Last year was an important period of consolidation for us at the Open Knowledge Foundation.  

After a profound redefinition of our strategy in previous years, in 2024 we took important steps on all fronts on which we operate. 

• We resumed the innovative development of open technologies by design with the creation of the Open Data Editor.
• We re-established our influence in global multi-stakeholder forums, with important contributions to the G7 Italy, the G20 Brazil, the United Nations Summit of the Future and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
• We deepened and diversified our work in communities, coalitions and alliances. We welcomed new members to the Open Knowledge Network, produced open knowledge in initiatives such as Common(s) Cause, and invested in grassroots campaigns such as Open Goes COP.

More importantly, all this work has led us to re-evaluate our practices and positioning as a global organisation working in the digital commons, and has resulted in an initiative that organises our approach to technology for the coming years - with the new vision articulated around The Tech We Want, we want to make and advocate for technologies that are useful, simple, durable and focused on solving people's real problems.

At the same time, we keep an eye on what's happening around us, and it's impossible not to be concerned about the technological oligarchy that has come to wield decisive influence over some of the world's most powerful governments. Now more than ever, we need to stand firm to explain and defend the principles of openness and democratic governance.

That's what we'll be doing in 2025. We hope you'll join us.

#BetterOpenThanClosed
#BetterTogetherThanAlone

In 2024 we engaged with communities on every continent, with important activities and announcements practically every month.

Take a look back and browse the main moments of Open Knowledge in 2024 on the timeline below. 

It’s built with our open source tool TimeMapper, with which you can make timelines and maps in seconds. TimeMapper was launched back in 2011 and still runs smoothly. It's the kind of simple, open-by-design technology that we are proud to keep betting on, in line with our The Tech We Want vision.

Thanks to the reliable financial support of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, we dedicated the whole of 2024 to re-evaluating and developing our Open Data Editor (ODE) application, until we released the stable version 1.2.0 in early December. The main goal of ODE is to make data management easier for people with little or no programming skills, thus democratising highly technical work among communities of practitioners such as data journalists and activists.

The development process went through several stages, all well documented on our blog. First, we assembled a diverse team of experts in their fields (product management, UX design, developers, AI specialists), followed by months of extensive user research. This work gave us the input to make decisions and implement (or remove) features based on actual use of the application.

Open Data Editor was launched in beta in October, when the testing phase began with organisations selected through an open call: StoryData, a data journalism agency based in Barcelona, and ACIJ, an Argentinian NGO working for social justice and human rights. Their feedback was crucial to the launch of the stable version, which included a live webinar.

In the last days of the year, through a collaboration with Open Knowledge Brazil, we released a free online course on how to work with quality and consistent data using tools like ODE. The course is  complementary to the app, helping individuals with minimal data knowledge understand key concepts, learn best practices, and practical tips.

In 2025, we will continue to work on the Open Data Editor with a new round of funding from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, now focused on improving data literacy and accessibility of ODE. You can expect lots of news in the coming months.
 

In June 2024 we announced the release of version 2.0 of the Data Package standard (previously known as Frictionless Specs), a community work made possible by the generous support of NLnet. Data Package is a standard for data containerisation, which consists of a set of simple yet extensible specifications to describe datasets, data files and tabular data. It is a data definition language (DDL) and data API that enhances data FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability).

Since its initial release in 2007, the community has suggested many features that could improve or extend the standard for use cases that weren’t initially envisioned. Those were sometimes adopted, but there wasn’t a versioning or governance process in place to truly evolve the standard. We started with the issues that had accumulated in the GitHub repository to build our Roadmap for v2. Many of the requested features are now adopted, making Data Package the answer for even more use cases.

During the update process we tried to be as little disruptive as possible, avoiding breaking changes when possible. We put a lot of effort into removing ambiguity, cutting or clarifying under-defined features, and promoting some well-oiled recipes into the Standard itself. An example of a recipe (or pattern, as they were called in v1) that has been promoted to the Standard is the Missing values per field. We also added a versioning mechanism, support for categorical data, and changes that make it easier to extend the Standard.

To increase and facilitate adoption, we published a metadata mapper written in Python.

When they were not happening on GitHub, all community discussions were documented on the Frictionless blog. We shared our main takeaways at FOSDEM 2024. The presentation was recorded and can be retrieved here.

In August, the CKAN developer community, in which we have representatives from our Tech Team, announced the release of version 2.11. There are a big number of improvements, but the one we are most excited about is: cementing the Hypermedia Approach of its architecture. Starting 2.11, CKAN ships with HTMX, which we believe is one of the flagship technologies in The Tech We Want vision.

