iA

Shuttleworth Fellowship Quarterly Review – Feb 2012

by Rufus Pollock. Average Reading Time: about 3 minutes.

As part of my Shuttleworth Fellowship I’m preparing quarterly reviews of what I and the Open Knowledge Foundation have been up to. So, herewith are some some highlights from the last 3 months.

Highlights

  • Substantial new project support from several funders including support for Science working group and Economics working group
  • Our CKAN Data Management System selected in 2 major new data portal initatives
  • Continuing advance of projects across the board with several projects reaching key milestones (v1.0 or beta release, adoption by third parties)
  • Rapid expansion of chapters and local groups — e.g. London Meetup now has more than 100 participants, new chapters in Belgium and Switzerland are nearly finalized
  • Completion of major upgrade of core web-presence with new branding and theme used on http://okfn.org/ and across our network of sites (now numbering more than 40)
  • Announcement of School of Data which drew huge attention from the community. This is will be a joint Open Knowledge Foundation / P2PU project.
  • Major strengthening of organizational capacity with new staff

Projects

Major new project support including:

  • $124k grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development of the Open Economics Working Group
  • Grant from Open Society Foundations for work associated to the OpenSpending project
  • Grant from Open Society Foundation for Panton Fellowships
  • Part of new European Union funded DM2E (Digital Manuscripts to Europeana) project

CKAN and the DataHub

  • Won several competitive bids to deliver data portals with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN Data management System

    • Part of winning bid to deliver the European Commission’s new Data Portal which will be powered by CKAN
    • Together with new CKAN Partner New Amsterdam Ideas won bid to develop CMAP’s data portal in Illinois

  • CKAN v1.6 Completed

    • New Javascript Data Explorer (Recline) – see it in action on this Dataset of ISO Currency Codes
    • New DataStore providing a rich Data API (NB: this will ship as part of v1.7 but is already live on the DataHub)
    • Continuing extensive UX improvements started 6m ago

  • The DataHub passed 3000 datasets in early January and is nearing 3300

OpenSpending

  • Major breakthrough with achievement of simple data upload and management process – result of more than 9 months of work
  • OpenSpending now contains more than 30 datasets with ~7 million spending items (up from 2 datasets and ~200k items a year ago, and under 10 datasets a 1.5m items just 4 months ago)
  • Substantial expansion in set of collaborators and a variety of new funding opportunities

Other Projects

  • BibServer and BibSoup, our bibliogrpahic software and service, reached beta and have been receiving increasing attention

  • Public Domain Review celebrated its 1st Birthday. Some stats:

    • The Review now has more than 800+ email subscribers, ~800 followers on Twitter
    • 20k visitors with over 40k page views per month
    • An increasing number of supporters making a monthly donation

  • Initiated a substantive collaboration on the PyBossa crowdsourcing platform with Shuttleworth Fellow Emeritus Francois Grey and his Citizen Cyberscience Centre

    • New dedicated website: http://pybossa.com/

  • Annotator and AnnotateIt v1.0 Completed and Released

    • Annotator is now seeing uptake from several third-party projects and developers
    • Project components now have more than 100 followers on GitHub (up from ~20 in December)

Working Groups and Local Groups and Chapters

Working groups have continued to develop well:

  • New dedicated Working Group coordinator (Laura Newman)
  • Panton Fellowships run under auspices of Science Working Group
  • Funding of Economics Working Group

Rapid Chapter and local group development:

  • Lots of new Open Knowledge Foundation meetup groups
  • Belgium and Swiss groups nearly at Chapter status
  • New Local Groups in several other countries – see http://okfn.org/chapters/ for overview
  • New meetup system with meetups in more than a dozen countries. Last London Open Data Meetup attended by more than 100 people

Additional items

  • Hired key new staff including developers, community coordinators and a new management team
  • Begun a series of hackathons and hackdays under the auspices of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Economics
  • Open Data Handbook v1.0 Released – http://opendatahandbook.org/
  • In collaboration with P2PU and Philipp Schmidt announced the School of Data — huge interest from the community with the announce post having the most shares so far of any on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog
  • Finalized Open Knowledge Foundation Labs proposal and launched basic website: http://okfnlabs.org/
  • Invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
  • Invited to be an Adviser to Canadian Government on Open Data

Events and Meetings

Participated in numerous events and meetings including:

  • TA Tech (Transparency and Accountability Technology) meeting in New York
  • LIFT 2012 in Geneva
  • Dev8d
  • Citizen Cyberscience Summit
  • Transparency Board

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