The first Open Knowledge Foundation Glasgow Meetup
Guest - August 28, 2013 in Events, Meetups, OKFN Local

Guest - August 28, 2013 in Events, Meetups, OKFN Local
Christian Villum - August 22, 2013 in Brazil, federal budgeting, OKF Brazil, OKFN Local, Open Spending, OpenSpending
Christian Villum - August 14, 2013 in Featured, OKFN Local
Naomi Lillie - July 19, 2013 in network, OKF, OKFN Local, Open GLAM, Open Government Data, Open Humanities, Open Science, Our Work, Talks, Working Groups
Christian Villum - July 4, 2013 in Featured, OKF Bangladesh, OKF France, OKF Morocco, OKF Nepal, OKF South Korea, OKF Spain, OKFN Local
Christian Villum - July 2, 2013 in OKF Japan, OKFN Local, Open Government Data
Denis Parfenov - June 20, 2013 in OKFN Local, Open Government Data
“I look forward to working with citizens, civil society interests and business on the development of Ireland’s first National Action Plan of commitment required for full OGP participation”,
“I hope that civil society and citizens at large will use the OGP as an opportunity not only to encourage greater transparency and to open the doors of government to greater scrutiny but to increase citizen engagement in the reform effort overall.”Our initial difficulties in attracting interest from the State were overcome through perseverance. In the interim between my previous blog post and this one, ActiveCitizen and other civil society participants continued to raise awareness of OGP with the government – meeting advisors, ministers and civil servants. We also initiated an on-going series of Open Data Ireland meet-ups: creating bottom-up demand for and awareness of Open Data and building communities of interested people from diverse sectors. It has been a challenging process but one that delivered some valuable lessons on identifying and engaging with key networks. Once the government was fully informed about the economic and social benefits of OGP, they engaged with us positively and openly. This constructive and receptive engagement makes us hopeful of a meaningful and effective OGP process.
pierre chrzanowski - June 3, 2013 in OKF Belgium, OKF France, OKF Switzerland, OKFN Local
Zara Rahman - May 13, 2013 in Featured, OKF Australia, OKF Austria, OKF Belgium, OKF Brazil, OKF Greece, OKF Nepal, OKF Spain, OKF Switzerland, OKFN Local
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.
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, 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.
..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!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 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!
Christian Villum - April 29, 2013 in Featured, OKF, OKF Greece, OKFN Local