hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0874.txt

Episode: 874
Title: HPR0874: Interview: Lucy Chambers, Open Knowledge Foundation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0874/hpr0874.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:54:41

---

The full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio, this episode open data.
Hello world and welcome to our show on Hacker Public Radio.
This episode is the last of our three interviews resulting from the open tech conference
over the summer recorded by my co-host Les Pounder.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the independent magazine
for the Ubuntu community. Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
We're going to jump in and skip the introductions if you want to find out more about the
conference and our other interviews. You can listen back to the earlier preview of the show with
organizer Sam Smith and with speakers Greg Main of Social Innovation Camp and Paula Graham of
FOSBOX. This episode is our interview with Lucy Chambers of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
And our third interview related to open tech is Lucy and I've got to admit I haven't
listened to this one myself yet so this is going to be a surprise for me. She's from the Open
Knowledge Foundation which has got three really good words in it for anybody into open technology
but what exactly does the Open Knowledge Foundation mean? The way I discussed it with it was
while I tried to realise what it was in my own head was that it was an open source version of data.
So statistics, the written words, music, just all this is open and freely available to everyone
just like open source and creative commons type media is available to everyone. I'm looking at the
website now just and there are Shakespearean plays that have been transcribed and put on
this Open Knowledge Foundation website and where the wording is very as we all know from
its skill very very Shakespearean. If you can't really work out what the word means if you hover
the mouse over it it will actually bring up a tool tip which tells you what the word means in modern
day English and that's only made possible because people can edit information that's been presented
to them but there's all sorts of statistics and data on there from the government so you can play
with data for employment so how much would I earn in this circumstance and how much taps would I pay
you can play with all this data online free of charge work of it and use it for proper projects
as well. Well let's not hang about let's play in what Lucy had to say.
Here I am with Lucy Chambers from the Open Knowledge Foundation. Hi Lucy.
Hi Les. Well the Open Knowledge Foundation is something that I've not heard of before. Can you
tell me more about it? Okay so the Open Knowledge Foundation is an organization which exists
basically to promote open knowledge and open data in whatever form is relevant basically.
So our tagline is some statistics gene study geodata and we basically provide a home for
and any support that we can for people who are looking to get involved with open knowledge projects
essentially that's that's the short one. So we have we have a couple of flagship projects
for example Ckan which is our data hub and kind of very widely used in the world of data hubs
and then we also support various working groups for example we have working groups on open data
in science we have working groups on public domain works in art and literature. There is a
general general questions that's the short answer of what we do. We are an open community if
you like and always invite people to come and get involved and if we don't have a project that
they're interested in at the moment then we will see what we can do to set one up for them.
So it's also put into context that people from the Linux community might understand. The Open
Knowledge Foundation is it like an open source for data in that the data is freely available
and anyone can use the data to work on their projects and can match the data up and play with
it in different ways. Essentially a lot of what we're doing is open source. Okay for example
our projects like open spending and Ckan their open source, the code is open source.
So in terms of are you looking for a specific or are you just looking at like whether the
relationship maps onto it's kind of an analogy between the data and the yeah it's put into context
people that will be like listen into the podcast come from the Linux or Unix background.
So yeah I mean obviously data data is a bit of a tricky thing when you're talking about whether
it's open or not because there are various things which which make data different from
say standard content which are typically license licenses such as creative commons licenses for
example it's very it's very tricky area to say whether data is open or not open but we have for
example we have written a couple of licenses which are specifically for data to attempt to
make that distinction a lot clearer. So we have various licenses which you can you can see a list
of licenses that we commonly work with in Ckan. Our focus is just to make people license their
data as kind of explicitly and openly as possible in much the same way that people have put the
focus on attempting to get people to license their software. If we're about to get the data from it
what sources have you got? It comes from it comes from absolutely everywhere if you take a look at
our Ckan is probably the best place to have a look so if you look at ckan.net there is literally
everything in there from government government budgets to I think there are things in there about
flower prices and it's basically a way of putting together everything that people have found
across the net and just typing it down so whatever people find we register. Is there any links between
yourselves in the UK government perhaps for their data because I know the the government and the
NHS are trying to put more of the data that's used in the house online so people can play with it
and create application from it. Has any converted through to yourselves or are there two separate
entities? Rufus would have to probably answer that a little bit in more depth than I can but I know
that we do we do work with the UK government for example Rufus is an advisor for the kind of
the transparency side of certain parts of the government and we do certainly data.gov.uk runs
