Virtual Workshop on Linking Development Data, 12-13th May 2011

The following guest post is from David Pidsley who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development. Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) on 12th and 13th May 2011 in Amsterdam focuses on how developers, practitioners and policy makers can harness open international development data more effectively. During […]

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OKCon 2011 Presentation and Speaker Preview

The following post is from Daniel Dietrich, Board Member of OKF Deutschland and main organiser of OKCon 2011 in Berlin. Although the list of keynote speakers and presentations is not yet set in stone, it is shaping up very nicely so far! Here is a bit of a sneak preview of just a few of […]

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Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 17: Jan-March 2011

Welcome to the seventeenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 17 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 17 Contents: Announcing… The Open Data Challenge! OKCon 2011: Call for Participation New Working Group on Open Economics launches Yourtopia.net GetTheData.org […]

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Your stories here!

Want to share your tales of openness with the world? Got a cool project you’d like to tell people about? Or perhaps some interesting ruminations about open knowledge? The OKF blog is a fantastic place to tell your story, open up conversations, and make sure all your hard work is getting noticed. We want to […]

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New mailing list for open data in Czech Republic

The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. The Open Knowledge Foundation has just launched the okfn-cz mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-cz The short URL is: http://bit.ly/okfn-cz The intent of the […]

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Where does Italy’s money go?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over the past 48 hours or so we’ve been busy loading 12 years of Italian spending data into Open Spending. Further details on the project and the data are below. This project was put together by Stefano Costa, Friedrich Lindenberg, Luca […]

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Yourtopia wins 3rd prize at World Bank Contest

The following post is from Guo Xu, a member of the new OKF Working Group on Economics and a member of the YourTopia.net A few months back, we launched a simple app that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what “YourTopia”, they would like to live in. Created with the help of the […]

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#opendata: New Film about Open Government Data

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce the release of #opendata, a new short film clip about open government data. The film includes interview footage with numerous open government data gurus and advocates, which we shot at last year’s Open […]

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What do you think about Norway’s new open data license?

The following guest post is from Sverre Andreas Lunde-Danbolt who works for the Department for ICT and renewal in the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs, and who is a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data The Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform have just sent a […]

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Voluntary Transparency And Digital Civic Literacy Help Build Strong Communities

The following guest post is by Matt Rosenberg of Seattle, founder of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest and the news knowledge base site Public Data Ferret, a Seattle Times local news partner. There’s no dispute that mandated public disclosure in accordance with freedom of information and open meetings laws is a cornerstone of any modern […]

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Notes from the Big Clean in Prague

The following is a guest post from Jindrich Mynarz at the National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic, member of the OpenData.cz initiative, and one of the organizers of the Big Clean in Prague. On the Saturday, March 19th, the Big Clean workshop took place as a twin event in two cities, Prague (Czech Republic) […]

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Wikipedia Academy on Wikipedia and Higher Education

The following guest post is from Alex Stinson, Campus Ambassador at Oxford University for Wikipedia The London Wikipedia Academy is a mini-conference aimed at starting a conversation between academics and Wikipedians in London, moving from ethereal opinions to organised, evidence based, informed discussions. There will be a number of exciting speakers all engaging in a […]

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Announcing the Open Data Challenge – a pan-European open data competition

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. For a long while our Working Group on EU Open Data has been very keen to run a pan-European open data competition. Hence we’re very pleased to announced the opening of the Open Data Challenge, which is precisely such a competition. […]

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Open for Business

The following post is from Professor Nigel Shadbolt, who is on the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. This article was originally published in Think Quarterly and is reproduced here with permission from the author. The first decade of the twenty-first century has been defined by our insatiable demand for information. It has led to […]

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Building the (Open) Data Ecosystem

The following is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Present: A One-Way Street At the current time, the basic model for data processing is a “one way street”. Sources of data, such as government, publish data out into the world, where, (if we are lucky) it is processed by […]

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Bounties for scrapers: a new approach to opening global data

This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. On Friday we at OpenCorporates announced an innovative (and frankly untested!) way for the open data community to work together in helping opening up one of the most important datasets there […]

