Introducing CKAN (Open Knowledge Foundation)
Hi all, For those of you who haven't heard about the Open Knowledge Foundation we are a not-for-profit promoting open knowledge: that's any kind of information - sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata - that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed [1] and we rely heavily on Python for a lot of our work. One of our key products is called CKAN [2]. It's an open source, web-based data catalogue written in Pylons, SQLAlchemy and Genshi which is used by various organisations, governments and councils around the world to help them organise and share data with the public. Most notably it powers the UK government's http://data.gov.uk site which you may have seen in the news when the UK government released details of all department's spending over £25,000 [3]. CKAN is rapidly becoming very popular so we are looking for more people who are passionate about open knowledge to join our team. Although we do have voluntary contributors we are particularly interested in hiring expert Python web developers (probably as contractors and based in London if possible) so I wanted to draw your attention to the links below in case you are interested: http://www.python.org/community/jobs/index.html?#open-knowledge-foundation-w... http://blog.ckan.org/2010/12/16/python-web-expert-jobs/ Beyond that it would just be nice to connect with other people on this list who are interested in open data and Python so do get in touch with me (on or off list) if this is your sort of thing. Happy Christmas all, James Personal blog: http://jimmyg.org/blog [1] The Open Knowledge Foundation: http://okfn.org [2] CKAN developer site http://ckan.org and catalogue: http://ckan.net [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11795313
Interesting. I've often thought its such a shame there is no centralised data catalog in my field of biomedical research. There is a great culture of openness in the community of scientists but all the data sets are in disparate corners of the web. If I want some data on some particular aspect of biology (which is bound to be out there on someones departmental website somewhere) most of the time I wouldn't know where to start. Its a shame because there is so much data out there. Anyway, probably just a pipedream, but it would be nice. Martin On 24 Dec 2010, at 18:18, James Gardner wrote: Hi all, For those of you who haven't heard about the Open Knowledge Foundation we are a not-for-profit promoting open knowledge: that's any kind of information - sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata - that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed [1] and we rely heavily on Python for a lot of our work. One of our key products is called CKAN [2]. It's an open source, web-based data catalogue written in Pylons, SQLAlchemy and Genshi which is used by various organisations, governments and councils around the world to help them organise and share data with the public. Most notably it powers the UK government's http://data.gov.uk site which you may have seen in the news when the UK government released details of all department's spending over £25,000 [3]. CKAN is rapidly becoming very popular so we are looking for more people who are passionate about open knowledge to join our team. Although we do have voluntary contributors we are particularly interested in hiring expert Python web developers (probably as contractors and based in London if possible) so I wanted to draw your attention to the links below in case you are interested: http://www.python.org/community/jobs/index.html?#open-knowledge-foundation-w... http://blog.ckan.org/2010/12/16/python-web-expert-jobs/ Beyond that it would just be nice to connect with other people on this list who are interested in open data and Python so do get in touch with me (on or off list) if this is your sort of thing. Happy Christmas all, James Personal blog: http://jimmyg.org/blog [1] The Open Knowledge Foundation: http://okfn.org [2] CKAN developer site http://ckan.org and catalogue: http://ckan.net [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11795313 _______________________________________________ python-uk mailing list python-uk@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk
sorry - didn't mean to post to the whole list! On 24 Dec 2010, at 19:50, Martin Goodson wrote: Interesting. I've often thought its such a shame there is no centralised data catalog in my field of biomedical research. There is a great culture of openness in the community of scientists but all the data sets are in disparate corners of the web. If I want some data on some particular aspect of biology (which is bound to be out there on someones departmental website somewhere) most of the time I wouldn't know where to start. Its a shame because there is so much data out there. Anyway, probably just a pipedream, but it would be nice. Martin On 24 Dec 2010, at 18:18, James Gardner wrote: Hi all, For those of you who haven't heard about the Open Knowledge Foundation we are a not-for-profit promoting open knowledge: that's any kind of information - sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata - that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed [1] and we rely heavily on Python for a lot of our work. One of our key products is called CKAN [2]. It's an open source, web-based data catalogue written in Pylons, SQLAlchemy and Genshi which is used by various organisations, governments and councils around the world to help them organise and share data with the public. Most notably it powers the UK government's http://data.gov.uk site which you may have seen in the news when the UK government released details of all department's spending over £25,000 [3]. CKAN is rapidly becoming very popular so we are looking for more people who are passionate about open knowledge to join our team. Although we do have voluntary contributors we are particularly interested in hiring expert Python web developers (probably as contractors and based in London if possible) so I wanted to draw your attention to the links below in case you are interested: http://www.python.org/community/jobs/index.html?#open-knowledge-foundation-w... http://blog.ckan.org/2010/12/16/python-web-expert-jobs/ Beyond that it would just be nice to connect with other people on this list who are interested in open data and Python so do get in touch with me (on or off list) if this is your sort of thing. Happy Christmas all, James Personal blog: http://jimmyg.org/blog [1] The Open Knowledge Foundation: http://okfn.org [2] CKAN developer site http://ckan.org and catalogue: http://ckan.net [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11795313 _______________________________________________ python-uk mailing list python-uk@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk _______________________________________________ python-uk mailing list python-uk@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-uk
Hi Martin,
sorry - didn't mean to post to the whole list!
Well, maybe there are others interested too, but if not I'll stop replying on list as well.
Interesting. I've often thought its such a shame there is no centralised data catalog in my field of biomedical research. There is a great culture of openness in the community of scientists but all the data sets are in disparate corners of the web. If I want some data on some particular aspect of biology (which is bound to be out there on someones departmental website somewhere) most of the time I wouldn't know where to start. Its a shame because there is so much data out there. Anyway, probably just a pipedream, but it would be nice.
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing CKAN should be used for. My own background (before starting the Pylons project) is in Physics and there is a similar problem there. Just this week I was drafting a quick blog post about the Voyager 1 spacecraft reaching a distant point at the edge of the solar system [1] and it would be nice to be able to have all the data published somewhere centrally along with a brief analysis and some preview graphs. At the moment people can either re-use ckan.net and tag things with "physics" or "biology" but I'd love to set up an instance specifically for Biology data sets if you thought it might catch on? What are the obstacles preventing scientists publishing their data somewhere central? Is it just lack of a network effect do you think? Cheers, James [1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20101213.html
participants (3)
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Alec Battles -
James Gardner -
Martin Goodson