Czech Open Data Challenge: a showcase of amazing transparency apps

This blog post was written by the Czech Republic Open Knowledge team as part of our blog series of Open Knowledge Network updates.  In the fifth edition of Czech open data challenge, interested parties from the ranks of the public, non-profit organizations and companies were invited to submit applications that use or generate open data. Applications developed between November […]

Pin it in the Parks: Crowdsourcing park facilities information in Dublin

Since 2015 Open Knowledge International has been part of the consortium of RouteToPA, a European innovation project aimed at improving citizen engagement by enabling meaningful interaction between open data users, open data publishers and open data. This month, the project is running the Pin it in the Parks competition together with Smart Dublin to encourage, […]

AbreLatam / Condatos: after the first 5 years

This is a somewhat belated entry about the Abrelatam and Condatos, the regional open data conference of Latin America. It comes more than a month after the conference took place in San José, Costa Rica, but the questions raised there are still relevant and super important for advancing open data in Latin America and working […]

Frictionless Data v1.0

  Data Containerisation hits v1.0! Announcing a major milestone in the Frictionless Data initiative. Today, we’re announcing a major milestone in the Frictionless Data initiative with the official v1.0 release of the Frictionless Data specifications, including Table Schema and Data Package, along with a robust set of pre-built tooling in Python, R, Javascript, Java, PHP […]

Open data quality – the next shift in open data?

This blog post is part of our Global Open Data Index blog series. It is a call to recalibrate our attention to the many different elements contributing to the ‘good quality’ of open data, the trade-offs between them and how they support data usability (see here some vital work by the World Wide Web Consortium). […]

Gender inequality on focus in São Paulo Open Data Day

This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2017. On Saturday 4 March, groups from around the world organised over 300 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. 44 events received additional support through the Open Knowledge International mini-grants scheme, funded by SPARC, the Open […]

Open Data got to Paraguay to stay – Open Data Day 2017

This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2017. On Saturday 4 March, groups from around the world organised over 300 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. 44 events received additional support through the Open Knowledge International mini-grants scheme, funded by SPARC, the Open […]

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of #OGP16 Summit

This blog originally appeared on Medium and is reposted with permission. This post is a reflection of a long and intense week in Paris for the Open Government Partnership summit. I feel after this week like I have seen so much, but missed out on a lot of things (including a couple of meals!). All […]

Some misconceptions about data journalism

This blog originally appeared on Medium and is reposted with permission. In the past few years, a new discipline in journalism is slowly getting more and more followers — a discipline commonly known as ‘data journalism’. These so-called ‘data journalists’ are usually envisioned as the younger, tech savvy journalists, ones that are not afraid to analyse […]

Who Will Shape the Future of the Data Society?

This piece was originally posted on the blog of the International Open Data Conference 2016, which takes place in Madrid, 6-7th October 2016. The contemporary world is held together by a vast and overlapping fabric of information systems. These information systems do not only tell us things about the world around us. They also play […]

Open Knowledge Switzerland Summer 2016 Update

The first half of 2016 was a very busy one for the Open Knowledge Swiss chapter, Opendata.ch. Just between April to June the chapter had 3 Hackathons, 15 talks, 3 meetups and 10 workshops. In this blog post we highlight some of these activities to update the Open Knowledge Community about our chapter’s work.   […]

Registration to the Open Exchange for Social Change – IODC unconference is now open!

We are excited to announce that registration is open for ‘The Open Exchange for Social Change’. This event has been referred to in the past as ‘The Unconference’ during the flurry of pre-event IOCD Madrid announcements made over the past few weeks.   The response has already been amazing on social media, and we have received […]

Open Data as a Human Right: the Case of Case-Law

Open data is sometimes considered first as a way to foster economic growth through the development of innovative services built on public data. However, beyond this economic perspective, important though it may be, access to public sector information should be seen first and foremost as an unprecedented opportunity to bridge the gap between the government […]

Announcing the Legislative Openness Data Explorer

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is premised on the notion that sharing success stories can encourage further experimentation and reform. This is certainly true with parliaments, where the Legislative Openness Working Group (LOWG) has repeatedly witnessed the value of sharing information and experience.   To ensure that good practice is effectively captured and shared, the […]

Introducing The New Proposed Global Open Data Index Survey

The Global Open Data Index (GODI) is one of the core projects of Open Knowledge International. Originally launched in 2013, it has quickly grown and now measures open data publication in 122 countries. GODI is a community tool, and throughout the years the open data community have taken an active role in shaping it by reporting […]

New Report: “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?”

