After the Open Data and Semantic Web Workshop

Last week we had a workshop on Open Data and the Semantic Web in London. There were some excellent talks, demos and discussions – and documentation is now online! As a result of discussions we had at the workshop, we now have two new volunteer positions at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you’re interested in […]

Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources, Saturday 8th November

As we announced earlier this month, tomorrow is our Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources. As a concrete outcome of the workshop, we hope to add more open scientific resources to CKAN, as we did last Saturday in the Workshop on Public Information and which we’ve blogged about in the past. So far, […]

Open Knowledge 1.0 Nearly Here

Open Knowledge 1.0, which takes place on Saturday March the 17th at Limehouse Town Hall in London, is now just over a week away. While there are still some places left we are nearing capacity so, if you would like to come, we advise you to register as soon as possible via: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/ Open Knowledge […]

Opening Up Ancient Geodata: The Barrington Atlas II

I’ve written previously about the Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World which took 12 years to produce (1988-2000). It’s a wonderful example of interdisciplinary collaboration using, as it did, the talents of a multitude of classical scholars as well as many cartographers. In that earlier post I pointed out that, unfortunately, none of the underlying […]

Dead knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters

When I think of the amount of knowledge that is ‘dead’ because of a lack of explicitness about its ‘openness’ I am always surprised by the number of examples. Consider the following two: Example 1: Everything2 and h2g2 Years ago, back when I was at university I remember stumbling across <http://www.everything2.com/>. Shortly thereafter I remember […]

#ODD2023 Stories @ Tanzania 🇹🇿

GeoTE Tanzania celebrated Open Data Day on 10 March 2023, where representatives from different organisations and students participated in the event. The event theme was “Mapping with Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response”, where we aimed to help create open data to help areas affected by earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. The event was successfully organised […]

#ODD2023 Stories @ Philippines 🇵🇭

On March 4, 2023, USTP YouthMappers organised Open Data Day 2023 with the theme “Empowering AI and Mapping with Open Data” at the University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines, Cagayan de Oro Campus. With 40 participants, the training workshop was a tremendous success, and it was encouraging to see that more than half […]

France Prefers to Pay (twice) for Papers by Its Researchers

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier […]

Knowledge Creation to Diffusion: The Conflict in India

This is a guest post by Ranjit Goswami, Dean (Academics) and (Officiating) Director of Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Nagpur, India. Ranjit also volunteers as one of the Indian Country Editors for the Open Data Census. Developing nations, more so India, increasingly face a challenge in prioritizing its goals. One thing that increasingly becomes relevant […]

PDF Liberation Hackathon – January 18-19

This guest blog post has been written by Marc Joffe, of Public Sector Credit Solutions. Open government data is valuable only to the extent that it can be used cost-effectively. When governments provide “open data” in the form of voluminous PDFs they offer the appearance of openness without its benefits. In this situation, the open […]

Announcing Sunlight’s international lobbying disclosure guidelines

This is a cross-post by Julia Keserű, Lisa Rosenberg and Greg Brown from the Sunlight Foundation, originally published on the Sunlight Foundation blog. With more and more civil society organizations in the open government universe recognizing that “thorny issues” — such as political finance transparency or surveillance — need to be tackled somewhat more vehemently, […]

Visualizing How the Brazilian Government Underspends on the Public Good

This post is authored by Vitor Batista, who works as developer for the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Neil Ashton, Data Roundup Editor for the School of Data blog. It is cross-posted from the PBS Ideas and OpenSpending blogs. Brazilian NGO INESC (Institute of Socio-Economic Studies) and Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil want Brazilians to participate in […]

Announcing CKAN 2.0

CKAN is a powerful, open source, open data management platform, used by governments and organizations around the world to make large collections of data accessible, including the UK and US government open data portals. Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece […]

Preregistration in the Social Sciences: A Controversy and Available Resources

This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. For years now, the practice preregistering clinical trials has worked to reduce publication bias dramatically (Drummond Rennie offers more details). Trying to build on this trend for transparency, the Open Knowledge Foundation, which runs the Open Economics Working Group, has expressed support for All Trials […]

Reputation Factor in Economic Publishing

“The big problem in economics is that it really matters in which journals you publish, so the reputation factor is a big hindrance in getting open access journals up and going”. Can the accepted norms of scholarly publishing be successfully challenged? This quotation is a line from the correspondence about writing this blogpost for the […]

OKFN India Trip – the Roundup

This is the final post in the Open Data in India series. Our visit to India wasn’t just about meetups… the following post deals with the individuals and organisations that Lucy and Laura met whilst in India, the questions they were asked and the projects they were introduced to. It is cross-posted on the OKFN […]

Dear Internet, we need better image archives

The following guest post is by Nina Paley, cartoonist and blogger. Nina is a member of the OKF’s Working Group on the Public Domain. Dear Internet, You know what should be really easy to find online? Good quality, Public Domain vintage illustrations. You know, things like this: I found this on Flickr, where someone claims […]

Austria adopts CKAN and CC-BY as nation-wide defaults

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor. Fantastic news from our fledgling Austrian chapter, the Open Knowledge Forum Österreich! The cities of Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, and Graz, together with the Chancellor’s office, have established the “Cooperation OGD Austria” – a new alliance bringing together federal, state, and city governments, as well […]

OKF Germany launched at Leipzig Semantic Web Day!

We are delighted to announce the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which took place yesterday at the Leipzig Semantic Web Day. The OKF Germany chapter will be dedicated to promoting all forms of open knowledge in Germany — including open government data, open data in science, and the public domain. Work is already […]

Where Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched

We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]