Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by

Rufus Pollock Rufus Pollock (born 1980) is a British economist, activist and social entrepreneur. He has been a leading figure in the global open knowledge and open data movements, starting with his founding in 2004 of the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundatio ...

on 20 May 2004 in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, England. It is incorporated in England and Wales as a

private company limited by guarantee A company limited by guarantee (CLG) is a type of company where the liability of members in the event the company is wound up is limited to a (typically very small) amount listed in the company's articles or constitution. Most have no share cap ...

. Between May 2016 and May 2019 the organisation was named ''Open Knowledge International'', but decided in May 2019 to return to ''Open Knowledge Foundation''.

Aims

The aims of Open Knowledge Foundation are: *Promoting the idea of open knowledge, both what it is, and why it is a good idea. *Running open knowledge events, such as OKCon. *Working on open knowledge projects, such as Open Economics or Open Shakespeare. *Providing infrastructure, and potentially a home, for open knowledge projects, communities and resources. For example, the KnowledgeForge service and CKAN. *Acting at UK, European and international levels on open knowledge issues.

People

Renata Ávila Pinto joined as CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation in October 2021. From February 2019 to August 2020,

Catherine Stihler Catherine Dalling Taylor Stihler (née Taylor; born 30 July 1973) is a Scottish former politician who was chief executive officer (CEO) of Creative Commons from 2020 to 2023. A member of the Scottish Labour Party, she was a Member of the Europe ...

was CEO, and left to become CEO of

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

. Between 2015–2017, Pavel Richter took on the role of CEO of Open Knowledge Foundation, having been executive director of

Wikimedia Deutschland Wikimedia Deutschland (also known as WMDE, Wikimedia Germany, and the Society for the Promotion of Free Knowledge) is a German non-profit association based in Berlin. It was founded in 2004 and recognized that year as the first national chapter ...

. The Open Knowledge Foundation Advisory Council includes people from the areas of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

open data Open data are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

open content Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software, software program, or any other creative Media (communication), content for which there are very minimal ...

open science Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessib ...

data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...

and

digital rights Digital rights are those human rights and Natural and legal rights, legal rights that allow individuals to access, use, create, and publish digital media or to access and use computers, other Consumer electronics, electronic devices, and teleco ...

. In 2015, it consisted of: *Andrew Stott *

Becky Hogge Becky Hogge (born 1979 in London) is a UK-based music and technology writer and the first full-time executive director of the Open Rights Group, resigning in 2008. She was previously the managing editor, and then the technology director and techno ...

Benjamin Mako Hill Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, ''Debia ...

Carolina Rossini Carolina Rossini is a Brazilian-American attorney who focuses on intellectual property, open standard, and data privacy. She is notable for her work in intellectual property law in her native Brazil. In 2016, she was selected as a Young Global L ...

*Christopher Corbin *Daniel Dietrich *

Denis Parfenov Denis Parfenov (; born 22 September 1987, Moscow) is a Russian political figure and a deputy of the 7th and 8th State Dumas. In 2005, Parvenov joined the Russian Communist Youth League. Two years later, he became a member of the Communist ...

Peter Murray-Rust Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist currently working at the University of Cambridge. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access and open data. Education He was educated at Bootham School, a priva ...

*Sören Auer *

Glyn Moody Glyn Moody is a London-based technology writer. He is best known for his book '' Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution'' (2001). It describes the evolution and significance of the free software and open source movements with interviews ...

*Hannes Gassert *Lynn M.Combs-Heard *Jordan S. Hatcher *Jo Walsh *

Mark Surman Mark Surman is a Canadian open internet activist and the president of the Mozilla Foundation. He is a leading advocate for trustworthy AI, digital privacy, and the open internet. Before joining the Mozilla Foundation, Mark spent more than 15 year ...

Mayo Fuster Morell Mayo Fuster Morell (born 1975) is a social researcher. Her research has focused on sharing economy, social movements, online communities and digital Commons, frequently using participatory action research and method triangulation. She has be ...

*Nat Torkington *Pieter Colpaert *

Hans Rosling Hans Rosling (; 27July 19487February 2017) was a Swedish physician, academic and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed t ...

John Naughton John Naughton (born 18 July 1946) is an Irish academic, journalist and author. He is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, director of the Press Fellowship Prog ...

Nigel Shadbolt Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founde ...

*Panagiotis Bamidis *

Peter Suber Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office fo ...

* Yasodara Cordova

Network

As of 2018, Open Knowledge Foundation has 11 official chapters and 38 groups in different countries. In November 2022, the Open Knowledge Network was relaunched with two new projects. It also supports 19 working groups. * Lobbying Transparency *

Open Access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

* Open Bibliography *

Open Definition The Open Definition (formerly Open Knowledge Definition) is published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) to define openness for any type of data, content, or other knowledge. The definition's stated purpose is to " akeprecise the meaning o ...