In 2024, we also continued to provide various implementation services for open data portals using CKAN. It's worth highlighting the joint project with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), where we helped develop a Python script to automate the process of pulling variables from a CKAN instance and uploading them directly to KoboToolbox. The NRC team highlighted this in a recent text, explaining why it was a key solution for streamlining the management of aid distributions and monitoring field activities. 

Another notable piece of work has just begun, in partnership with the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI). We are now helping the bank to advance its open data policy through a new portal using CKAN. This project will run until 2025.

As every year, we want to thank both our stewards for their critical support to the project: Link Digital for their work on maintaining the project and Datopian for their work on managing the community and organising the CKAN Monthly meetups.

For almost two decades, OKFN has developed and maintained the Open Data Commons licences and standards. But today, as society and technology have evolved, we recognise that we lack a globally validated social, technical and legal infrastructure necessary for the sustainable production and inclusive reuse of a data commons. Even if there is a willingness to share data, the current tools do not provide models for sustainable, inclusive, regenerative, and ethical data commons. 

That's why, together with the Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS, we embarked on the From Open Data to Sustainable Data Commons project. The aim is to develop tools for reproducible research, and to establish an infrastructure and legal framework for sustainable data commons based on extensive community consultation and listening. We want to create a Network of Connected Communities using the tools, making the endeavour sustainable, and an Interoperable Data Ecosystem with shared value, all resulting in sustainable, ethical, inclusive and generative data commons.

In 2024 the project took just its first steps with a session at the CPDP.ai Conference, Open Data Commons in the age of AI and Big Data, and a round table with various important stakeholders and academics. Stay tuned in 2025 for the next steps.

In 2024, we continued our project to keep our strategies fresh and grounded in reality through conversations with artists, activists, academics, archivists, thinkers, policymakers, data scientists, educators and community leaders from all over the world. Our inspirational goal is to reach 100+ people.

Last year we’ve held six conversations, but they actually involved a total of 20 people. After involving the Regional Coordinators of the Open Knowledge Network, we changed the approach, alternating between targeted interviews and more collective conversations. The 2024 conversations were with Rebecca Firth, Angela Oduor Lungati, Romeo Ronald Lomora, Justine Msechu, Oluseun Onigbinde, Maxwell Beganim, Haydée Svab, Fernanda Carles, Omar Luna, Andrés Vázquez Flexes, Julieta Millán, Teg-wende Idriss Tinto, Ivan Kibangou Ngoy, Narcisse Mbunzama, Nikesh Balami, Tomoaki Watanabe, Thanisara Ruangdej, Nurunnaby Chowdhury, Apoorv Anand, and Setu Bandh Upadhyay.

We're now preparing for the 2025 season, in what has become an ongoing project that we love.

The Tech We Want Summit, which happened online on October 17-18, was a great moment in our year, bringing together our beloved community of technologists, practitioners and creators for two days to show that a different technology stack is possible (and we’re already doing it) – one that’s more useful, simpler, more durable and focused on solving people’s real problems.

The summit featured 43 speakers from 23 countries in 14 hours of live streaming followed by 711 participants. It was an entirely activist initiative to realise our vision of technology, with no specific funding. I was only made possible thanks to the partnership with Critical Infrastructure Lab, Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA), Dyne.org Foundation, Free Software Foundation (FSF), Global Voices, IT for Change, Jokkolabs Banjul, Open Knowledge Ghana, Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), #semanticClimate, The Tor Project, Ushahidi, and Xnet.

We gave space and context to 15 project demonstrations and featured major influencers from the civic and government space working at the intersection of technology and democracy, such as Cory Doctorow, Mishi Choudhary, Angela Oduor Lungati, Isabela Fernandes, Fieke Janse, Paz Peña, among many others.

The full documentation of the summit is gradually being published on our blog. You can follow the hashtag #TheTechWeWant on social media platforms to keep up with the new activities that will unfold with vigour over the coming months.

Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. Last year’s ODD was a huge success: almost 300 events registered worldwide, with 60 countries participating in 15+ different languages.

The organisation was a collective effort shared between members of the Open Knowledge Network, especially Jokkolabs Banjul (Gambia), Open Knowledge Germany, Open Knowledge Nepal, and Open Knowledge Ghana. We also relied on old and new partners to sponsor mini-grants to support events selected by an open call - thanks again to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), Datopian, and Link Digital.

Here’s a report we published with statistics and key learnings. And here you can read 26 event reports sent in by the organisers themselves, an initiative we've been calling ‘ODD Stories’ since 2023.

