[okfn-announce] Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 15

Fri Sep 3 19:12:59 UTC 2010

Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 15

Welcome to the fifteenth Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter!

Contents:

  * Open Government Data Camp, London, November 2010
  * Panton Principles win SPARC Innovators award
  * Rufus Pollock on new UK transparency board
  * Where Does May Money Go? The hunt continues!
  * CKAN goes international
  * New OKF Working Groups on Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Linguistics
  * Principles for opening up government finances
  * New study charts history of open government data
  * OKF extends its open borders: OKF Germany launched
  * New translations of the Open Knowledge Definition
  * News in brief
  * Other news in brief
  * Thanks to our volunteers!
  * Support the Open Knowledge Foundation
  * Further information

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## To support the OKF see:
## http://www.okfn.org/support
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OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA CAMP
===========================

Save the date! From the 18-19th November 2010, the Open Knowledge Foundation will host an international workshop on open government data in London:

  http://opengovernmentdata.org/camp2010/

The event will be an opportinity to meet movers and shakers in the world of open government data including government representatives, policymakers, lawyers, technologists, academics, advocates, citizens, journalists, and re-users.

Open Government Data Camp is supported by the Cabinet Office, UK; EU LAPSI project, Turin, Italy; EU LOD2 project, Leipzig, Germany; Guardian, UK; and Sunlight Foundation, USA.

PANTON PRINCIPLES WIN
======================

We were delighted to hear that the authors of the Panton Principles have been given a SPARC Innovators award!

  http://pantonprinciples.org/

The principles are currently maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s working group on Open Data in Science. Working group member Peter Murray Rust is starting a series of papers on issues related to the Panton Principles, which BioMed Central have kindly offered to publish.

If you’d like to join the debate, you can sign up to the open-science discussion list:

  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-science

RUFUS POLLOCK ON NEW UK TRANSPARENCY BOARD
==============================================

We’re also pleased to announce that OKF Director Rufus Pollock has been invited to be a member of the UK government's new Public Sector Transparency Board, which will help to drive forward the Government’s transparency agenda. Further information is available here:

http://blog.okfn.org/2010/06/28/new-uk-transparency-board-and-public-data-principles/

If you have any ideas about how governments can continue to open up data, you're welcome to pitch in on the OKF's Open Government discuss list:

http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government

 WHERE DOES MY MONEY GO? THE DATA HUNT CONTINUES!
===================================================

There was excitement all round, and especially from the OKF's Where Does My Money Go team, when back in June the UK's new government committed to opening up more data. 
We launched a new interface to the COINS data, the biggest database of UK spending data:

  http://coins.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/

We've also been working on new visualisations of the budget and deficit gap:

  http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/
  http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/interactive/

 To keep up to date with the project you can join the discuss-list here:

 http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss

CKAN.NET GOES INTERNATIONAL!
=============================

Exciting news from CKAN, where the Italian, Norwegian, and German instances are now live! You can see them at:

  http://it.ckan.net/
  http://no.ckan.net
  http://de.ckan.net

We’re also proud to note that the Canadian citizen-driven data catalogue is being powered by CKAN:

  http://datadotgc.ca

There are currently 67 packages available on it.ckan.net, while there are already 136 packages online at no.ckan.net which is a fantastic start! If you are interested in starting an instance of CKAN for open (government) data in your country, drop us a line on our ckan-discuss list, where there is a growing group of developers and translators who can help you to get something up and running: 

  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss

NEW OKF WORKING GROUPS
=======================

Recently, the OKF’s series of working groups (WGs) has been expanding. A surge of member activity has brought new ideas bubbling up to the surface, from the collaborations and interests of the community. We’re happy to welcome to the working group stable: Open Archaeology, Open Cultural Heritage, and Open Data in Linguistics.

  http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology
  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-heritage
  http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/linguistics

One of the objectives of the Open Data in Linguistics WG is to maintain a registry of collections of open corpora, dictionaries and other linguistic resources on CKAN:

  http://ckan.net/tag/linguistics

If you’d like to get involved in a working group, whether you’ve got 5 minutes or 5 days to spare, find out which of our current 13 active WGs matches your interests here:

  http://wiki.okfn.org/wg

PRINCIPLES FOR OPENING UP GOVERNMENT FINANCES
===============================================

The OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data has released a new set of initiatives on publishing government finances:

  http://www.opengovernmentdata.org/finances/

Whether you're in the UK or abroad, we'd love to have your comments! Please dive in, on the open government data discuss-list:

  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government

NEW STUDY CHARTS HISTORY OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA
===================================================

A new report released late last month, and written by OKF board member Becky Hogge, charts the history of open government data in the UK and the US.

  http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519/open-data-study-100519.pdf

Written for a consortium of grant-giving organisations including the Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Institute, and DfID, the Open Data Study draws some new and surprising conclusions, as well as recognising the role of organisations like the OKF and mySociety in bringing about data.gov.uk.

OKF EXTENDS ITS OPEN BORDERS: OKF GERMANY LAUNCHED
=====================================================

We are delighted to announce the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which took place at the Leipzig Semantic Web Day in May 2010:

  http://okfn.de/

We look forward to following the activities of the new chapter — and doing everything we can to support it! If you’re interested in getting involved, please say hello on the mailing list:

  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-de

NEW TRANSLATIONS OF THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE DEFINITION
====================================================

We are pleased to now have Norwegian, Russian, and Chinese translations of the Open Knowledge Definition:

  http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/norsk_bokmaal/
  http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/russkiy
  http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/chinese

If you’d like to translate the Open Knowledge Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch!