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The Aid Revolution begins with XML

The following guest post is by Claudia Elliot from Publish What You Fund. IATI XML data After two years of negotiating, the 18 donors of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) agreed on February 9th the final details of a new global standard for publishing aid information. This format makes aid information internationally comparable, and […]

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The next OGD frontier: Low and middle income countries

The following guest post is by Aman Grewal and Carlos de la Fuente, from the World Wide Web Foundation and CTIC Foundation Last year we witnessed an impressive expansion of Open Government Data initiatives all around the world. We can assert without any doubt that it was clearly the year when Open Government spread throughout […]

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Open Data Search: finding useful datasets, worldwide

The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg, who is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation working on CKAN, PublicData.eu and Open Spending. Recently, there has hardly been a week in which there hasn’t been an announcement of a new local, regional or national open data initiative – including ever more extensive catalogues of data […]

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Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2011: 30th June & 1st July

The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]

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Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2011: 30th June & 1st July

The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]

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Public Transport Data for Berlin

The following post is from Stefan Wehrmeyer, who has worked on projects such as Mapnificent, and has recently joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as a developer! Public Transport Data is awesome! It’s one of the few datasets that people actually use every day when they ask for the next bus or the fastest route. And […]

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“Should Britain flog off the family silver to cut our national debt?”

The following post is from Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki. ‘Should Britain flog off the family silver to cut our national debt?‘ — that’s the question the UK current affairs documentary Dispatches tackled last Monday. ScraperWiki worked with Channel 4 News and Dispatches to make two supporting data visualisations, to help viewers understand what assets […]

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A Kafkaesque Data-trail: the Hunt for “Europe’s Hidden Billions”

The following guest post is by Cynthia O’Murchu, investigative reporter at the Financial Times, and previously their deputy interactive editor. She is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data At its inception, “Europe’s Hidden Billions”, a joint investigation by the Financial Times and the then newly formed Bureau of […]

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The Public Domain Calculators code is now in a separate library

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As many of you will know, the Public Domain Calculators aim to make it easier to find out which works are in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. There are two main parts of the project: A collection of flowcharts, […]

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Open Government Data in Slovakia

The following guest post is by Zuzana Wienk, from the Slovakian watchdog the Fair Play Alliance. She is also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data When we started to build a data catalogue of all possible flows of public finances to the private sphere in 2003, we had no […]

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Project Gutenberg adds their 40,000th free eBook!

The following guest post is from Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain It’s The Year of the eBook! Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of all eBook libraries, announced today they have put number 40,000 of internally produced free eBooks online as of March […]

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Introducing FigShare: a new way to share open scientific data

The following post is from Mark Hahnel, founder of the Science 3.0 network and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around […]

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Keeping Open Government Data Open?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. An unprecedented amount of freely reusable government information is currently being released by public bodies around the globe. This is being consumed and reused by numerous stakeholders – including civic developers, data literate citizens, data journalists, NGOs, researchers, and companies. There […]

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CityCamp Colorado – gov 2.0 goes local.

The following guest post is from Scott Primeau from Colorado Smart Communities, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data Just over a year ago, Kevin Curry started the CityCamp movement to bring together local government officials, government employees, private sector technology experts, journalists, and citizens to share perspectives and insights […]

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Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No.16 Sept-Dec 2010

Welcome to the sixteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 16 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 16 Contents: Open Government Data Camp 2010 Launch of PublicData.eu Europe’s Energy CKAN keeps on growing – new releases, and launch […]

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Open Data in Brighton and Hove

The following guest post is from Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and internet entrepreneur, and founder of the Open-data Brighton and Hove group. Greg is also director of strategic projects at Cogapp, and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. Brighton and Hove is a special place. […]

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Experts to underpin Wikipedia’s open wisdom? Turning anecdotes into data.

