As part of my Shuttleworth Fellowship I’m preparing bi-annual reviews of what I — and projects I’m involved in — have been up to. So, herewith are some some highlights from the last 6 months.

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)

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