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

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.

Though lacking in any great substance (cf, to say, The American) it consistently held one’s attention from the very first shot to the closing credits — something to be said of very few films of this kind.

• All week

Last Week

• Away until Friday when did a lot of email catching up
• Quite a bit of coding on Recline Data Explorer while away. Check out the demo

This Week

• CKAN – finishing and integrating Recline
• OKFN Labs
• BibServer Sprint

• Code on github: https://github.com/rgrp/pywordpress
• Python Package Index: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pywordpress/

Along with a wrapper for the main functions it also provides various helper methods, for example to create many pages at once. This is somewhat of a belated announce as the first version of this was written almost a year ago!

Usage

Command line

Check out the commands::

wordpress.py -h 

Commands::

create_many_pages: Create many pages at once (and only create pages which do not already exist).
delete_all_pages: Delete all pages (i.e. delete_page for each page in instance).
delete_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.deletePage
edit_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.editPage
get_authors: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getAuthors
get_categories: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getCategories
get_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPage
get_page_list: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPageList
get_pages: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getPages
get_tags: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.getTags
init_from_config: Class method to initialize a `Wordpress` instance from an ini file.
new_page: http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp#wp.newPage

You will need to create a config with the details (url, login) of the wordpress instance you want to work with::

cp config.ini.tmpl config.ini
# now edit away ...
vim config.ini

Python library

Read the code documentation::

>>> from pywordpress import WordPress
>>> help(WordPress)

License

MIT-licensed: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

CKAN and the theDataHub

• Finalized separation of software and site: CKAN = data hub software, theDataHub.org = community data hub site
• Worked heavily to develop CKAN as a product e.g. much improved website http://ckan.org/, nascent partner programme and more
• Major milestone with CKAN v1.5 release just 2 weeks ago. Result of 6 months of development with major new features.
• theDataHub has also been much improved with move to new servers, a new theme (default in CKAN v1.5) and deployment of ever more extensions
• Some personal items:
  • DataExplorer
  • UX work – http://wiki.ckan.org/UX
  • data package manager (dpm) and work on Data Packages spec

OpenSpending

• Two major point releases of OpenSpending software v0.10 and v0.11 (v0.11 just last week!). Huge maturing and development of the system. Backend architecture now finalized after a major refactor and reworking.
• Community has grown significantly with now almost 50 OpenSpending datasets on theDataHub.org and growing group of core “data wranglers”
• Spending Stories was a winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spending Stories will build on and extend OpenSpending.

Open Bibliography and the Public Domain

• The Public Domain Review goes from strength to strength
• BibServer has had a ground-up rewrite and can be seen online at http://bibsoup.net/
• Additional support from JISC for a second phase of JISC Open Bibliography project

Open Knowledge Foundation and the Community

• In September we received a 3 year grant from the Omidyar Network to help the Open Knowledge Foundation sustain and expand its community especially in the formation of new chapters
• Completed a major recruitment process in (Summer-Autumn 2011) to bring on more paid OKFN team members including community coordinators, foundation coordinator and developers
• The Foundation participated in launch of Open Government Partnership and CSO events surrounding the meeting
• Working groups continuing to develop. Too much activity to summarize it all here but some highlights include:
  • WG Science Coordinator Jenny Molloy travelling to OSS2011 in SF to present Open Research Reports with Peter Murray-Rust
  • Open Economics WG developing and Open Knowledge Index in August
  • Open Bibliography working group’s work on an Metadata guide.
  • Open Humanities / Open Literature working group winning Inventare Il Futuro competition with their idea to use the Annotator
• Development of new Local Groups and Chapters
  • Lots of ongoing activities in existing local groups and chapters such as those in Germany and Italy have
  • In addition, interest from a variety of areas in the establishment of new chapters and local groups, for example in Brazil and Belgium
• Start of work on OKFN labs
  • Alpha website at http://labs.okfn.org/
  • Dashboard sprint

Meetups and Events

• Regular OKFN organized Open Data meetup in london
• Open Government Data Camp

Talks and Events

• Attended Open Government Partnership meeting in July in Washington DC and launch event in New York in September
• Attended Chaos Computer Camp with other OKFNers in August near Berlin
• September: Spoke at PICNIC in Amsterdam
• October: Code for America Summit in San Francisco (plus meetings) – see partial writeup
• October: Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw (organized by Open Knowledge Foundation)
• November: South Africa – see this post on Africa@Home and Open Knowledge meetup in Cape Town

General

• Partcipation in meetings of the UK Public Sector Transparency Board
• Annotator has seen ongoing coding and growing use – including very promising integration of Annotator with textbooks thanks to Ewald Zietsman of Siyavula
• Co-coded PyBossa – an open source platform for crowd-sourcing online (volunteer) assistance to perform tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence (e.g. image classification, transcription, information location etc)

• All week
• In South Africa Mon-Thurs (return to UK Friday)

Activity

• All last week in South Africa for Shuttleworth Fellows meetup
• Post about meetups and hackdays in South Africa
• Humanities working group meetup
• Limited coding and contribution to CKAN, specifically on:
  • data package manager
  • Recline Data Explorer (with Max Ogden) – cf this ticket http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1357
• Work on v0.11 release of OpenSpending. In particular updating and improving openspendingjs so that we have a proper bubbletree explorer. Check out, for example this bubbletree of UK gov expenditure in 2010 – which also includes a breakdown (see the donut ring) by region
• OKFN Dashboard hackday
• Africa at Home hackday where I worked on PyBossa – an opensource crowdsourcing engine. PyBossa is a port the BOSSA crowdsourcing engine to python (a bit like an opensource mechanical turk but without money!) and with an initial focus on helping scientists and other researchers crowd-source human problem-solving skills!

This Week

• More meetings and coding with people in South Africa including Cape Town meetup
• OpenSpending especially coding on ETL and loading system and getting data loaded!
• Finish off Community Dashboard with Tom Rees
• Data Explorer integrated into new CKAN resource pages

The event is free, but unfortunately invite only due to limited capacity -(email richard.steele@icaew.com to attend). So, if you don’t have anything planned and would like to find out more about the intersection of accountancy and open data (think OpenSpending) then why not come along!

Open Data: What, Why, How

There has been growing interest in many circles, and especially in government, regarding ‘open data’. In this lecture Rufus will explain what open data is, why it’s of interest to government and others, and finally explain how governments and others can ‘go open’.

Access to government data is essential to many of the webapps and digital services we’d like to see, from planning a journey to work to knowing where your taxes get spent. As well as covering the basic what, why, how of open data this lecture will look at examples of some of the most interesting work in this area and provide a vision for what the nascent open data ecosystem could look like.

• All week (though may be at Moz Festival at end of the week)

Activity

• Back last week from Open Government Data Camp
  • Mini-hackday with Pedro Markun and others on OKFN Community Dashboard
• OKFN Hiring
• Planning of OKFN Labs
• Posts about Shuttleworth Fellowship renewal and plans for next year
• Limited coding and contribution to CKAN, specifically v0.9 release of datapkg (now renamed to dpm) and work on Recline / Data Explorer. Also created several datasets on theDataHub
• Getting up to speed on OpenSpending so I can help out with upcoming revamp, plus work on issues and User Stories
• sysadmin work – helped migrate some community CKANs

This Week

• Administration of various kinds (fun, fun, fun!)
• OpenSpending plus more Data Package Manager and Recline / Data Explorer
• More planning of OKFN Labs with Tom Rees
• Mozilla Festival