Fwd: [okfn-announce] The Open Knowledge Foundation Bulletin January 2012

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Sorry for some of the cross posting, some not on oknf might find this to be am interesting newsletter.

Cheers
t

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sam Leon <[hidden email]>
Date: Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 4:49 AM
Subject: [okfn-announce] The Open Knowledge Foundation Bulletin January 2012
To: [hidden email]

The Open Knowledge Foundation Bulletin January 2012

Happy New Year one and all!

2012 is set to be an exciting time in the open data space and the Open Knowledge Foundation is readying itself for its busiest year yet as an increasing number of governments, citizens and businesses around the world take note of the power that open knowledge has to make a more transparent and prosperous society.

We're incredibly proud of the work that our global network of volunteers and staff did last year. Of course this could not have been achieved without the generous help of our institutional and individual supporters. Everything that was donated went into building tools and projects that promote the value of open knowledge. We need your help more than ever this year, so please consider giving a donation via our Supporter's page.

Some highlights of last year:

• We ran the world's biggest open data event - the Open Government Data Camp - for which all post-event material is now available including videos, slides and photos;
• Our first national chapter beyond UK shores was incorporated in the form of The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany;
• The CKAN team - who manage our open-source data portal software that lies behind more that 40 data hubs globally - announced the launch of CKAN v1.5, which marks a major step forward for the project. Find out more on the CKAN blog;
• The Open Spending team made steps towards realising their grand vision of "mapping every government and corporate financial transaction across the world and present it in useful and engaging forms". They released a new and improved website and launched their blog.
• The Public Domain Review - a free online journal that surfaces beautiful rarities for which copyright has expired - was founded and featured contributions from leading scholars on an array of public domain works.

In the year ahead we will continue in the same vein, building on and expanding successful projects, running events that bring people from all sectors together in the name of open data and starting up new initiatives to promote open knowledge around the word:

• Our incubating local chapters in Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Brazil will continue to grow with numerous meet-ups and hackdays planned in the coming months;
• Building on the massive success last year of Open Government Data Camp and OKCon we plan to run a five day festival in Finland called OKFest in the autumn that will bring these two events together. Watch this space!
• Our first Panton Fellowships will get underway to support scientists who actively promote open data. We're currently taking applications for the Fellowships, see the website for more details;
• We will begin work TEXTUS, an open source platform for reading, transcribing and collaboratively annotating public domain texts;
• The Open Spending team is working on setting up an enormous registry of open spending data sets on The Data Hub, as well as working closely with a huge number of civil society organisations to find out what their technology needs for accessing spending information are.

Some Thoughts on Open Knowledge

Just in case you missed any of them, here's a little selection of some of the musings of our community on our blog from the last couple of months:

• Matt Rosenberg wrote a piece on Making the Open Government Partnership Work, looking at what it will take for the efforts of the recently formed Open Government Partnership to succeed. He takes in initiatives from across the globe, addressing their context-specific challenges and potentials;
• Here's a related post from Chris Taggart on the Cost of Closed Data and the Economics of Open Data, looking at the difficulties of estimating the true economic value of openness;
• Our very own Rufus Pollock, in his piece Open Data: a means to an end, not an end in itself, looked at what we are trying to achieve with all this openness.

Open Knowledge Around the World

The Open Data movement is going from strength to strength, and we love getting in your stories from all the cool projects that you're doing across the globe. We're starting to compile a global registry of data catalogues, through our new datacatalogs.org, so do get in touch if you'd like to contribute from wherever you are!

Here are some of the great stories from the last couple of months:

• Introducing Share your African Knowledge, the project to broaden the representation of African knowledge online;
• The awakening of open data in Italy, with a week jam-packed with developments;
• A report on all the hard work on OGD over in Portugal;
• OKFN's Germany chapter launched an Apps4Germany contest;
• And very cool city-level intiatives from Open Data Philly in the USA, and Open Commons Region Linz!

Dates for the Diary

The following is a list of hackdays, meet-ups and Skype calls run by Open Knowledge Foundation projects and working groups and that are open to anyone who is interested. Remember, if you can't make any of these events there are a huge number of other ways you get involved with our activities. Check out our Get Involved page to find out more.

26th January 2012 - Public Domain Day in Paris

28th January 2012 - Open Economics Hackday

30th January 2012 - Open Data London Meet-up

2nd February 2012 - Open Spending Community Skype Call

15th February 2012 - Open Humanities Working Group Community Skype Call

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--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
 
"Every epoch dreams the one that follows it's the dream form of the future, not its reality" it is the "wish image of the collective".
 
Walter Benjamin, between 1927-1940, (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/buck-morss.pdf)