In 2025, between 1 and 7 March, we hope that Open Data Day will be even bigger and more diverse, and that communities from all over the world will come together for a week to celebrate the power of open data to tackle the polycrisis we are experiencing as a global civilisation. 

By the way, go ahead and register your ODD 2025 event now.

In 2024, the Open Knowledge Foundation continued to influence the conversation at some of the most important global multilateral forums. The issues on which we are pushing an agenda are in line with our Advocacy Strategy published earlier last year: open Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) and the democratic and equitable governance mechanisms needed to ensure that these infrastructures serve everyone.

In the context of the G7 Italy (May), in partnership with the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), the Open Future Foundation, the Center for European Policy Network (CEP) and MicroSave Consulting, we published a policy brief entitled Democratic governance of AI systems and datasets, offered in the context of Task Force 4: Science and Digitalisation for a Better Future. There, we argued that governments should strengthen the open source ecosystem and promote the use of open source AI solutions in the public sector.

In the context of the G20 Brazil (November), in partnership with the Center for Internet and Society, CNRS and Research ICT Africa, we published the policy brief Governing Digital Public Infrastructure as a Commons, offered in the context of Task Force T05 - Inclusive Digital Transformation. In it, we argue that a common approach to IPR governance can help scale and localise IPR exchanges, increase transparency and accountability, accelerate their impact, reduce the complexity of governance, data and localisation frictions, and ensure community engagement beyond the governments and companies involved.

Among the many alliances we have maintained or started in the past year, a particular highlight is the Common(s) Causes initiative in partnership with Creative Commons, Open Future and Wikimedia Europe. Together we organised a Wikimania side event in Katowice, Poland in August, attended by more than 50 open movement activists from 20 countries. The aim was to reflect together, share agendas, identify common challenges, obstacles and opportunities, and possibly design a joint roadmap for action for 2025. 

In addition to the invaluable connections and cohesion of our global movement, the result was a report published in November: Open Movement's Common(s) Causes. The report identifies some common causes at the intersection of Open Movement organisations' strategies, the socio-technical zeitgeist and current political opportunities, such as (re)defining openness in a new technological era; creation of a shared advocacy strategy and enhanced regional and thematic cooperation across the organisations; developing and testing governance approaches for our digital commons; advancing openness and sustainability for the technology, data, content, and governance of Digital Public Infrastructure.

We hope that by 2025 this roadmap will be solid and that we can help further strengthen the open movement in an unprecedented context of technology enclosure.

Since joining the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) in 2023, when CKAN was recognised as a Digital Public Good, our collaboration and proximity to the Alliance have grown. Over the past year, we've regularly attended member meetings, attended the 50-in-5 event in New York where many governments came together to share their approaches to Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and the DPGA was represented on the panel The Tech We Want is Political at the summit we held.

At the end of the year, we were in Singapore for the DPGA Annual General Meeting. There, our Tech Lead, Patricio Del Boca, chaired several sessions focusing on the connections between DPGs and some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as the climate crisis, privacy, and open public interest AI. 

The work of the Alliance will remain constant and active in 2025, with a number of calls for collaboration planned, and we hope to continue working together to keep the spirit of the commons at the heart of conversations around Digital Public Goods.

Our advocacy work has also moved in the direction of the climate crisis, one of the most pressing issues of our time, and one where, interestingly, the open movement doesn't have as much influence. That's why we followed the initiative of Maxwell Beganim, leader of Open Knowledge Ghana, to form a coalition with Wiki Green Initiative, Creative Commons and Open Data Charter called Open Goes COP.

COP is the acronym for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. We aim to overcome the lack of discussion on the role of ‘openness’ as a necessary condition for addressing the climate crisis and to build the capacity of open movement activists and stakeholders from civil society and academia to influence high-level decisions on related issues.

During 2024, we held two open online webinars and a collective strategy session. This was followed by two podcast episodes, the creative way we decided to document this process. We also held sessions at Wikimania in Poland, one during The Tech We Want Summit, and attended COP 29 itself in Baku, Azerbaijan.

This year our efforts will be focused on COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon. You can find out more and join the initiative at opengoescop.org.

Over the last 2 years, the Open Knowledge Network has been growing consistently, and a lot of it is happening in regions that we at OKFN know less well than others, and around new topics too. For some time we have felt the need to be closer to our members, so in April we launched a Network Regional Hubs Prototype Programme. At its core, the Network Regional Hubs are designed to cultivate a network of individuals committed to advancing open knowledge principles in their respective regions. With five hubs strategically located across different continents, this initiative seeks to better understand the local specificities, use languages other than English to advocate for open knowledge, and amplify our collective voice. Our coordinators are: Maxwell Beganim for Anglophone Africa, Setu Bandh Upadhyay for Asia, Esther Plomp for Europe, Narcisse Mbunzama for Francophone Africa, and Julieta Millán for Latin America.

