We’re glad to announce that Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, will be one of our keynote speakers at OKCon 2013. As co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Ellen Miller advocates the use of the internet to inspire greater openness and transparency in government. She founded two further organisations, the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign, that focus their activities in the fields of money and politics. Ellen Miller can look back at a career of 35 years advocating non-profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism.

From a recently published blog post by Mrs Miller, On the Topic of Open Government and Open Data:

Sunlight believes in open data and open government not because these are abstract goods, but because we want to make government more accountable to ordinary people and less subservient to well-connected special interests. We think it’s great that more consumer-facing data will be opened up by the Obama administration (aka “smart disclosure”), and we want the “operating system” of government open and free, along with many others. And to be sure, there are many additional benefits to be had from opening up government data including increasing efficiency, reducing waste, creating new business opportunities and empowering consumers. But we remain insistent that a central if not the core goal of the transparency movement must be to shift power from the few to the many, by making all the information about who is trying to influence the process and what they get out the other end more accessible to all.

From the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010, from her talk Open Government Scorecard:

We can’t wait to attend her talk at OKCon in September! And we’ll be happy to have you joining us, too.

Early Bird tickets are now on sale and will be available until June 23rd, 2013. Buy yours now!

Today is International Clinical Trials Day. To mark the event, here’s a post from Iain Hrynaszkiewicz reviewing the current state of open knowledge in medicine. You can see an earlier version on F1000’s blog.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the organisation which approves drug license applications from the pharmaceutical industry in Europe, has made important progress towards more open science. They hope to release anonymised data from drug trials online, but are faced with widely divided opinions on how data sharing should happen, as well as legal challenges in making it happen. The Open Knowledge community has a chance to help produce better outcomes for the beneficiaries of medical research.

On 30 April 2013 the EMA published advice documents, which cover five different aspects of clinical data sharing and are designed to help the EMA craft their policy on data release. The advice was sourced from around 200 volunteers from across the drug industry, academic research, publishing, and patient advocacy communities. I’ll be the first point out this is not an open data policy – it’s a data sharing or data access policy. The EMA is, along with most medical research, a long way from implementing an Open Knowledge-compliant data policy – with data rapidly released in machine-readable formats to the public domain. But amongst the documents released there are some pertinent developments – worrying and promising in equal measures – that the open science community should recognise now.

Copyright and licenses

One suggestion in the EMA’s legal advisory group was that all data submitted to the EMA would be protected by copyright under the EU Database Directive. This seems unlikely, as it assumes all trial data are in a database. Data take many forms within and without databases. Whether copyright applies to data is a much debated issue depending on, amongst other things, the legal jurisdiction. However, Creative Commons CC0 was proposed to the EMA as possible solution to this problem. Data repositories Dryad and figshare were used as examples along with the journal F1000Research, which was the first journal to use the CC0 public domain dedication waiver for data it publishes.

Data formats and standards

Data standards breed efficiency – efficient reuse, sharing, understanding and computation. The advice to the EMA on data formats includes some promising recommendations. The advisory group was quick to recognise the importance of clinical data standards such as CDSIC and file formats that can be read with open source software. But to avoid delays in implementing the policy it seems likely that such standards will not be required and “any format shall be acceptable for all data until the policy is applied by stakeholders”. PDF, a format widely discouraged for data, was even recommended by some as a format for some types of data.

Many other issues were covered, and the documents are available with full version history.

Making more science data and research results available openly ultimately means faster progress in solving the most difficult problems facing the world. In medicine the benefits of doing more reliable science through open data are the most tangible. People’s health is improved. But much of the clinical research community are not even used to sharing or being able to share – publish – the reports of their work (papers in journals) let alone their raw data.

Publication bias, where positive trials are more frequently published than negative trials, has been found in more than 50 different treatments including widely prescribed antidepressants and anitvirals. A lack of available platforms is not the barrier. Many journals accept or encourage negative results – including F1000Research which just launched a fee waiver for negative results –and various repositories can accept negative data.

