• All week except Thursday (in London Tues + Fri)

Last Week

• Monday: CKAN DataStore and Data API v2 live on the DataHub
• Wed-Fri: EPSI Platform Conference in Rotterdam including a Presentation about CKAN and PublicData.eu
• Prix Ars Electronica Submission with Laura Newman
• Catching up with the email backlog after a week away
• Various CKAN and Open Knowledge Foundation related stuff
  • http://DataProtocols.org/ has new theme and new sections
• Video of my talk at LIFT Conference now up

This Week

• Miscellaneous project related items!
• http://DataProtocols.org/
• Recline Data Explorer – v0.3 released
• Talking at ORGCon on Saturday

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

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

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

• All week (in London Tues + Fri)

Last Week

• Talked at LIFT 2012 on Open Data
• Work on Webstore in CKAN
• With Laura Newman Open Data Handbook v1.0 Released
• With Velickha Dimitrova announced Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Support for Open Economics Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation
• Administration with the inimitable Laura James and Naomi Lillie

This Week

• Transparency Board meeting
• Catching up with the email backlog
• CKAN strategy meeting + Webstore v2 finished
• http://DataProtocols.org/ plus its mailing list
• Recline Data Explorer – v0.3 released (I hope!)

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

• All week though in Geneva Wed-Fri for LIFT Conference

Last Week

• Dev8D – talk on CKAN and its use in academia and research (plus Data Repositories panel)
• Citizen Cyberscience Summit on Friday and Saturday
  • Huge amount done on PyBossa including finishing (the major) authorization and authentication work, updated tutorial, a new home on the web at http://pybossa.com/, a new home on GitHub at http://github.com/PyBossa and a new ‘Guess My Age’ app that Daniel built as part of the Hackday on Saturday
• Recline Data Explorer improvements
• Open Data Handbook finalized for launch this week

This Week

• Talking at LIFT Conference in Geneva plus meeting with Swiss Open Data community
• Webstore v2 based on ElasticSearch in CKAN
• Launch Open Data Handbook
• Finalize Recline Data Explorer for its v0.3 public release
• Minor CKAN and Annotator work

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

• All week (in London Wed-Fri)

Last Week

• Variety of meetings including an OGP one with the TB
• Lots of CKAN
  • Especially work on Recline Data Explorer. Support for sorting and better notifications.
• Data wrangling: several datasets in the DataHub
  • Open Exchange Rates Data plus Consolidated API-accessible Exchange Rate Data in the Webstore
  • ISO 4217 Currency Codes – Consolidated ISO 4217 Currency Codes in Webstore
• With Laura Newman School of Data Announced
• Administration with the inimitable Laura James and Naomi Lillie
  • Wrote Handbook section on Working Process plus lots of Templates for Budgets, Todo lists etc
• Annotator and AnnotateIt – now at 70 watchers on github!
• Spent a great day with Friedrich Lindenberg catching up and planning Labs etc

This Week

• Events: Dev8D, Citizen Cyberscience Summit
• CKAN work and planning. Further work on Recline
• More work on YourTopia code with Open Economics team — hope to get it to the point where we can upgrade current YourTopia to new codebase
• Open Data Handbook (formerly Open Data Manual) out the door

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

Availability

• All week (in London Wednesday)

Last Week

• Lots of CKAN
  • Especially work on Recline Data Explorer. This is now fully functional and integrated into the DataHub, see e.g. this gold prices dataset
• Work on BibServer and Public Domain Works and its Public Domain Calculators
• Open Economics Hackday — it was great!
  • Working on YourTopia code – clean rewrite in pure js
  • Data wrangling: Economics datasets on the DataHub — up 10 in the last week
• Post on Dreams of a Unified Text
• Various administration

This Week

• Some core admin, including getting a standard spreadsheet template for budgeting and (simple) tasks/todos
• More on OKFN Labs with Tom Rees and others
• CKAN work and planning
• More work on YourTopia code with Open Economics team — hope to get it to the point where we can upgrade curr
  ent YourTopia to new codebase
• NESTA round-table on innovation on Wednesday
• Talking at Data Insights meetup in Cambridge on Thursday

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

• All week

Last Week

• Away until Friday when did a lot of email catching up
• Quite a bit of coding on Recline Data Explorer while away. Check out the demo

This Week

• CKAN – finishing and integrating Recline
• OKFN Labs
• BibServer Sprint

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

Availability

• Mon-Thurs: but in Boston Mon-Tues and travelling back to UK Wednesday

Week of 21st November

• In South Africa all week
• More meetings and coding with people in South Africa including Cape Town meetup
• More work on Community Dashboard with Tom Rees
• Integrated Data Explorer with CKAN

Week of 28th November

• Tues-Friday at: Bridging Transparency and Technology Session on Natural Resources
• Saturday: Open Data Day and RHOK. Specifically took part in the DataHub and OpenSpending related Seize the Data Day segment
  • Seize the data day: updated Data Patterns with a piece on using the DataHub and Webstore. Wrangling on Exchange Rate data and sqlite data pattern
  • In the RHOK part I started work on using the PyBossa microtask framework to integrate microtasking into existing crowdsource workflows with specific focus on a geocoding microtasker.
  • Code and README here https://github.com/rgrp/pybossa-geodemo
• Open Government Data Bulletin planning
• Start planning the Open Data Census

