[python-uk] Introducing CKAN (Open Knowledge Foundation)

[James Gardner]

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-worldwide-but-particularly-london
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