Whether patients, or part of traffic, or exercising or simply walking with one of the behavioral trackers du jour, we are constantly giving data about ourselves and our surroundings to data collecters with few returns. From privacy regulations to bureaucratic barriers to collecting and locking up information just in case it might create monetary value…

opensource.com / CC BY-SA One year ago, CC announced the Affiliate Project Grants to support and expand CC’s global network of dedicated experts. With a little help from Google, we were able to increase the capacity of CC’s Affiliates to undertake projects around the world benefiting a more free, open, and innovative internet. We received…

What do you get when you write software that becomes the basis of just about every geospatial application out there? You get perspective. Frank Warmerdam has been authoring, improving, supporting, and shepherding Shapelib, libtiff, GDAL and OGR for the past 15 years. Frank believes that by sharing effort, by adopting open, cooperatively developed standards, and…

Two weeks ago we wrote about the U.S. Executive Order and announcement of Project Open Data, an open source project (managed on Github) that lays out the implementation details behind behind the President’s Executive Order and memo. The project offers more information on open licenses, and gives examples of acceptable licenses for U.S. federal data.…

As research communities worldwide look for new ways to make the scientific process and its data and results more open and participatory, New Zealand is showing us how it is done. In July 2010, The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) approved by the Cabinet provided guidance for agencies to follow when…

In the past few weeks, the Foundation Center and the philanthropic world have taken two big steps forward in transparency. First, 15 of the nation’s largest foundations joined the “Reporting Commitment,” agreeing to release grant information regularly through Foundation Center’s Glasspockets repository. Then last week, the Foundation Center relaunched IssueLab, an extensive repository of third-sector…

Some of these developments may be dated by a month or more, but we want to make sure they are on your radar by pointing them out here. Several open data portals have launched, including a Brazilian Open Data portal powered by the open-source data cataloguing software CKAN (run by the Open Knowledge Foundation –…

This Saturday’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy will unveil a months-long collaborative effort — the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, CC BY-SA licensed book to help journalists find and use data for better news reporting. Data Journalism Handbook – Cover Mockup / jwyg / CC BY-SA A joint initiative of the European Journalism Centre…

Open Science Logo / gemmerich / CC BY-SA Creative Commons is seeking a Project Coordinator for Science and Data! The Project Coordinator will organize, coordinate and manage projects related to data policy and governance and perform research and analysis on data governance topics across relevant sectors — particularly for science — and communicate results and…