Martin says: I had a chat with my daughter Carla (9 years old) after the Warsaw Camp 2011 about the idea of Open Government Data, as […]
Read moreThe State of OpenData in Philly
The following guest post is by Mark Headd, from OpenDataPhilly in Philadelphia. Earlier this year, with the unveiling of the OpenDataPhilly website, the City of Philadelphia joined the growing fraternity of cities across the country and around the world to release municipal data sets in open, developer friendly formats. But the City of Brotherly Love […]
Read moreTuesday OKF Hangout
The Open Knowledge Foundation Hangout will be running this coming Tuesday (and every Tuesday after that) from 5:00pm-7:00pm (UK time). The community team (Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Kat Braybrooke and Sam Leon) will be on IRC in order to help you with any questions or suggestions you have about OKF projects, or advise you on […]
Read moreShare Your African Knowledge
The following guest post is by Iolanda Pensa, the scientific director at WikiAfrica and Share You Knowledge. What about African knowledge? Where is it? Who has it? And what is African knowledge anyway? Defining “African knowledge” is so difficult that it probably takes less time to share it. Talking about African knowledge is to talk […]
Read moreBarcelona’s Free Culture Forum Builds Community the Spanish Way
Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, Spain on behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation with an invitation from some of the amazing folk at Wikimedia Catalan and Creative Commons Spain. While the format of Forum itself was inspiring, with free admission for all attendants and a diverse […]
Read moreApps 4 Germany Contest Launched
The Open Knowledge Foundation today proudly announces the launch of the Apps 4 Germany Contest. The Contest is organised by three civil society organisations (The Open Data Network, the Gov2.0 Network and the German Chapter of the OKFN) in cooperation with BITKOM (Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) under the auspices of […]
Read morePrizewinning bid in ‘Inventare il Futuro’ Competition
By James Harriman-Smith and Primavera De Filippi On the 11th July, the Open Literature (now Open Humanities) mailing list got an email about a competition being run by the University of Bologna called ‘Inventare il Futuro’ or ‘Inventing the Future’. On the 28th October, Hvaing submitted an application on behalf of the OKF, we got […]
Read moreDevelopments in Cultural Data
The following guest post is by Rob Myers, artist, hacker, writer, and member of the OKFN Working Groups on Open Data in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage and one of the curators of the of the Open Art and Cultural Data group on the Data Hub. This year has seen some exciting developments in cultural […]
Read moreA translation fund for public domain texts
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It was originally posted on his blog. If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with […]
Read moreOpen Data, Italy has awoken
The following guest post is by Vincenzo Patruno, who works at ISTAT – the Italian National Institute for Statistics. He has translated it from his original here. The week before last was probably the most important week yet for open government and open data in Italy. It started with the public announcement of the launch […]
Read moreOpen Data in Cultural Heritage: Finding your way through the license labyrinth, London, 24th November 2011
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Following on from our Open GLAM workshop in Warsaw last month, in a few weeks we’re hosting a half day workshop looking at how to overcome barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector. So far we have confirmed […]
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