This Week

• Meetings in Boston
• Finish off PyBossa demo
• Recline Data Explorer
• OpenSpending work especially re finalizing dataset import process

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

CKAN and the theDataHub

• Finalized separation of software and site: CKAN = data hub software, theDataHub.org = community data hub site
• Worked heavily to develop CKAN as a product e.g. much improved website http://ckan.org/, nascent partner programme and more
• Major milestone with CKAN v1.5 release just 2 weeks ago. Result of 6 months of development with major new features.
• theDataHub has also been much improved with move to new servers, a new theme (default in CKAN v1.5) and deployment of ever more extensions
• Some personal items:
  • DataExplorer
  • UX work – http://wiki.ckan.org/UX
  • data package manager (dpm) and work on Data Packages spec

OpenSpending

• Two major point releases of OpenSpending software v0.10 and v0.11 (v0.11 just last week!). Huge maturing and development of the system. Backend architecture now finalized after a major refactor and reworking.
• Community has grown significantly with now almost 50 OpenSpending datasets on theDataHub.org and growing group of core “data wranglers”
• Spending Stories was a winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spending Stories will build on and extend OpenSpending.

Open Bibliography and the Public Domain

• The Public Domain Review goes from strength to strength
• BibServer has had a ground-up rewrite and can be seen online at http://bibsoup.net/
• Additional support from JISC for a second phase of JISC Open Bibliography project

Open Knowledge Foundation and the Community

• In September we received a 3 year grant from the Omidyar Network to help the Open Knowledge Foundation sustain and expand its community especially in the formation of new chapters
• Completed a major recruitment process in (Summer-Autumn 2011) to bring on more paid OKFN team members including community coordinators, foundation coordinator and developers
• The Foundation participated in launch of Open Government Partnership and CSO events surrounding the meeting
• Working groups continuing to develop. Too much activity to summarize it all here but some highlights include:
  • WG Science Coordinator Jenny Molloy travelling to OSS2011 in SF to present Open Research Reports with Peter Murray-Rust
  • Open Economics WG developing and Open Knowledge Index in August
  • Open Bibliography working group’s work on an Metadata guide.
  • Open Humanities / Open Literature working group winning Inventare Il Futuro competition with their idea to use the Annotator
• Development of new Local Groups and Chapters
  • Lots of ongoing activities in existing local groups and chapters such as those in Germany and Italy have
  • In addition, interest from a variety of areas in the establishment of new chapters and local groups, for example in Brazil and Belgium
• Start of work on OKFN labs
  • Alpha website at http://labs.okfn.org/
  • Dashboard sprint

Meetups and Events

• Regular OKFN organized Open Data meetup in london
• Open Government Data Camp

Talks and Events

• Attended Open Government Partnership meeting in July in Washington DC and launch event in New York in September
• Attended Chaos Computer Camp with other OKFNers in August near Berlin
• September: Spoke at PICNIC in Amsterdam
• October: Code for America Summit in San Francisco (plus meetings) – see partial writeup
• October: Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw (organized by Open Knowledge Foundation)
• November: South Africa – see this post on Africa@Home and Open Knowledge meetup in Cape Town

General

• Partcipation in meetings of the UK Public Sector Transparency Board
• Annotator has seen ongoing coding and growing use – including very promising integration of Annotator with textbooks thanks to Ewald Zietsman of Siyavula
• Co-coded PyBossa – an open source platform for crowd-sourcing online (volunteer) assistance to perform tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence (e.g. image classification, transcription, information location etc)

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site

• All week
• In South Africa Mon-Thurs (return to UK Friday)

Activity

• All last week in South Africa for Shuttleworth Fellows meetup
• Post about meetups and hackdays in South Africa
• Humanities working group meetup
• Limited coding and contribution to CKAN, specifically on:
  • data package manager
  • Recline Data Explorer (with Max Ogden) – cf this ticket http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1357
• Work on v0.11 release of OpenSpending. In particular updating and improving openspendingjs so that we have a proper bubbletree explorer. Check out, for example this bubbletree of UK gov expenditure in 2010 – which also includes a breakdown (see the donut ring) by region
• OKFN Dashboard hackday
• Africa at Home hackday where I worked on PyBossa – an opensource crowdsourcing engine. PyBossa is a port the BOSSA crowdsourcing engine to python (a bit like an opensource mechanical turk but without money!) and with an initial focus on helping scientists and other researchers crowd-source human problem-solving skills!

This Week

• More meetings and coding with people in South Africa including Cape Town meetup
• OpenSpending especially coding on ETL and loading system and getting data loaded!
• Finish off Community Dashboard with Tom Rees
• Data Explorer integrated into new CKAN resource pages

read original post on Rufus Pollock's Site