Many of Open Knowledge Foundation's projects are technical in nature. Its most prominent project,
CKAN, 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 groups 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 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, 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 (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'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 (BMBF). It is a low-threshold funding program for Germany software developers who develop innovative
open source software.
Technical project in
Spanish The foundation places a strong interest in the use of
open source technologies. Its software projects are hosted on
GitHub, which utilises the
Git version control software. Some of the projects are listed below: •
CKAN, 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 and public domain calculators. Examples include the Bibliographica, Public Domain Works, Open Shakespeare, Open Text Book and
The Public Domain Review projects. • OpenGLAM, an initiative that promotes free and open access to
digital cultural heritage, held by GLAMs: Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. OpenGLAM is co-funded by the
European Commission as part of the DM2E (Digitised Manuscripts to
Europeana) project. • Open Economics • Open Knowledge Forums • Information Accessibility Initiative • Open
geodata • 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 (for Open Data in Science) in 2010 had large contributions from Open Knowledge people and in 2011 Jonathan Gray and
Peter Murray-Rust successfully obtained funding from OSF for two fellowships, held by Sophie Kershaw and Ross Mounce. In 2013 OKF obtained sponsorship from
CCIA 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. == See also ==