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Welcome to the Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter.
May 2019 edition

Today marks our 15th anniversary: in May 2004, the Open Knowledge Foundation was launched in Cambridge by entrepreneur and economist Rufus Pollock.  

From humble beginnings, we grew across the globe and pioneered the way the world uses data today, striving to build open knowledge in government, business and civil society - and creating the technology to make open material useful.  

But now in 2019, our world has changed dramatically. Large unaccountable technology companies have monopolised the digital age, and an unsustainable concentration of wealth and power has led to stunted growth and lost opportunities. When that happens it is consumers, future innovators and society that loses out. As we reach an important milestone in our journey, we recognise it is time for new rules for this new digital world.

So we have decided to re-focus our efforts on why we were created in 2004, ‘to promote the openness of all forms of knowledge’, and return to our name as the   
Open Knowledge Foundation. Our vision is for a future that is fair, free and open. That will be our guiding principle in everything we do. Read more in our anniversary blogpost.

At the beginning of this month, we were a proud organiser of csv,conf,v4 (8-9 May, Portland), which brought together data enthusiasts from around the world.

Highlights of the conference included lightning talks from OKF community members, keynote presentations such as making research reproducible and building equitable open source communities, and over 40 amazing talks ranging from loving boxplots to openly mapping streets named after women in the Global South. The videos and slides from all the talks are available online now as well.
Lilly Winfree and Jo Barratt of Open Knowledge Foundation with the comma llama at csv,conf,v4
Highlights from our projects
We are happy to announce the Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research’s Fellows Programme! We are recruiting and training early career researchers to become champions of the Frictionless Data tools and approaches in their field. Fellows will learn about Frictionless Data, including how to use Frictionless Data tools in their domains to improve reproducible research workflows, and how to advocate for open science. In addition to mentorship, we provide Fellows with stipends of $5,000 to support their work and time during the Fellowship.

Applications are open until 30th July 2019. Read more
We have partnered with the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) to support governments in the publication of budget and spending open data, through the Open Fiscal Data Package (OFDP). This specification allows publishers to structure their data in a way that makes its description and use as easy as possible and provides visualizations and developer tools for publishers and users with the OpenSpending platform.

In this blogpost we guide you through the OFDP, for a successful publication.
Two years ago, members of the European Parliament voted to force large multinational corporations registered in Europe to reveal how much tax they pay, how many people they employ and what profits they make in every country where they work (a transparency measure known as public country-by-country repor-ting, or public CBCR). As European parliamentary candidates enter the final stretch of campaigning, we urge those elected to return to Brussels in July to arrive with a renewed sense of urgency in this area and to focus efforts on making sure public CBCR becomes law before the public’s trust is rocked by yet another international tax scandal.

On this year’s Open Data Day, we registered over 300 events across five continents: we just published an overview and index of all event reports of our mini-grantees. It shows that Open Data Day is well established and the community is growing. We want to learn more about the people behind these events; we know open data looks different from place to place and what people need to make Open Data Day happen are different as well. If you took part, please fill in our brief survey so we can learn more and support all of you better. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to making this Open Data Day a success!
From our network

  • Another anniversary for our Brazilian chapter Open Knowledge Brazil: their School of Data Brazil is celebrating five years of activity! They have great plans for the future: they are going to deliver the first Brazilian award dedicated to data journalism at the next edition of the Coda.Br conference, work on creating an ebook, publish open tutorials regularly and expand trainings for more regions. Read more and watch their video here.

  • Some of the members from our Open Education working group are involved in the recently launched Open Education Policy Lab - project supporting Higher Education Institutions and Consortia in co-creating Open Education Policies using a solid evidence-based approach. The Lab will focus on providing people with the skills they need to actively participate in policymaking, and offers tools such as a policy making toolkit and a co-creation methodology. Read more on their blog.

  • Last year, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and AlgorithmWatch launched OpenSCHUFA, a large-scale data donation campaign to shed light on the German credit scoring bureau SCHUFA. OpenSCHUFA has now been nominated for the Grimme Online Award – read more about what the project has achieved so far, and what still has to be done, on the OpenSCHUFA website.
Upcoming events
On 22-23 May, Github Satellite, a global conference exploring the future of software, takes place in Berlin. Our CEO Catherine Stihler will be speaking in the session Open source for good: the people and projects driving change on 23 May.
As lead co-chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), the Government of Canada will host the 6th OGP Global Summit in Ottawa, Canada from 29-31 May. The event will discuss ways to leverage open government initiatives and tools to build stronger, more accountable, and responsive democracies; driving home an ambitious agenda around the key themes of inclusion, participation and the impact of open government
From 11-14 June, the RightsCon summit on human rights in the digital age comes to Tunis. The event brings together business leaders, policy makers, general counsels, government representatives, technologists, and human rights defenders to connect, strategise, and shape the future.
Our Swiss chapter OpenDataCH is organising the OpenData.CH/2019 Forum on 4 July. This year there is an exciting unconference format: the aim is to help participants to take practical action to provide and reuse open data. There will be a series of meetings defined by the participants in the day, with a focus on sharing experiences and best practices, inspiration and innovation.
Preparations for MyData 2019, which will happen from 25-27 September in Helsinki, are ongoing. The event will discuss accelerating global change towards a human-centric approach to personal data. Early bird tickets are still available via https://mydata2019.org
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