Rufus Pollock
Rufus is working to promote Open Knowledge around the world, including any kind of content or data from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata, which is freely usable, sharable and reusable.
Specifically he promotes open knowledge in different domains such as governmental, scientific, economic and bibliographic. This involves working to build communities of advocates and practitioners – by organising regular meetings, bringing people together for events and starting work on standards and consensus building. Building and sustaining independent and active communities of people creating, using, and promoting open data in different fields is key to advancing open knowledge around the world.
Rufus is helping to grow the open data ecosystem, for example by adapting the tools and methodologies of the free/open source software community for use with open data. He will specifically be working heavily to develop CKAN, an open source registry for datasets. CKAN, which he helped initiate as an Open Knowledge Foundation project, is being used by the UK in its official data catalogue, data.gov.uk and already has community instances in many other countries around the world – including Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, and Norway. There is a lot of interesting work both to extend CKAN and to improve associated tools like datapkg which enable “data developers” to automate working with datasets.
The Fellowship supports Rufus to work on specific projects that exemplify the open knowledge development process from end to end – going from opening up the raw data, to cleaning and aggregation, to re-exporting for reuse or integration into end user applications that explore, analyze and present the data. For example, Where Does My Money Go?, a project to allow users to explore and visually represent UK public spending, and Open Biblio, which will combine together numerous large sources of bibliographic information with various web services orientated towards different groups of users.
Rufus is a Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation which he co-founded in 2004. He has worked extensively, as a scholar, coder and activist on the technological, social and legal issues surrounding access and sharing of knowledge. He has a PhD in Economics from Cambridge University.