In Brussels for Committee Vote on the INSPIRE Directive

By fortuitous coincidence I was in Brussels earlier this week in the run-up to the ENVI committee vote on the INSPIRE directive. The OKF has been actively supporting the Public Geodata campaign and finding myself with some time spare this seemed to a perfect opportunity to do some last minute contacting of MEPs as well […]

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Free Culture UK Meetup

Free Culture UK are having a meetup in London on Saturday the 8th of April. Anyone’s welcome and it should be a fun day so if your saturday’s free why not come along. I’ll definitely be heading down and am looking forward to some joint hacking on the the public domain project that we’ve been […]

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Public Geospatial Data and the OSGeo Foundation

I admit that I vacillated for a while over being nominated to the board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The idea clicked for me when I realised that I would want to put at least as much time into the Public Geospatial Data Project there as into a board membership role; and the PGDP’s […]

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Access to Knowledge Conference at Yale, April 21-23rd

There seems to be a nexus of academic open knowledge efforts at Yale University. I just heard about a big Access to Knowledge conference that is happening there next month, on the 21st-23rd April. The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly […]

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Open Letter from Public Geodata

An Open Letter regarding the INSPIRE Directive to Members of the ENVI Committee in the European Parliament was published by Public Geodata yesterday. OKFN has been providing support resources to Public Geodata as part of the Open Geodata awareness raising effort, and Rufus has been doing a fantastic job of sanitising our rhetoric for official […]

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Open version of the OED

Jo pointed me at this recent email about progress by Kragen Sitaker on scanning the first edition of the OED (from looking at the front pages it looks like this copy has come from Harvard University library). Currently he’s up to volume 6 (L,M,N) and has also produced a nice web interface to let you […]

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Talk at ETech 06

Today Jo and I did our talk at ETech about the experience of helping organize WSFII.London last year and the lessons we learned from it. Here is the slide show (in the s5 format and should work in any standards compliant browser). We presented a half serious, half whimsical set of rules for hacking your […]

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At ETech 06

I’m currently in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech ’06) courtesy of co-presenting a talk with Jo Walsh entitled Hack Your Own Conference: the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures. The talk to interest the most so far was by Tim Bray who spoke about the Atom syndication format. Rather than being […]

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Open Content Forum

Full details at http://www.openknowledgefoundation.org/okforums/content/ This forum will focus on ‘open content’, that is works such as books, music, and films which are provided under terms that allow for free access, redistribution and re-use. When: Wednesday 22nd February 2006, 7-9pm Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London. Who can attend: public. Registration is optional but useful so […]

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WIPO SCCR 2005-11-23: Intervention of the Open Knowledge Foundation

In the interests of brevity Mr Chairman we will limit our comments. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom, which is dedicated to promoting access to knowledge as well as an open approach to knowledge production and reuse. Brazil earlier today mentioned a 3-step test for the public […]

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Talk Tonight to Cambridge University Pugwash Society

Tonight I’ll be talking at a joint meeting of the Cambridge University Pugwash Society and Cambridge People and Planet with the title ‘Information wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains’- Fighting for Open Knowledge in an Age of Enclosure. Anyone can come along so if you are in the area do come along […]

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Open Knowledge Definition Released

Following extensive discussion of the first draft we are pleased to announce the public release of the Open Knowledge Definition. A space has also been created on wiki for the Definition which anyone may edit and improve.

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Open Knowledge Foundation Annual Report Released.

Today the Foundation released its first annual report. Rufus Pollock, Director of the Foundation said: I’m very proud of the progress we’ve made in such a short time. This is an very dynamic area and just in the last year we’ve seen a huge amount of activity and development and we believe that the next […]

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Paula Le Dieu Joins Advisory Board

April 20th 2005. The Foundation is delighted to announce that Paula Le Dieu, Director of Creative Commons International has joined the Advisory Board. Her wealth of experience includes leading the BBC’s Creative Archive project and her advice particularly in relation to promoting open approaches to content will be extremely valuable.

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The Medical Innovation Convention: A New Global Framework for Healthcare Research and Development

Introduction Funding research and development for new drugs and treatments as well as the transfer of existing knowledge around the globe is essential to improving healthcare in the twenty-first century, especially for those in developing countries. However the current global innovation system for healthcare, heavily based on TRIPs and ever stronger intellectual property rights, is […]

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Why the Open Knowledge Foundation

This essay is a first attempt at putting down in hard text a coherent explanation of the reasons for setting up the Open Knowledge Foundation. Undoubtedly this vision will both change and improve with the passage of time. The Open Knowledge Revolution The arrival of pervasive information technology has unleashed a revolution in the realm […]

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The Three Meanings of Open

The OKF is the Open Knowledge Foundation. But what does it mean for knowledge to be open? We take open to have three distinct senses: legal, social and technological. Legally Open Knowledge is legally open if it is free of most of the standard legal restrictions and requirements. In particular it should be accessible without […]

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Open Knowledge Foundation Launched

May 24th 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation was launched today with explicit objectives to promote the openness of all forms of knowledge where knowledge is taken to include information, data and all other synonymous terms. In particular To promote freedom of access, creation and dissemination of knowledge. To develop, support and promote projects, communities and […]

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