The EMA’s initiative comes at a time when there is unprecedented attention on access to information from medical research in the UK and EU. The UK Government’s Science and Technology Select Committee is reviewing large amounts of oral and written evidence on its recent inquiry on clinical trials. The Alltrials campaign for the reporting and registration of all trial results – an initiative of Sense About Science, BMJ and others and fronted by Dr Ben Goldacre – has amassed more than 50,000 signatures.

Medical research is finally moving, albeit slowly, to a new default of open. The open science and open knowledge community should support and guide the EMA and other interested parties in taking these important steps towards open data. And to mark International Clinical Trials Day, go sign the Alltrials petition! This is a real chance to change medical evidence for the better.

If you’d like to give the Open Knowledge Foundation a birthday gift, please consider making a regular or one-off donation to support our work opening up knowledge around the world!

Plaque to commemorate the founding of the Open Knowledge Foundation in May 2004 on Panton Street, Cambridge.

Nine years ago today the Open Knowledge Foundation was born. We’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings in Cambridge in 2004.

From government to science to culture, open knowledge is now on its way to being established as an essential part of our information environment.

Governments around the world are now putting open data at the heart of their transparency plans. Major publishers and research funding bodies are supporting and mandating open access to research publications and data. Leading cultural institutions and cultural portals are opening up their holdings.

And there are now more projects, initiatives and organisations than ever before dedicated to using open knowledge to improve the world – from civic hacking to citizen science, from data journalism to the digital humanities.

But we still have our work cut out for us: much essential information about the world is still locked up or gathering dust, and much remains to be done if we are to put this information to work to improve the world.

To mark the occasion of us entering our tenth year, we’re going to have a quick look at where we’ve come from, and some of our hopes for the future.

Where we’ve come from

Many of the Foundation’s earliest projects, principles, activities and aspirations are still with us today.

The Open Definition – our foundational text

The Open Definition – which sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content – was one of the first projects that we launched, and it still underpins everything we do.

The world’s biggest open knowledge events

Early on we still ran our big annual open knowledge events, like the ones we run today. Writer and open source advocate Glyn Moody (who now sits on our Advisory Board) wrote of our first edition of the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), Open Knowledge 1.0 in London:

The location was atmospheric: next to Hawksmoor’s amazing St Anne’s church, which somehow manages the trick of looking bigger than its physical size, inside the old Limehouse Town Hall.

The latter had a wonderfully run-down, almost Dickensian feel to it; it seemed rather appropriate as a gathering place for a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells: geeks, wonks, journos, activists and academics, all with dangerously powerful ideas on their minds, and all more dangerously powerful for coming together in this way.

Panel discussion from Open Knowledge 1.0. From left to right: Becky Hogge, then Executive Director of the Open Rights Group; Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at the Guardian and Founder of the Free Our Data campaign; Ed Parsons, then CTO of the UK’s Ordnance Survey; and Steve Coast, Founder of Open Street Map.

Our 2010 and 2011 Open Government Data Camp events helped to transform a loose knit group of public servants, hackers and advocates into a coordinated force for open data around the world. Last year saw over 1000 people gather in Helsinki for OKFestival 2012, which was the biggest open knowledge event to date. This year, OKCon 2013 in Geneva will convene governments and civil society representatives from dozens of countries to figure out how to support the growth of open knowledge internationally.

‘Raw data now’

OKF Founder Rufus Pollock’s 2007 call to ‘Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now’ was adopted and popularised by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a 2009 TED talk. This became one of the rallying calls of the open data movement around the world, and was widely covered up in the media (for example, see articles in the BBC, the Guardian, or Wired).

Following the money

A prototype of our Where Does My Money Go? project – which shows how UK public funds are spent – was featured on the front page of the BBC News. The Open Knowledge Foundation went on to play a leading role in securing the release of the COINS and £25k spending data, which are amongst the most detailed spending databases ever released by any government. Our Open Spending project now has over 13 million transactions, covering over 50 countries and over 80 cities and regions around the world – from Belgium to Bosnia, Portugal to Puerto Rico.