Following on from our discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, today we’re pleased to announce the release of a new report titled “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?”. Undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge and the CIVICUS DataShift, […]

Introducing Viderum

Ten years ago, Rufus started CKAN as an “apt-get for data” in order to enable governments and corporations to provide their data as truly open data. Today, CKAN is used by countless open data publishers around the globe and has become the de facto standard. With CKAN as the technical foundation, Open Knowledge has offered […]

New Report: “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape”

We’re pleased to announce a new report, “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape” undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge, the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency and the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. The report offers an unprecedented empirical mapping and analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has […]

New Discussion Paper: “Democratising the Data Revolution”

“New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are […]

Announcing the new open data handbook

We are thrilled to announce that the Open Data Handbook, the premier guide for open data newcomers and veterans alike, has received a much needed update! The Open Data Handbook, originally published in 2012, has become the go to resource for the open data community. It was written by expert members of the open data […]

Joint Submission to UN Data Revolution Group

The following is the joint Submission to the UN Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution from the World Wide Web Foundation, Open Knowledge, Fundar and the Open Institute, October 15, 2014. It derives from and builds on the Global Open Data Initiative’s Declaration on Open Data. To the UN Secretary General’s […]

Enter the Partnership for Open Data’s Impact Stories Competition!

We want to know how opening up data impact those in developing countries. The Partnership for Open Data (POD) is a partnership of institutions to research, support, train and promote open data in the context of low and middle income countries. We invite you to share with us your stories about how open data has […]

U.S. government’s data portal relaunched on CKAN

Today, we are excited to announce that our work with the US Federal Government (data.gov) has gone live at catalog.data.gov! You can also read the announcement from the data.gov blog with their description of the new catalog. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Services team, which deploys CKAN, have been working hard on a new unified catalog […]

The Open Data Census Challenge on Open Data Day 2013

On the recent Open Data Day we ran the Open Data Census Challenge. The challenge enlisted the help of participants around the world in digging up information on open data in their city and region and contributing it to the newly launched city section of the Open Data Census. The results have been impressive with […]

Let’s defend Open Formats for Public Sector Information in Europe!

Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats! When we work on building all […]

ePSI Platform Conference 2012

On Friday the 16th of March, the European Public Service Information (ePSI) Platform conference was held in Rotterdam. More than 300 guests from all over the world gathered for what turned out to be a very busy and interesting day. In 15 sessions 60 speakers gave an overview on a wide variety of open data […]

Living Labs Global Award 2012 – Two Open Knowledge Foundation Projects Nominated

Two projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been nominated for the Living Labs Global Award 2012: OpenSpending.mobi – Participatory budgeting through augmented reality and CityData – Making Cities Smarter – A central entry point to all your city’s data. Out of nearly 700 submitted showcases, about 15% have been selected to submit an extended […]

Announcing the ePSI Trailblazers 2012

In the run to the upcoming ePSI Conference 2012 on 16th March in Rotterdam, Netherlands, we are very excited to announce the ePSI Trailblazers 2012. What are the ePSI Trailblazers? What if, instead of handing out another award, we could offer you both recognition from your peers and help in improving your work? At the […]

Open Economics Hackday

The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. It is great to see people coming together and doing something cool on a Saturday. The Open Economics Hackday gathered more than thirty people at the Barbican and online, crafting fancy visualisations, wrangling data and being creative together. The day was devoted […]

ePSIplatform Conference 2012

The following post is by the organisers of the ePSIplatform Conference 2012 and is cross-posted from epsiplatform.eu. 16 March 2012, Rotterdam, Netherlands With the progress the open data movement has made in the past few years, and the announcement of the European Open Data Strategy by the European Commission, we are reaching a new maturity level […]

Apps for Germany

The following is a post by Daniel Dietrich, coordinator of the working group Open Government Data and chairman of the German Chapter of the OKFN. We are delighted to announce the launch of “Apps für Deutschland” – the first open data competition in Germany. Apps für Deutschland (Apps4De) will officially be launched on November, 8th […]

How to study lobbying with crowdsourced open data

The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data. For about a year, Regards Citoyens has been working together with the French chapter of Transparency International in order to bring more transparency in the processes of influence and lobbying within the French parliament. Lobbying is a very controversial subject […]

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 […]

Why Open Government Data Camp matters

Tomorrow morning at 9.30 marks the start of the Open Government Data Camp, the first of it’s kind, and what we hope will be an annual event. People are already arriving from across the world to attend including representatives from the UN, White House and European Commission. But why all the fuss? We spoke to […]

Open government data in Germany: what next?

Following is a guest post from Daniel Dietrich, Chairman of the Open Data Network, Official Representative of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany and Researcher at the centre for Computers and Society at the Technical University Berlin. In this post I will try to give you an overview and update on what is happening on open […]