The following guest post is from Dr Panagiota Alevizou, member of the Wikimedia Research Committee, Research Fellow in Education and Educational Technologies at the Open University, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Science. Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary last January was followed by a frenzy of media coverage in the mainstream and […]

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DataMarket.com Launches with 100 Million Open Data Time Series – remains firmly commited to open data

The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, founder of DataMarket.com, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. We‘ve just launched an offering of statistics from some of the world’s most important sources of open data on DataMarket.com. This enables users to find, compare, visualize and download statistics from […]

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As coder is for code, X is for data

For code we have the term coder, as in, “he’s a great coder”, but what do we use when talking about data? datanaut, datar, data wrangler, data hacker, data geek …? Suggestions (and votes) please in a comment or tweet! (@okfn or @rufuspollock) Would also be nice to have equivalents for the many variations that […]

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Open Bibliographic Data Challenge

What can you do with open access to data? What great ideas do you have for utilising open access to bibliographic catalogues? Or what example prototypes can you come up with? We want to find out! 2 x £50 prizes for great ideas using bibliographic data 2 x £500 prizes for building prototype apps using […]

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The Open Knowledge Foundation will soon help to run ePSIplatform

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re proud to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is part of a new team which will take on the maintenance of ePSIplatform project for the next two years. As many of you will know ePSIplatform is a key resource for […]

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Navajo Nation Water Quality Project

The following guest post is by Arlen Parsa, who works for Groundswell Educational Films, an American non-profit. In collaboration with the Northwestern University chemistry department, they’ve produced a brilliant example of how opening up data can have a real impact on people’s lives. ##The problem Many parts of the Navajo Indian reservation in the south-western […]

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How can we promote the public domain?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. A few weeks back we ran a small workshop in Berlin for Public Domain Day 2011. It was attended by a mix of artists, scholars, legal experts, technologists, and passers by. We started out with a general conversation in which the […]

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Playing around with Open Linked Data: data.totl.net

The following guest post is by Christopher Gutteridge, a Web & Systems Programmer and Open Data Architect at the University of Southampton. When he was young he wrote the “coffee stain” filter for GIMP, and is the developer of Graphite RDF PHP library & tools. He is a member of the OKF Working Group on […]

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Europe’s Energy: a new mini-app to put the European energy targets into context

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ […]

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Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint

The following is a guest post by James Harriman-Smith who is coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being […]

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Art Open Data

The following guest post is by Rob Myers, artist, hacker, writer, and member of the OKF Working Groups on Open Data in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Art Open Data is Open Data that concerns art institutions, art history, the art market, or artworks. Using this data, we can examine art history and contemporary art […]

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Support Yourtopia.net in the Worldbank Apps competition!

The following post is from Guo Xu, economics researcher, member of the OKF’s fledgling Working Group on Open Information in Economics, and member of the Yourtopia project. Two weeks ago, we announced the Yourtopia.net project, a simple web application that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what “YourTopia”, they would like to live in. […]

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Open Public Data: Then What? – Part 2

The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). On Friday he mapped three possible futures for Open Public Data, and today he suggests ways to ensure we will avoid some of the dangers he highlighted. ###What triggers what? One may believe that one of the three scenarios […]

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Open Public Data: Then What? – Part 1

The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). Today he explores three possible futures for Open Public Data, and on Monday he will suggest ways to ensure that we are moving in the best direction. We tend to assume that the opening up of public data will […]

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Publishing the OKF Board Minutes

The following is a post by Becky Hogge, a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. On behalf of the OKF Board of Directors, today I’ve published summary minutes of OKF Board meetings dating back to May 2009. Minutes from some of the previous meetings, including the Board’s two most important ones, have been online […]

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Python Web Expert Jobs

This is a joint post by James Gardner, the lead developer on CKAN and Rufus Pollock, creator of CKAN and project lead for Where Does My Money Go. The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for really good Python web developers to join our organisation to work on CKAN, our open source web-based catalogue system built […]

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Open Biblio Principles Announced

The following post is by Mark McGillivrary, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Last week the Open Biblio Principles were launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. The principles are the product of six months of development and discussion within the working group […]

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Introducing Our New Project Coordinator: Jason Kitcat

Hello, my name is Jason and I’m OKF’s newest addition to the team. I’m filling a new role at the OKF to keep an overview of live projects, liaise with the Board of Directors and the Coordination Committee plus doing some direct project management. The first major piece of work I’m diving into is OKF’s […]

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