* Open Design & Hardware * Open Development * Open Economics *

Open Education Open education is an educational movement founded on openness, with connections to other educational movements such as critical pedagogy, and with an educational stance which favours widening participation and inclusiveness in society. Open educa ...

* OpenGLAM * Open Government Data * Open Humanities * Open Linguistics * Open Product Data *

Open Science Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessib ...

OpenSpending Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction, it opposes reason of state a ...

* Open Sustainability * Open Transport (project) * Personal Data and Privacy *

Public Domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

Operations

Many of Open Knowledge Foundation's projects are technical in nature. Its most prominent project,

CKAN The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) is an open-source open data portal for the storage and distribution of open data. Initially inspired by the package management capabilities of Debian Linux, CKAN has developed into a powerful da ...

, is used by many of the world's governments to host open catalogues of data that their countries possess. The organisation tends to support its aims by hosting infrastructure for semi-independent projects to develop. This approach to organising was hinted as one of its earliest projects was a project management service called KnowledgeForge, which runs on the KForge platform. ''KnowledgeForge'' allows sectoral

working group A working group is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. Such groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdisciplinary collab ...

s to have space to manage projects related to open knowledge. More widely, the project infrastructure includes both technical and face-to-face aspects. The organisation hosts several dozen mailing lists for virtual discussion, utilises

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

for real-time communications and also hosts events.

Advocacy

Open Knowledge Foundation is an active partner with organisations working in similar areas, such as open educational resources. Open Knowledge Foundation has produced the

Open Knowledge Definition Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Got ...

, an attempt to clarify some of the ambiguity surrounding the terminology of openness, as well as the Open Software Service Definition. It also supported the development of the

Open Database License The Open Database License (ODbL) is a copyleft license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others. ODbL is published by Open Data Commons, which is part of Open Kn ...

(ODbL). Outside of technology, Open Knowledge Foundation plays a role in advocating for openness broadly. This includes supporting the drafting of reports, facilitating consultation and producing guides. Rufus Pollock, one of Open Knowledge Foundation's founders, and current board secretary sits on the

UK government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central government, central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

's Public Sector Transparency Board. The Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the

Federal Ministry of Education and Research The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (; abbreviated BMFTR) is a cabinet-level ministry of Germany. It is headquartered in Bonn, with an office in Berlin. The Ministry provides funding for research projects and institutions (aim ...

(BMBF). It is a low-threshold funding program for Germany software developers who develop innovative

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

Technical

The foundation places a strong interest in the use of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

technologies. Its software projects are hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, which utilises the

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

version control software Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code t ...

. Some of the projects are listed below: *

, a tool that provides store for metadata. This enables governments to quickly and cheaply provide a catalogue of their data. * Datahub, 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, 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, with particular emphasis on those works that are in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

and public domain calculators. Examples include the Bibliographica, Public Domain Works, Open Shakespeare, Open Text Book and

The Public Domain Review ''The Public Domain Review'' is an online journal showcasing works which have entered the public domain. It was co-founded by Jonathan Gray and Adam Green. It was launched on January 1, 2011, to coincide with Public Domain Day. The ''Review'' a ...

projects. * OpenGLAM, an initiative that promotes free and open access to

digital cultural heritage The Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage of UNESCO defines digital heritage as embracing "cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information ''created digit ...

, held by GLAMs: Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. OpenGLAM is co-funded by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

as part of the DM2E (Digitised Manuscripts to

Europeana Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...

) project. * Open Economics * Open Knowledge Forums * Information Accessibility Initiative * Open

geodata Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also ca ...

* 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. Its premier event is the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), which has been held occasionally since 2007. Other events have been organised within the areas of data visualisation and free information network infrastructure. Annually, Open Knowledge Foundation supports International Open Data Day

Panton Principles and Fellowships (Open data in Science)

The

Panton Principles The ''Panton Principles'' are a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge. History The principles were written by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Ru ...

(for Open Data in Science) in 2010 had large contributions from Open Knowledge people and in 2011 Jonathan Gray and

successfully obtained funding from OSF for two fellowships, held by Sophie Kershaw and Ross Mounce. In 2013 OKF obtained sponsorship from

CCIA The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is an international non-profit advocacy organization based in Washington, DC, United States which represents the information and communications technology industries. According to their ...

for 3 fellowships, which were awarded to Rosemarie Graves, Sam Moore, and Peter Kraker.

Other

Open Knowledge Foundation also supports Apps for Europe, and D-CENT, a European project created to share and organise data from seven countries, which ran from October 2013 to May 2016.

References

External links

* *
A self-published history of the Open Knowledge Foundation
{{Authority control Access to Knowledge movement Articles containing video clips Companies based in Cambridge Free and open-source software organizations Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Non-profit organisations based in the United Kingdom Open content Organisations based in Cambridge Organizations established in 2004 2004 establishments in the United Kingdom Public domain