Labour MP Tom Watson on our Where Does My Money Go? project in the BBC: “We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this new tool will have a big impact on the way the public sector is held to account by UK citizens.”

Open source tools for open data

CKAN, our open source data platform, was one of our earliest software projects. It is now being used by governments and organisations around the world, and last week saw a major new release.

From our earliest years, the Open Knowledge Foundation has attracted developers who want to work on open knowledge projects. Our OKF Labs continue to provide a place where like-minded hackers who want to develop and use open source tools for open knowledge can collaborate.

Empowering people to use data to change the world

Over the past few years, we haven’t just been working to open up the world’s knowledge: we have also helped more people than ever to use, share and benefit from it.

Our School of Data project works to help journalists and civil society organisations use data to improve their research and reportage. The Data Journalism Handbook, a free book that we created with the European Journalism Centre, shows journalists how to use data to improve the news and is now being translated into many different languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian.

The Data Journalism Handbook, which ReadWriteWeb said offers “a resounding case for data-driven journalism … and the service that it offers the public”.

Opening up our culture

We have long been interested in the digital public domain and the cultural commons – from our early attempts to build a global registry of public domain works, to trying to model copyright law in countries around the world to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Public Domain Review started life as a relatively modest project to highlight interesting public domain works and to raise awareness of importance of having an open cultural commons. In the past few years it has received extensive praise from some of the world’s most prestigious literary publications, and has a dedicated base of regular readers which is just about to hit 10,000.

Our OpenGLAM initiative continues to liase with cultural institutions around the world to encourage them to open up their holdings – and to support people who are trying to create useful things using open cultural material, through initiatives such as the Open Humanities Awards.

Curated collections of public domain images from the Public Domain Review, which the Paris Review called “one of our favourite journals”.

Where we’re going

Since 2004, we’ve become a truly international organisation. We’ve gone from being a handful of like-minded advocates – mainly based in the UK and Europe – to becoming a global network, spanning countries and cities across the world.

We want to continue to expand and empower this network, to open up essential information about things that matter – from carbon emissions to clinical trials to our cultural past. We want to catalyse and support projects which use open knowledge to change the world for the better, whether through greater accountability, more successful data driven investigative journalism projects, or more collaborative scientific research.

We’re looking forward to many more years of open knowledge, and we have some really exciting plans for our tenth year and beyond. We hope you’ll join us.

The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight.

At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state inspections. However, after years of pressure on global apparel brands from labor activists, the publishing of garment factory supplier lists is becoming increasingly standardized. We’re asking you to join us in mapping the data on garment factories.

Data Expedition: Mapping the garment factories 

When: Saturday May 25 – 12:00 BST to May 26 18:00 BST - link to your timezone

We’ll be looking for projects such as:

• Mapping garment factories locally and globally

• Exploring the global supply chain of garment export and imports

• Mapping the ownership of local factories and global brands with open company data

• Finding stories and patterns in the connections between global brands and local garment factories

Sign up here for the Data Expedition!

Please note that limited space is available. For more information about the Data Expedition format, we encourage you to read this article.

Before the Data Expedition – Help us build an open garment factory supply list

Before heading out on this important expedition, we’ll need to gather as much data as possible on garment factories. Labor activists and campaigners typically articulate the data in terms of ”supplier lists.” Some brands, such as Nike, provide a list of all factories in their supplier network via Excel and JSON downloads; while others, such as Levi-Strauss, only offer lists in PDF format. In order to prepare a solid dataset for the Data Expedition, we’re asking you to help locate, clean, and merge the supplier lists from across garment brands into one comprehensive Open Garment Factory List.

Begin today by adding to the Open Garment Factory List and join us for a GoogleHangout on Thursday, 23 May at 19:00 CET, where we’ll be engaging in joint data collection.

