Abbreviation | OKF |
---|---|
Formation | 20 May 2004 |
Founder | Rufus Pollock |
Type | Nonprofit organisation |
05133759 [1] | |
Focus | Open knowledge broadly, including open access, open content, open science and open data |
Location |
|
Area served | International |
Key people | Rufus Pollock, Renata Ávila Pinto (CEO) |
Website | okfn |
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. [1] It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 [2] in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England and Wales as a private company limited by guarantee. [1] Between May 2016 and May 2019 the organisation was named Open Knowledge International, [3] but decided in May 2019 to return to Open Knowledge Foundation. [4]
The aims of Open Knowledge Foundation are: [1]
Renata Ávila Pinto joined as the new Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation in October 2021. [5] From February 2019 to August 2020, Catherine Stihler served as CEO. She left the Open Knowledge Foundation to become the CEO of Creative Commons. [6] Between 2015–2017 Pavel Richter took on the role of CEO of Open Knowledge Foundation. Pavel was formerly Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland.
The Open Knowledge Foundation Advisory Council includes people from the areas of open access, open data, open content, open science, data visualization and digital rights. In 2015, it consisted of: [7]
As of 2018, Open Knowledge Foundation has 11 official chapters and 38 groups in different countries. [8] In November 2022, the Open Knowledge Network was relaunched with two new projects. [9]
It also supports 19 working groups.
Many of Open Knowledge Foundation's projects are technical in nature. Its most prominent project, CKAN, is used by many of the world's governments to host open catalogues of data that their countries possess. [11]
The organisation tends to support its aims by hosting infrastructure for semi-independent projects to develop. This approach to organising was hinted as one of its earliest projects was a project management service called KnowledgeForge, which runs on the KForge platform. KnowledgeForge allows sectoral working groups to have space to manage projects related to open knowledge. More widely, the project infrastructure includes both technical and face-to-face aspects. The organisation hosts several dozen mailing lists for virtual discussion, utilises IRC for real-time communications and also hosts events.
Open Knowledge Foundation is an active partner with organisations working in similar areas, such as open educational resources. [12]
Open Knowledge Foundation has produced the Open Knowledge Definition, an attempt to clarify some of the ambiguity surrounding the terminology of openness, [13] as well as the Open Software Service Definition. [14] It also supported the development of the Open Database License (ODbL). [15]
Outside of technology, Open Knowledge Foundation plays a role in advocating for openness broadly. This includes supporting the drafting of reports, facilitating consultation [16] [17] and producing guides. [18]
Rufus Pollock, one of Open Knowledge Foundation's founders, and current board secretary sits on the UK government's Public Sector Transparency Board. [19]
The foundation places a strong interest in the use of open source technologies. Its software projects are hosted on GitHub, which utilises the Git version control software. Some of the projects are listed below: [20]
Much of the collaboration with other related organisations occurs via events that the foundation hosts. [35] Its premier event is the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), which has been held occasionally since 2007. [36] Other events have been organised within the areas of data visualisation [37] and free information network infrastructure. [38]
Annually, Open Knowledge Foundation supports International Open Data Day
The Panton Principles (for Open Data in Science) in 2010 had large contributions from Open Knowledge people and in 2011 Jonathan Gray and Peter Murray-Rust successfully obtained funding from OSF for two fellowships, held by Sophie Kershaw and Ross Mounce. In 2013 OKF obtained sponsorship from CCIA [39] for 3 fellowships, which were awarded to Rosemarie Graves, [40] Sam Moore, and Peter Kraker. [41]
Open Knowledge Foundation also supports Apps for Europe, [42] and D-CENT, a European project created to share and organise data from seven countries, which ran from October 2013 to May 2016. [43]
Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose."
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. It is best known as the host platform for Wikipedia, the largest crowdsourced online encyclopedia and the 7th most visited website in the world, but also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.
The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".
Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.
Rufus Pollock is a British economist, activist and social entrepreneur.
The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is an open-source open data portal for the storage and distribution of open data. Initially inspired by the package management capabilities of Debian Linux, CKAN has developed into a powerful data catalogue system that is mainly used by public institutions seeking to share their data with the general public.
Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.
The Panton Principles are a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge.
The Open Energy Modelling Initiative (openmod) is a grassroots community of energy system modellers from universities and research institutes across Europe and elsewhere. The initiative promotes the use of open-source software and open data in energy system modelling for research and policy advice. The Open Energy Modelling Initiative documents a variety of open-source energy models and addresses practical and conceptual issues regarding their development and application. The initiative runs an email list, an internet forum, and a wiki and hosts occasional academic workshops. A statement of aims is available.
Open energy system database projects employ open data methods to collect, clean, and republish energy-related datasets for open use. The resulting information is then available, given a suitable open license, for statistical analysis and for building numerical energy system models, including open energy system models. Permissive licenses like Creative Commons CC0 and CC BY are preferred, but some projects will house data made public under market transparency regulations and carrying unqualified copyright.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
Irina Bolychevsky is a British activist and data specialist, focused on Open Data, decentralized technologies, and technical standards. She is currently director of standards and interoperability at the NHSX of the United Kingdom Government. She has been part of large organizations in those fields, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Open Data Institute, and worked for the UK, Dubai and UAE government administrations. She co-founded Redecentralize.org, an advocacy group promoting decentralized technologies.
These include the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN): CKAN stores the catalogue behind data.gov.uk and a growing number of open data registries around the world.
Strategic Development and Outreach Partners ... Open Knowledge Foundation
Information Program grantee Access Info Europe, together with the Open Knowledge Foundation, are holding a public consultation on open government data and the right of access to information.
And if you get excited by material that's free to access, reuse or re-distribute, then please come down to tomorrow's OKCon, for a day of seminars and workshops around the theme of 'Applications, Tools and Services'.
The Annual [sic] Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)