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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