Last week, the Open Knowledge community was out in force at Berlin’s re:publica conference, which brought together over 6,000 bloggers, internet activists, innovators and makers to meet in person, for three days. Here, we’ve collected a few of our personal highlights – let us know what yours were in the comments below!

The event was peppered with presentations from members of the Open Knowledge Foundation community. First, OKF Germany’s Stefan Wehmeyer and Julia Kloiber talked on “What does Open Data have to do with me?” (presentation in German). Their beautifully designed presentation looked at how open data could positively impact the everyday lives of citizens, such as through open publication of school inspection results, as happens in the UK, or police forces making data about cycling accidents available, enabling the creation of maps such as this one for Chicago.

The OKF’s OpenGLAM team, Joris Pekel and Daniel Dietrich, gave a talk about the curation of the digital cultural commons., largely inspired by the recent post on OpenGLAM about Small Data in GLAMs. They addressed the issue of effective overload of data – that the vast amount of data available renders it almost incomprehensible. Dealing with this effectively requires better infrastructure, access and tools.

Other OKFn-ers were spotted on the panel on Opening Public Transport in Berlin (Julia Kloiber again – the only woman on an all male panel!), and at the workshop News You Can’t Print (Friedrich Lindenberg), exploring how data informs how we tell news stories.

Over the entire three days, we came across so many new and exciting projects, many of whose objectives go hand-in-hand with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s. Check out Eugenio Tisselli’s Sauti Ya Wakulima project based in Tanzania, for example, which provides a simple platform for farmers from different regions to share insights and advice on how best to grow particular crops. This type of knowledge sharing, open to all and running on an open source platform, is a great example of how the open movement can improve the lives of people across the globe, in many different contexts and positions.

Other highlights included:

• Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s first independent blogger, talking about the challenges of working in a ‘closed’ environment, both in terms of the overall media environment and in terms of not being able to have access to new hardware such as computer parts or USB sticks. We hope her plea for future visitors to Cuba to take with them any pieces of old hardware and give them to Cuban citizens hit home with other listeners!

• Laurie Penny’s talk on cybersexism highlighted the gender imbalance within the tech world, an issue which will be explored in forthcoming blogs here at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

• A presentation from Tactical Technology Collective’s Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski on “Investigation 2.0” highlighted the results of collaboration across different spheres and of individuals taking on the role of institutions, thanks to new reams of data being made available for all to use.

• GIZ’s Global Innovation Lounge gave us the chance to mix with representatives from every one of the AfriLabs incubation hubs network, which was a wonderful opportunity to hear how technology and innovation is being fostered in various African countries. Hacker spaces and technology hubs are really taking off, and we hope to see the Open Knowledge community expand within the region too via our Local Groups and Ambassadors scheme.

The complete list of fascinating projects and people we came across is too long to include here, but the fact that there are so many projects working within the open movement is incredibly inspiring to us at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We look forward to collaborating with many of you – do get in touch, tell us about what you’re doing, and let us know how our global OKF Network could help. Or if you’d like to have a look for yourselves what we’re up to – check out our thematic Working Groups or geographically based Local Groups mailing lists, introduce yourselves and get involved in the Open Knowledge Foundation community!

Thanks to Joris Pekel for contributing to this post.

If you’d like to carry on the conversations started at re:publica, join us at OKCon this September!

We welcome the Shakespeare review as a time to reflect, coming as it does at a time of great growth in open data in government and the public sector.

The UK has lead the way with government taking a pioneering stance on open data policy in recent years, and this report sets out key recommendations for how to best take forward this work.

It is particularly good to see acknowledgement that there is a “difference between a commitment to transparency and a true National Data Strategy for economic growth” as it is clear that many of the benefits of open public sector information will go beyond the economic.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation has long emphasized:

The best thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else

Shakespeare recognises this with the comment that “we cannot always predict where the greatest value lies but know there are huge opportunities across the whole spectrum of PSI.”