NEWS IN BRIEF
===================

– Thanks to everyone for making OKCon 2010 such a success. You can download presentation slides, PDF and text of the talks here: http://okfn.org/okcon/2010/after/

– The OKF has launched a new RDF library, which is in use in several of its projects, including CKAN and WDMMG. You can find it here: http://ordf.org/

– The Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on EU Open Data is organising a session on linked data and open data at the ICT2010 event in Brussels later this year: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/ict2010/item-display.cfm?id=2790

– Scotland’s answer to OKCon 2010 (albeit in mini-form) took place in May in the contemporary Inspace area at the Informatics Forum, and was organised with support from iDEAlab and EDINA at the University of Edinburgh. For further OKF Scotland details, see here: http://wiki.okfn.org/okscotland

– OKF EU Open Data WG member Andreas Langegger helped organise an open data event in April in Austria. You can see the slides and the results of the open data event on the website of the project: http://www.zukunftsweb.at/opengovdata

– We’re thrilled to see all the amazing datasets, debates, and data mashups that have been taking place via the Guardian Data Blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablogsince it launched in March 2010, and we’re delighted to have helped! 

– An intense day of discussions, datasets, coding, and labeling took place as part of the Aid Information Challenge, co-organised by OKF along with Aid Info, Publish What You Fund, Rewired State and the Guardian. See some of the results of that day here: http://www.aidinformationchallenge.org/?page_id=228

– We’re delighted to welcome Nat Torkington to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board! A list of current Advisory Board Members is available at: http://okfn.org/about/people

– The OKF and the OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation) issued a shared response on March 15th to the UK Government’s consultation on opening access to Ordnance Survey data. You can read the shared response in full here: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/03/15/response-to-the-consultation-on-opening-access-to-ordnance-survey-data/

–  Scientist and OKF Advisory Board Member Peter Murray Rust has been spreading the OKF and Open Data word recently, at both the Open Science Summit 2010 (held in July at Berkeley) and at Sci Foo, the annual, interdisciplinary, invitation-only scientific 'unconference' organized by Nature Publishing Group, Google, and O'Reilly Media. Not a fan of powerpoint, he’s come up with a new presentation tool! http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2517

– Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock and Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal were asked by The Daily Telegraph what UK government datasets they’d like to see opened up next. Find out what they said here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/conradquiltyharper/100046396/the-government-has-unlocked-the-open-data-safe-now-we-must-open-it/

– Open Data Commons has released a new Open Data Commons attribution license (ODC-By): http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/

– Cologne-based libraries and the Library Centre of Rhineland-Palatinate (LBZ) in cooperation with the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) are the first German libraries to adopt the idea of Open Access for bibliographic data by publishing their catalogue data for free public use: so we’re delighted to be able to add a koeln-library-data package to the bibliographic data group on CKAN: http://www.ckan.net/group/bibliographic

– Members of the OKF were given the honour of judging open access publisher BioMed Central’s new Open Data Award: John Wilbanks, Peter Murray-Rust, and Rufus Pollock were part of the judging panel. You can read more on the awards, and the winning articles here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/researchawards/opendata/

– OKF member David Read gave a talk on open data and coding the data.gov.uk site, as well as information on the OKF and CKAN at EuroPython 2010 (The European Python Conference) held in Birmingham in July.

– Chris Taggart, of OpenlyLocal, has been delivering a raft of exciting and useful information for UK locales, based on local data, including an open data scoreboard for local authorities (showing whether they are publishing open data) as well as local council finances and spending: http://OpenlyLocal.com/councils/open

– OKF member Bryan Bishop gave a talk recently on ‘Open Knowledge Packages and CKAN, an Archive Network’ at SciPy 2010 (Python for Scientific Computing Conference) in Austin, Texas: http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2010/schedule.html

OTHER NEWS IN BRIEF
===================

– Just a reminder that the P2P Foundation carries a lot of useful resources on developments that are based on commons for open knowledge, software and code: http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open

– Iceland recently put into practice the IMMI (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative), passing legislation to strengthen free speech, among other issues. The legislation does not specifically talk about Open Data, but it clearly has many implications that are related. Visit the IMMI website for more details http://immi.is/ or see our recent OKF blog post: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/03/26/iceland-from-the-financial-crisis-to-open-data/

– As OKF member Chris Gutteridge points out, “just because knowledge is open, it doesn’t mean it’s true” and he’s even created some “silly” RDF datasets to prove his point. Enjoy! http://data.totl.net/

If you have any news that you'd like us to include in the next newsletter, let us know!

THANKS TO OKF VOLUNTEERS!
==========================
As usual, a big thank you to our volunteers and to our extended virtual community for all of their valuable input!

SUPPORT THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION
=========================================
A donation to the Open Knowledge Foundation would greatly help us with our overhead costs, including hosting (currently around £1000/year) and project development. To find out more about supporting our work, please visit:

  http://www.okfn.org/support

FURTHER INFORMATION
====================
If you would like to know more about what we are up to, please take a look at our active projects page.

  http://www.okfn.org/projects/

If you are interested in participating in any of the OKF's projects, please see our participate page, or join the OKF discuss list.

  http://www.okfn.org/participate/
  http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

For further news and comments, see our blog:

  http://blog.okfn.org

You can follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter at:

  http://identi.ca/okfn
  http://twitter.com/okfn

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization. It is incorporated in the United Kingdom as a company limited by guarantee with company number 5133759. The registered office is 37 Panton Street, Cambridge, CB2 1HL, UK.