The Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content.
The Foundation is an international leader in its field and has extensive experience in building tools and community around open material. Our software development work includes some of the most innovative and widely acclaimed projects in the area. For example, our CKAN project is the world’s leading open source data portal platform – used by data.gov, data.gov.uk, the European Commission’s open data portal, and numerous national, regional and local portals from Austria to Brazil.
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s award winning OpenSpending project enables users to explore over 13 million government spending transactions from around the world. We have an active global network which includes Working Groups and Local Groups in dozens of countries – including groups, ambassadors and partners in 21 of Europe’s 27 Member States.
Tens of thousands of people from a wide variety of backgrounds take part in Open Knowledge Foundation discussions and activities. We run numerous events – from small hands on policy workshops and code sprints, to our annual international events, OKFestival and OKCon, the last edition of which convened over a thousand people for five days of activities in Helsinki, Finland.
In 2011 the Foundation ran the Open Data Challenge, which was Europe’s biggest open data competition to date, attracting 430 entries from 24 Member States. Along with the EJC we coordinated the production of the Data Journalism Handbook, a free reference book on how journalists can use data to improve the news with contributions from leading media organisations from around the world – including the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Le Monde, New York Times, Zeit Online, Wired, and many others.
Activities
The Open Knowledge Foundation supports the global open knowledge and open data community, is a home for projects of all kinds (especially software and data projects), investigates and explores topics and innovation around open, and offers a variety of professional and technical services.
We are trusted, pioneering, passionate, and practitioners as well as advocates. Our community changes the world by educating, advocating, creating and making.
Many of our activities are detailed on our Projects page.
Other information
Read about our governance, board of directors, and find our annual reports and published accounts on our Governance page.
The Open Knowledge Foundation has a shared set of values and a vision of open knowledge as vitally important to empower individuals and enable fair, sustainable societies.
Organisational information
The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization. It is incorporated in England & Wales as a company limited by guarantee with company number 05133759. The registered office is St John’s Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WS, UK and it is to this address that all correspondence should be addressed.
The Foundation is registered with the UK ICO and is on the Data Protection Register under the terms of the Data Protection Act 1998. The Open Knowledge Foundation is registered for VAT in the United Kingdom with number 984 4049 89.