Getting more data released quickly, without agonising over quality concerns, is an excellent recommendation and we look forward to seeing this in practice. Alongside this we welcome the demand for high quality information in the National Core Reference Data plan, including key entity data; such reference data, following clear open standards, will transform what can be done with UK data. The request that Trading Funds should remove restrictive PSI licensing and work towards releasing all raw data for use and reuse is particularly warmly welcomed.

We are pleased to see consideration being given to privacy and confidentiality issues; our definition of open data has always excluded personally-identifiable information, but with greater data collection than ever before, we acknowledge the challenges this can bring for data publishers. The demand for realistic and pragmatic consideration of privacy and confidentiality is welcomed, and best practice guidelines will be very helpful in assisting data publishers here. In addition we hope to see key security and privacy sector experts engaged in this as there are tough technical challenges around anonymisation, aggregation and sandbox use, and deep technical understanding is needed to fully appreciate the risks and limits of such systems, and to create sensible guidelines.

We are also delighted to see open access mentioned in the report; open access to publicly-funded research data and papers has been a long-standing tenet of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s work. Shakespeare notes that “even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers, by commercial publishers, aided by university lethargy, and government reluctance to apply penalties; thereby obstructing scientific progress.” We can, and must, do better here.

We applaud the call for more data scientists and greater statistical skills at all levels; stronger data awareness and skills are critical for all the benefits of open data to be realised. In particular, the recognition that interactive and workshop methods can be most effective at teaching data skills is well aligned with our own School of Data and long standing culture of hackathons and developer engagement. The more teaching and training around data, alongside other key STEM areas including maths and technology, the better.

Finally, it is great to see that the economic value of open data will be assessed through research and audit, but at the same time it is vital to be realistic about the timescales for significant change and impact in this field. We think on a timescale of decades to see the full benefits and effects of the new open approaches to creation, sharing and reuse of knowledge, and government and others must be realistic about what will be achieved and how quickly, to avoid disappointment.

Open data is valuable to us socially and culturally as well as commercially, but it is only one part of a solution, and we need to work on the other key elements, including institutional change, tools, skills and awareness, which are also necessary conditions to realise the full benefits of openness. These other elements may be harder, and more expensive, than the release of data – we should still release more open data, and we are glad to see this report affirming this and encouraging data skills alongside – but the journey is far from over.

As Shakespeare puts it:

“It is now time to build on the very positive start we have made on open data with a more directed, more predictable engineering of usable information. Obstacles must be cleared, structures defined, and progress audited, so that we have a purposeful, progressive strategy that we can trust to deliver the full benefits to the nation.”

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

Tomorrow morning will see the release of a major new review on how to make the most out the UK’s Public Sector Information authored by Stephan Shakespeare, founder of opinion polls company YouGov.

Given our role in advocating open data in the UK for many years, we’re very keen to see what Shakespeare says. Here are a few of our thoughts about what we hope to see in the review.

Strong commitment to open data as the default for UK Public Sector Information.

On the back of President Obama’s recent Executive Order announced last week that says public information in the US should be “open and machine readable” by default, we hope Stephan Shakespeare’s review will urge similarly strong support for open data in the UK.

In particular we hope he pushes the UK to do more to open up raw data currently sold by trading funds, and key datasets like the Postcode Address File (which is a crucial part of any website or app which involves putting things on maps).

Supporting standards to make open data more usable and useful

We hope that the review contains recommendations about developing and promoting better standards to make open data more usable and useful.

From spending information, to carbon emissions data, to health data, we hope to see initiatives to ensure greater standardisation of public information across central and local government to lower barriers to reuse. (This point was also alluded to in a article on the Guardian published earlier today.)

We’ve started work in this direction with our Data Protocols, but we’d really like to see the UK government doing more in this area. Given its role in the Open Government Partnership, it could help to create standards that could be used not just in the UK, but around the world.

Open data isn’t just about money

While we expect the economic potential of open data to be a major focus area for tomorrow’s review, we hope Shakespeare recognises that open data is not just about money.