On 5 August, representatives from the Open Knowledge Network gathered in Katowice, Poland for a day of strategic thinking, ahead of the 2024 Wikimania – which incidentally had collaboration as its main theme this year. How we can increase collaborations within the Network (and beyond!) and how we can make those collaborations more effective is indeed something we talked about extensively during the gathering. The importance of in-person meetings like this one is key to foster connections and initiate projects, as we know from the Open Knowledge Festivals of the past. 

Another clear outcome of the meeting was the need to communicate more clearly our values, and we need to communicate them to a broader audience too. We need to remind people outside our bubble the benefits of open knowledge, such as transparency, collaboration, and innovation. 

The truth is, though, that large segments of people are still lacking the skills to build, use, or understand open data and open technologies, and are therefore excluded from benefiting from open resources, exacerbating existing inequalities and hindering the potential for widespread knowledge sharing. Limited access to quality education and digital literacy creates significant barriers to engaging with open knowledge, and something we need to tackle as a Network. To know more about the Network gathering, you can read the dedicated blog.

Some of the Network members from Brazil 🇧🇷, Finland 🇫🇮, Germany 🇩🇪, Gambia 🇬🇲, Nepal 🇳🇵 and the Network Lead at OKFN also took part in a panel discussion at Wikimania called All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall, through which we explored avenues for collective action to address fragmentation and enhance our collective impact. You can watch the recording of the session here.

In October, the Regional Coordinators ran a series of regional meetings to explore the challenges and opportunities for the movement in the region, and share the initial mapping of the ecosystem that the coordinators ran.

• In Francophone Africa the key barriers that were identified were the lack of funding and lack of structural collaboration, despite a growing interest in open data and the increase of open data initiatives.
• In the European meeting members highlighted that rather than a mapping, they would find it more useful to enhance project discoverability and reproducibility, thus improving the Open Knowledge Network Project Repository.
• The members from Latin America shared the interest in adding to the organisation mapping other types of nodes, such as events (AbreLatam, América Abierta, etc.) and projects. They were also in favour of keeping regular regional meetings, to strengthen ties and foster collaboration in the region.
• During the Anglophone Africa meeting a lot of enthusiasm for open initiatives was shared, despite the fact that financial constraints remain a barrier to scaling up and sustaining projects in the area. The Network members who participated in the call expressed interest in organising a regional convening too, and were also interested in improving the Project Repository to make it a tool for project collaboration and replication. Read more about the meeting here.

With the regional meetings it became quite clear that there is a shared interest in knowing more about successful Network projects, especially those with potential to be replicated. This is why, in November we organised an online presentation of Prototype Fund in Germany 🇩🇪 and Switzerland 🇨🇭. Prototype Fund offers funding with a lightweight structure for public interest tech, and is an excellent example of project replication within the Network.

In the last month of the year members of the Open Knowledge Network were also involved in the early testing of Open Data Editor.

Last but not least, in 2024 we welcomed several new members from: Bangladesh 🇧🇩, Congo 🇨🇬, Nigeria 🇳🇬, Tanzania 🇹🇿, Uganda 🇺🇬. We were also super excited to greet our very first official chapter in Africa: Open Knowledge Ghana 🇬🇭!

OKFN would like to thank the generous contributions we received by individual donors in 2024. Your support helps us to fulfil our mission of promoting openness as a design principle and building a fair, sustainable and open future.

The donations directly funds initiatives that drive positive change by supporting open data projects, advocating for policy change, and promoting standards and software that empower individuals and communities. Without their generosity, our mission would remain an aspiration rather than a reality. We are honoured to have you as a valued member of our community.

OKFN is now recognised as equivalent to a US public charity through the NGOsource Equivalency Determination (ED) certification.

If you're not yet a donor, consider making a one-off or recurring donation by clicking on the button below.

To follow the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation, you can connect with us via BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, Github, YouTube or subscribe to receive our Newsletter every month which features updates on our projects, Network and events.

We also invite you to check our Network's Global Directory of open knowledge specialists and Project Repository regularly. Both are constantly open to new submissions, and you are welcome to nominate yourself or the projects you are involved in.

Finally, the Open Knowledge Network is growing. Why don't you consider joining us?