Public 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 […]

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European 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 […]

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Data = 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 […]

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Open 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 […]

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#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 […]

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The 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 […]

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LAPSI 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 […]

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A 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 […]

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Corruption-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 […]

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Wanted – 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 […]

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International 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 […]

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Working 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 […]

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Open 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 […]

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Data & 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 […]

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UK 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, […]

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Seize 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! […]

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Solving 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 […]

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Data 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 […]

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European 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 […]

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Two 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 […]

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Work 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 […]

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Finland 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 […]

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International 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 […]

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Work 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 […]

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Hacks 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 […]

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Open 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 […]

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Major 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 […]

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Carla’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 […]

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The 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 […]

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Tuesday 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 […]

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Share 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 […]

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Barcelona’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 […]

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Apps 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 […]

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Prizewinning 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 […]

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Developments 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 […]

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A 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 […]

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Open 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 […]

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Open 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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The Data Journalism Handbook at #MozFest 2011 in London

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. With the Mozilla Festival approaching fast, we’re getting really excited about getting stuck into drafting the Data Journalism Handbook, in a series of sessions run by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre. As we blogged about last month, […]

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Making the Open Government Partnership Work

The following guest post is by Matt Rosenberg, founder and editor of Public Data Ferret, a project of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest. In this special in-depth report, Matt looks at what it will take for the efforts of the recently formed global Open Government Partnership to succeed, taking in initiatives from across the globe […]

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Scaling the Open Data Ecosystem

This is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. As reported elsewhere I’ve been fortunate enough to have my Shuttleworth Fellowship renewed for the coming year so that I can continue and extend my work at the Open Knowledge Foundation on developing the open data ecosystem. The following text and video […]

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Launch of Open Spending Blog: Thoughts on Journalist-Programmer interaction

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Thanks to the hard work of the OpenSpending team getting the software to an exciting stage of development that we are happy to write about and some aesthetic love from our brilliant designer, Kat Braybrooke, the OpenSpending blog was officially launched yesterday. […]

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Open Data: Wishlist for the Next Year

In our closing session at Open Government Data Camp, we asked keynoters to reflect on what developments they would most like to see in the next year in relation to open government data and open data more generally. Here’s the resulting list: Open Government Data as a Right More Schemas (Knowledge APIs) – keep it […]

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Transparency Board urges widest possible response to UK data consultations

The following guest post is from Andrew Stott, who sits on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. In his former role as Director of Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office, Andrew helped to set up the UK’s open data initiative. Speaking to the OKFN Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw this morning, Professor Nigel […]

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#ogdcamp opening talk from Neelie Kroes

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Here is the video and full text for Neelie Kroes’s address at Open Government Data Camp 2011. Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, Opening up public data will foster the participation of citizens in political and social life, increase the transparency of […]

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Keynoting at the OGD Camp … Chris Taggart!

Less than 24 hours to go! The space is amazing, the scene is set, and we can’t wait till it’s filled with all your faces tomorrow morning! We’re pleased to announce our final keynote for the camp will be Chris Taggart of OpenCorporates. ###About Chris Chris Taggart is the CEO and co-founder of OpenCorporates: The […]

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PRESS RELEASE: The world’s biggest open data event

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Government Data Camp 2011 takes place tomorrow in Warsaw. We’re really excited. Our press release is below. We’d be grateful for any help in sending this to relevant colleagues and organisations! PRESS RELEASE: The world’s biggest open data event […]

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Keynoting at OGD Camp … Tom Steinberg!

Coming to you from Warsaw, where satellite events are now begun and the main event is only 2 days away, we’re pleased to announce that Tom Steinberg will be joining us on Friday for his keynote! Get full programme details now, on the ogdcamp website. ###About Tom Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of […]

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The cost of closed data & the economics of open data

This guest post by Chris Taggart was originally published on his blog at countculture.wordpress.com. Chris is co-founder of OpenCorporates,  founder of OpenlyLocal, and member of the OKF open government working group  Yesterday I received an email from a Cabinet Office civil servant in preparation for a workshop  tomorrow about the Open Data in Growth Review, and in it I […]

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LAPSI Legal Workshop at OGD Camp 2011.

We’re very pleased that LAPSI will be joining us next week in Warsaw for a workshop on legal issues around PSI. In this post Cristiana Sappa and Claudio Artusio explain a bit more about what you can expect… Public sector information can be defined as the wide range of information that public sector bodies collect, […]

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