Making essential information easier to use can bring about many different kinds of value – not just those that can be directly measured in pounds and pence. For example, greater accountability, innovative digital public services for citizens, and new forms of civic participation, journalism and campaigning. The impact of open data isn’t a magical rapid increase in jobs and economic value, but in many cases will be over a longer term, and will include non-monetary gains such as fairness and equality.

Next month, the US’s National Day of Civic Hacking plans to mobilise over 5,000 developers to address a variety of different challenges. The Data Journalism Handbook is full of examples of how journalists are using data to improve the news.

The UK has been a world leader in using data to benefit society – from projects like mySociety‘s TheyWorkForYou, which enables people to track what their MPs say in parliament, to pioneering data driven reportage from the likes of the Guardian. We hope the review also recognises this, and recommends that the UK does more to support it.

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

• What. Volunteering at OKCon 2013
• When & where. 16th-18th September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland.
• How. Find the call and the submission form here
• Deadline. The deadline to submit your application is May 26th, 23:59:59 GMT.

Are you a team player passionate about the power of open knowledge?

Are you ready to make OKCon 2013 a unique experience?

Do you have good English speaking skills and are you outgoing, hard-working and 100% reliable?

We want to hear from you!

We are looking for highly motivated volunteers willing to join us to make OKCon 2013 a fantastic and invaluable experience.

We expect our volunteers to deliver professional work during 2-3 days (16th-18th September, 2013). In return, we offer  an enlightening work environment, and the opportunity to connect with incredibly inspiring and like-minded people. Needless to say that we plan your work around your choice of talks.

Given the qualification for the profiles needed, those already in the Open Knowledge Foundation Task Force and other active members of the OKF community will be looked upon favourably.

If you are interested and available from 16th to 18th September 2013, please apply on the OKCon Call for Volunteers webpage. Deadline for the applications is Sunday, 26th May at 23:59:59 GMT. We look forward to receiving your application!

Last week the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, a level which is said to be unprecedented in human history.

Leading scientists and policy makers say that we should be aiming for no more than 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change.

But what’s in a number? Why is the increase from 399 to 400 significant?

While the actual change is mainly symbolic (and some commentators have questioned whether we’re hovering above or just below 400), the real story is that we are badly failing to cut emissions fast enough.

Given the importance of this number, which represents humanity’s progress towards tackling one of the biggest challenges we currently face – the fact that it has been making the news around the world is very welcome indeed.

Why don’t we hear about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from politicians or the press more often? While there are regularly headlines about inflation, interest and unemployment, numbers about carbon emissions rarely receive the level of attention that they deserve.

We want this to change. And we think that having more timely and more detailed information about carbon emissions is essential if we are to keep up pressure on the world’s governments and companies to make the cuts that the world needs.

As our Advisory Board member Hans Rosling puts it, carbon emissions should be on the world’s dashboard.

Over the coming months we are going to be planning and undertaking activities to advocate for the release of more timely and granular carbon emissions data. We are also going to be working with our global network to catalyse projects which use it to communicate the state of the world’s carbon emissions to the public.

If you’d like to join us, you can follow #OpenCO2 on Twitter or sign up to our open-sustainability mailing list:

Image credit: Match smoke by AMagill on Flickr. Released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

For your delectation, we bring you the third installment of Global Community Stories – a round up of the fantastic projects and activities of our Local Groups across the world, including a Wikipedia Editathon for girls in Nepal, a multitude of events in Belgium, Big Data Week across Spain, a Swiss Government pilot project, a multicultural open data event in Edinburgh, and a tiny town in Austria taking the lead in releasing data sets – the race is on!

