• All week
• In Manchester for Future Everything Thursday and Friday

Last Week

• In San Francisco for ONEF meeting
• Previous weeks: travelling in Brazil

This Week

• Future Everything
• DataHub, CKAN and Recline work including roadmap planning
• School of Data
• Various Reports and Proposals

• All week except Thursday (in London Tues + Fri)

Last Week

• Monday: CKAN DataStore and Data API v2 live on the DataHub
• Wed-Fri: EPSI Platform Conference in Rotterdam including a Presentation about CKAN and PublicData.eu
• Prix Ars Electronica Submission with Laura Newman
• Catching up with the email backlog after a week away
• Various CKAN and Open Knowledge Foundation related stuff
  • http://DataProtocols.org/ has new theme and new sections
• Video of my talk at LIFT Conference now up

This Week

• Miscellaneous project related items!
• http://DataProtocols.org/
• Recline Data Explorer – v0.3 released
• Talking at ORGCon on Saturday

Highlights

• Substantial new project support from several funders including support for Science working group and Economics working group
• Our CKAN Data Management System selected in 2 major new data portal initatives
• Continuing advance of projects across the board with several projects reaching key milestones (v1.0 or beta release, adoption by third parties)
• Rapid expansion of chapters and local groups — e.g. London Meetup now has more than 100 participants, new chapters in Belgium and Switzerland are nearly finalized
• Completion of major upgrade of core web-presence with new branding and theme used on http://okfn.org/ and across our network of sites (now numbering more than 40)
• Announcement of School of Data which drew huge attention from the community. This is will be a joint Open Knowledge Foundation / P2PU project.
• Major strengthening of organizational capacity with new staff

Projects

Major new project support including:

• $124k grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development of the Open Economics Working Group
• Grant from Open Society Foundations for work associated to the OpenSpending project
• Grant from Open Society Foundation for Panton Fellowships
• Part of new European Union funded DM2E (Digital Manuscripts to Europeana) project

CKAN and the DataHub

• Won several competitive bids to deliver data portals with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN Data management System

  • Part of winning bid to deliver the European Commission’s new Data Portal which will be powered by CKAN
  • Together with new CKAN Partner New Amsterdam Ideas won bid to develop CMAP’s data portal in Illinois

• CKAN v1.6 Completed

  • New Javascript Data Explorer (Recline) – see it in action on this Dataset of ISO Currency Codes
  • New DataStore providing a rich Data API (NB: this will ship as part of v1.7 but is already live on the DataHub)
  • Continuing extensive UX improvements started 6m ago

• The DataHub passed 3000 datasets in early January and is nearing 3300

OpenSpending

• Major breakthrough with achievement of simple data upload and management process – result of more than 9 months of work
• OpenSpending now contains more than 30 datasets with ~7 million spending items (up from 2 datasets and ~200k items a year ago, and under 10 datasets a 1.5m items just 4 months ago)
• Substantial expansion in set of collaborators and a variety of new funding opportunities

Other Projects

• BibServer and BibSoup, our bibliogrpahic software and service, reached beta and have been receiving increasing attention

• Public Domain Review celebrated its 1st Birthday. Some stats:

  • The Review now has more than 800+ email subscribers, ~800 followers on Twitter
  • 20k visitors with over 40k page views per month
  • An increasing number of supporters making a monthly donation

• Initiated a substantive collaboration on the PyBossa crowdsourcing platform with Shuttleworth Fellow Emeritus Francois Grey and his Citizen Cyberscience Centre

  • New dedicated website: http://pybossa.com/

• Annotator and AnnotateIt v1.0 Completed and Released

  • Annotator is now seeing uptake from several third-party projects and developers
  • Project components now have more than 100 followers on GitHub (up from ~20 in December)

Working Groups and Local Groups and Chapters

Working groups have continued to develop well:

• New dedicated Working Group coordinator (Laura Newman)
• Panton Fellowships run under auspices of Science Working Group
• Funding of Economics Working Group

Rapid Chapter and local group development:

