Open Knowledge Foundation

Self-portrait

About

We believe open knowledge can empower everyone, enabling people to work together to tackle local and global challenges, understand our world, expose inefficiency and challenge inequality and hold governments and companies to account.

Open Knowledge International is a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and enable people to work with it to create and share knowledge.

Our mission

We want to see enlightened societies around the world, where everyone has access to key information and the ability to use it to understand and shape their lives; where powerful institutions are comprehensible and accountable; and where vital research information that can help us tackle challenges such as poverty and climate change is available to all.

We envision a world where: - knowledge creates power for the many, not the few. - data frees us to make informed choices about how we live, what we buy and who gets our vote. - information and insights are accessible – and apparent – to everyone.

This is the world we choose. We want to see open knowledge being a mainstream concept, and as natural and important to our everyday lives and organisations as green is today.

To reach these goals, we need to raise the profile of open knowledge and raise awareness of how important it is. We need to change cultures, policies and business models at large organisations to make opening up information acceptable and desirable. We need to build capacity in understanding information, sharing, finding and using data, across the population and the world. We need to create and encourage collaborations across government, business and civil society to use data to rebalance power and tackle major challenges. We need tools (technical, legal, and educational) to make working with data easier and more effective.

Here’s how we do it at Open Knowledge International:

- International network: We support, encourage and coordinate an international network of individuals passionate about openness and active in making, training and advocating

- Opening up information: We advocate and campaign for open release of key information, particularly at national or large scale, and we monitor the level of openness worldwide

- Impact through information: We help people learn about openness and gain data skills, and we partner with change-making organisations aligned with our key themes to help them use open data to accelerate their work, creating positive change towards our goals, stories and case studies

- Stewardship: a home for projects and communities: helping nurture and support efforts to open up data and see it used for positive change

- Services and consulting: We offer commercial technology services, consultancy and training to help openness reach its full potential

Legal notice

The Open Knowledge Foundation, trading as Open Knowledge International, is a not-for-profit organisation. It is incorporated in England & Wales as a company limited by guarantee, with company number 05133759. VAT Registration № GB 984404989. Registered office address: Open Knowledge Foundation, St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WS, UK.

(https://okfn.org/about/)

Description

Open Knowledge Foundation is a global non-profit organization that promotes the opening of knowledge, content and data. It was founded in Cambridge, UK, in May 2004 by Rufus Pollock, economist and member of the Public Sector Transparency Board of the United Kingdom. It emerges as a possibility of opening access to cultural, scientific, financial, governmental, statistical, environmental and transportation information, through the participation of interdisciplinary collaborators around the world.

The organization intends to transform relations between the government, business and civil society through the opening of the information, and thereby contribute to the understanding of local and global issues by offering training to make informed choices and active participation in possible solutions.

It teaches and promotes the concept of Open Knowledge, defined as “any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and re-distribute without any legal, technological or social restriction” (https://okfn.org/opendata/).

The Foundation works, hosts and supports projects for the opening of information of different areas, from economics to literature, and promote working groups in the areas of transparency, education, hardware design, sustainability and public domain, among others.

It has also designed major projects that have transformed access to information at a global scale, such as Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), an international Open Source platform which embraces contributions from regional governments, companies, and organizations working to make information accessible.

Regarding issues of economy, OKF generated the project 'Where does my money go?' a website dedicated to the uses that British Government makes of taxes, to allow all citizens to see the percentage of their salary allocated for health, education, defense, culture, environment or government. This project is part of Openspending, a project that aims to make transparent financial reporting globally.

Publications

Daniel Dietrich, Johnatan Gray, Tim McNamara, Antti Poikola (2010) Manual de open data

Links

URL: https://okfn.org/

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160819183609/https://okfn.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Knowledge