Shuttleworth Fellowship Bi-Annual Review

NOVEMBER 25, 2011

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

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

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

Meetups and Events

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