• Lots of new Open Knowledge Foundation meetup groups
• Belgium and Swiss groups nearly at Chapter status
• New Local Groups in several other countries – see http://okfn.org/chapters/ for overview
• New meetup system with meetups in more than a dozen countries. Last London Open Data Meetup attended by more than 100 people

Additional items

• Hired key new staff including developers, community coordinators and a new management team
• Begun a series of hackathons and hackdays under the auspices of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Economics
• Open Data Handbook v1.0 Released – http://opendatahandbook.org/
• In collaboration with P2PU and Philipp Schmidt announced the School of Data — huge interest from the community with the announce post having the most shares so far of any on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog
• Finalized Open Knowledge Foundation Labs proposal and launched basic website: http://okfnlabs.org/
• Invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
• Invited to be an Adviser to Canadian Government on Open Data

Events and Meetings

Participated in numerous events and meetings including:

• TA Tech (Transparency and Accountability Technology) meeting in New York
• LIFT 2012 in Geneva
• Dev8d
• Citizen Cyberscience Summit
• Transparency Board

• All week (in London Tues + Fri)

Last Week

• Talked at LIFT 2012 on Open Data
• Work on Webstore in CKAN
• With Laura Newman Open Data Handbook v1.0 Released
• With Velickha Dimitrova announced Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Support for Open Economics Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation
• Administration with the inimitable Laura James and Naomi Lillie

This Week

• Transparency Board meeting
• Catching up with the email backlog
• CKAN strategy meeting + Webstore v2 finished
• http://DataProtocols.org/ plus its mailing list
• Recline Data Explorer – v0.3 released (I hope!)

Update 2012-02-24: Slides up

Open Data: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data with significant uptake in government, research and elsewhere. Open data has the potential to transform society, government and the economy, from how we travel to work to how we decide to vote. But we have only just begun down this road, and the going, even so far, has not always been easy.

This talk will introduce the idea of open data, explain how, and why, we are where we are today, and, finally, look to the future of the rapidly evolving open data ecoystem.

• All week though in Geneva Wed-Fri for LIFT Conference

Last Week

• Dev8D – talk on CKAN and its use in academia and research (plus Data Repositories panel)
• Citizen Cyberscience Summit on Friday and Saturday
  • Huge amount done on PyBossa including finishing (the major) authorization and authentication work, updated tutorial, a new home on the web at http://pybossa.com/, a new home on GitHub at http://github.com/PyBossa and a new ‘Guess My Age’ app that Daniel built as part of the Hackday on Saturday
• Recline Data Explorer improvements
• Open Data Handbook finalized for launch this week

This Week

• Talking at LIFT Conference in Geneva plus meeting with Swiss Open Data community
• Webstore v2 based on ElasticSearch in CKAN
• Launch Open Data Handbook
• Finalize Recline Data Explorer for its v0.3 public release
• Minor CKAN and Annotator work

• Where: Fountain Inn, Cambridge, UK (OpenStreetMap)
• When: Feb 2nd 2012, from 7:30pm

Slides

Links

• http://ckan.org/ – CKAN, open-source data hub software
• http://thedatahub.org/ – the DataHub
• http://thedatahub.org/dataset/standard-and-poors-500-shiller – S&P dataset I demo-d http://thedatahub.org/dataset/standard-and-poors-500-shiller/resource/f2a375b2-b4d4-4100-88ad-952a4c6c8d74
• raw data
• http://okfnlabs.org/recline/ – Recline Data Explorer
• http://www.dataprotocols.org/
• http://openspending.org/

Abstract

There has been growing interest, especially in government, in ‘open data’. This talk will explain what open data is, why it is important and go on to cover some of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s recent work in this area.

About the Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation has been a pioneer in the field of open data since its inception in 2004. It works in a wide array of areas from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. Its open-source CKAN software powers http://data.gov.uk/, http://thedatahub.org/ and dozens of other open data hubs around the world. For more information about the Foundation see http://okfn.org/ and http://okfn.org/projects.