Open Knowledge Foundation

Advocacy

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 Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It is a low-threshold funding program for Germany software developers who develop innovative open source software.

Technical

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]

• CKAN, a tool that provides store for metadata. This enables governments to quickly and cheaply provide a catalogue of their data.[21]
• Datahub,[22] a community-run catalogue of useful sets of data on the Internet. Depending on the type of data (and its conditions of use), Datahub may also be able to store a copy of the data or host it in a database, and provide some basic visualisation tools.
• Frictionless Data,[23] a collection of standards and tools for publishing data.
• Open bibliography, broadly construed as efforts to catalogue and build tools for working with and publishing bibliographic resources,[24][25] with particular emphasis on those works that are in the public domain and public domain calculators. Examples include the Bibliographica, Public Domain Works, Open Shakespeare,[26] Open Text Book[27] and The Public Domain Review[28] projects.
• OpenGLAM,[29] an initiative that promotes free and open access to digital cultural heritage, held by GLAMs: Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.[30] OpenGLAM is co-funded by the European Commission as part of the DM2E (Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana) project.[31]
• Open Economics[32]
• Open Knowledge Forums[33]
• Information Accessibility Initiative
• Open geodata[34]
• Guide to open data licensing
• "Get the Data" — a web-site for questions and answer on how to get data sets.
• POD - Product Open Data

Events

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.

Panton Principles and Fellowships (Open data in Science)

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]

Other

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]