Following the incredibly kind donation of OpenBelgium.be to our Open Knowledge community by Wunderkraut, OKF Belgium is preparing to take on maintenance of the site and grow the community that they began. They’ve been busy developing other collaborations too; a meet up with Random Hacks of Kindness is coming up June 1-2, as well as developing appsforgeo.be. Their impressive upcoming events include a fully booked master class on Open Culture data, a presentation at the Flemish government to civil servants, as well as Apps for Flanders on June 14, and a General Assembly in June too. They’ve been keeping an eye on the public sphere too, and are organising a debate on new business models to allow financial sustainability through art following a lawsuit by the Belgian copyright organisation Sabam against ISP for not wanting to cooperate on copyright tax on internet subscriptions.

In Austria, the OKF community is supporting the fight for a freedom of information act…

 Together with other civil society initiatives, the Austrian Chapter of OKFN is supporting this movement by organising a series of workshops for all stakeholders on the upcoming freedom of information law, reaching out to civil servants, citizens and politicans. They’ll be providing an opportunity for every stakeholder group to discuss and define their point of view, empowering change-makers across the sphere to broaden their influence, and they’ll be looking to develop the debate around freedom of information in a similar way to which the topic of open data was discussed some years ago.

 One little village in Austria deserves a special mention – Engerwitzdorf, a town of only 8000 inhabitants, has released 116 data sets – more than the entire federal government of Austria! They’ve been honoured for their work by being nominated for the Document Freedom Award by the Free Software Foundation Europe – congratulations! OKF Austria will joining in the celebrations through organising Engerwitzdorf’s first OKF MeetUp.

In Switzerland, government data is being made more accessible…

In Switzerland, the OKF Swiss Chapter has been developing a pilot project called Open Government Data at the Confederation – or, OGD@ Federation for short. Through the project, a group of government agencies will be attempting to bundle their data together via an open source platform, and they’ll be presenting this on May 22. We’ll keep you updated with how it goes, and for readers in Switzerland, you can register here.

OKF Spain has been expanding rapidly…

..having reached 149 members on their mailing list and recently having organised a successful Big Data Week in Madrid and Barcelona! It doesn’t sound like they’re sitting on their laurels though, as they have another three day event coming up in Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla and Valladolid about data journalism which will include a hackathon, a barcamp and several workshops. They have an impressive line up of speakers too, including James Ball from the Guardian, Manuel Aristarán from the Knight Foundation, and OKF Central’s own Michael Bauer, so if you can, swing by!

They also undertook the invaluable task of translating into Spanish Laura’s blog post, “Open Knowledge: much more than Open Data” – which has now become “Conocimiento Abierto: Mucho más que Open Data.” This is a wonderful way of getting our message out to a whole new audience – thanks!

Laura’s post was also a hit with our OKF Greece Chapter, who kindly translated it into Greek. Translations of posts on the okfn.org into any language at all are very much welcome; if you do any translations, please do let us know so we can publicise it too, and we very much appreciate your efforts!

OKF Greece have also been busy organising an #OpenHealth event, and also took part in a Wikimedia workshop together with the Greek Wikipedia community. They recently completed the incredibly useful task of translating the Open Spending handbook into Greek, and you can now find the OKF Greece group on Facebook, too!

In Scotland, Germans and Brits came together…

Last week, the University of Edinburgh hosted the wonderfully multicultural event of German-British Open Data event. Scholarship holders from the Foundation of German Business came together for the weekend of talks, under the title “Open Data — Better Society?” and you can find a great round up of the talks and conclusions on the OKF Scotland blog.

OKF Nepal have been focusing on getting girls into ICT…

OKF Nepal recently teamed up with Wikipedia Nepal to organise a Wikipedia Editathon, which took place on the International Day of Girls in ICT. A truly great initiative, addressing a key issue facing the tech movement. OKFN Nepal’s Prakash Neupane also took to the stage to explain about the Open Knowledge Foundation’s mission, and from the photos it looks like all involved had a wonderful time. We look forward to hearing from the next event!

Congratulations all, for some incredible activities from across the globe!

(and keep an eye out for some exciting upcoming events- OKF Brazil are organising an event on Open Science at the beginning of June, and OKF Australia are organising a Beautiful Data GovHack at the end of May !)