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Last Updated
17/05/2025
Open Knowledge Foundation
By: Mike Peters
Wikipedia: 20/07/2024
"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 developing semi-independent projects. 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." - Wikipedia
Aims
"The aims of Open Knowledge Foundation are:
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Promoting the idea of open knowledge, both what it is, and why it is
a good idea.
- Running open knowledge events, such as OKCon.
-
Working on open knowledge projects, such as Open Economics or Open
Shakespeare.
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Providing infrastructure, and potentially a home, for open knowledge
projects, communities and resources. For example, the KnowledgeForge
service and CKAN.
-
Acting at UK, European and international levels on open knowledge
issues." - Wikipedia
Open Knowledge Foundation
Vision
"Our vision is that openness and open knowledge are adopted by every
government, institution and movement to ensure access to critical
information that will empower humans to solve the most pressing problems of
our times, leading to a sustainable, fair and open future for all." -
OKFN
"The world’s institutions are decaying rapidly by embracing a culture where
knowledge is privatised, artificially restricted behind paywalls or secrecy
laws, violently extracted from groups or even extinct due to neglect and
austerity. The future world is being built by corporations in closed virtual
reality spaces, blocking all possibilities of generativity and democracy
from flourishing, or in closed rooms and opaque systems.
The root of the problem is an institutional architecture designed for that
to happen, limited literacies and skills of people to act on the problem and
no effective models and tools to replace the current systems. Our hope and
focus will be to reverse it and push for openness as a design principle to
build future institutions.
We believe it is time for new rules, models and tools that generate
improved conditions for knowledge to be shared by all in a fair, free and
open future. In the face of rising inequality, global threats to our shared
environment, and fading social consensus, open knowledge is not simply the
opposite of closed societies: it opposes misleading facts (about societal
issues), illegible data (from scientific research), privatised information
(held by tech platforms) and of course withheld documents (about government
or corporate acts). Those elements can exist even in a technically 'open
society'. Our mission is to enable a future where communities, tools and
best practices exist to keep those threats to the health of our societies at
bay. And do it as agile, scalable, and adaptable to local circumstances, as
possible." - OKFN
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