in part using I believe Ckan's software so yeah there's definitely work going on. Well let's talk
about some events and the Open Knowledge Foundation has some events that they run through the
I mean I'm looking at one now it's okay Con. Okay Con in June isn't it? Yes it is June the 30th
and July so yeah so June the 30th and July the 1st in Berlin in Kagshunah and there are a couple
of workshops the day before, a couple of days before Wednesday before we have a workshop on
open spending which is kind of targeted at the users of open spending seeing what they want from
from the open spending platform. I think particularly at journalists to see how we can work with
journalists working with particularly on data driven journalism and then on the Tuesday
before okay Con there's a Ckan workshop so that's kind of it's kind of a get together of all of
the people because obviously we're a virtual organisation and our developers work all over the
world so it's quite good to get everybody in one place for the particular day and people people
from the outside community are also welcome to join in if they're interested you're welcome to
contact me and we have a events pages on eventbrides so if you're interested in joining please
have a take to get in contact. What's the website address for okay Con? It is okaycon.org I believe
and it will should redirect you to this year's it's okaycon.org and they're actually straight
to this year's page because this has been running for a couple of years so it's becoming an annual
thing. Another project I can see underneath Ckan is Open Shakespeare. Open Shakespeare yes. What is
that all about? In a nutshell Open Shakespeare is a starter project for a kind of a more ambitious
project that we're looking to work towards so Shakespeare's works are obviously all in the
public domain because he's been dead for quite a long time and they're publicly available on the web
in various forms and there's been lots of kind of redrafting of Shakespeare's works so what we've
done with Open Shakespeare is actually puts some of the the most popular editions of Shakespeare's
works online and probably the most interesting feature of Open Shakespeare is that we've built a
tool into the platform which is called the annotator there are two ways that you can use
annotates you can either build it into your web page and then allow people to create annotations
and edit annotations and directly on your web page or you can kind of download it as a bookmarker
and use it as part of your browser to annotate any any web page that you choose you choose
so Open Shakespeare is useful because it gives people the kind of the interactive way to
work with Shakespeare's texts and to highlight the interesting parts and to kind of collaborate with
others on interpreting and commenting on his works but it is a kind of a starter on what we
hope will be a much bigger project which is going to be Open Shakespeare and so we are looking
for ways that we can expand it so yeah it's it's a great project I'm just looking at it now I'm
looking at the tragedy of Hamlet the Prince of Denmark and that already at one I can see there's
highlighted pieces of text annotations themselves and moving them out so for it I can see
where people have put in information for me to look out and I'm just thinking I wish I had this
when I was doing my GCSEs exactly yeah well um we're kind of we're working on the way to
also make this make this school friendly it's kind of it's annotated still in the kind of
beta stage of testing so we're allowing people to play with it for a while before we kind of go
and go out and try and get schools to use this as a tool yeah I mean eventually that is that's
what we'd love to do with it and I think it's really useful for stuff like that it is really
useful just in that five minute look see if I've done it it's fantastic piece of kit
I'm also looking at a few other projects here and there I used before just as a test that where
does my money go yes I could see the breakdown of my annual income and all the taxes and insurance
that I pay out where it all goes to in the world so in it in the UK and it's fascinating really
what you can do with their decides and the data that's available yeah no it's it's wonderful
where's my money go was the original UK based budget and finance explorer and obviously has
things like my daily bread which allows people to see they have a kind of a slider which they can
select their income and so they can use the calculator to work out based on their income how much
literally contribute on a daily basis to various sectors of society and now this is kind of developed
into open spending which is kind of larger international version of what you've looked at on where
does my money go dog attempting to internationalize this we've already got several countries budgets
online but it's one of the most it's one of the most ambitious projects purely because nobody
publishes their budget data in the same format so it's just staggeringly staggeringly
complicated and staggeringly worrying how many holes you sometimes see in people's budget data
whether that day to exist but yeah it's fascinating project and I encourage people to go and have
a look at open spending dog and where does my money go dog. Now the main site for the Open Knowledge
Foundation what's the web address for that? It is a care fund dog. You were at Open Tech on Saturday
the 21st of May. We were. We were. Now what were you doing there? What was your session all about?
Rufus himself was speaking on open spending so he was introducing the concept of open spending
which we haven't officially launched yet but we are kind of working on we're going to launch it
hopefully in the in the next couple of weeks officially but doesn't mean that we're not working
on it and people are already contributing to it so Rufus was kind of doing the official announce
of it and it was a really good session partly the feedback that we got from that audience of what
they'd like to see was really really useful so that was that was the main thing and we also
obviously attended lots and lots of interesting talks. It was an interesting day it was the first time
I'd ever been to Open Tech so it was great. Which talks did you go to on the day or which one was
the one that stood out as the best talk of the day for yourself? So I particularly enjoyed the
last session of the day I think it was in the main room so there were various people speaking there
there was Lisa Evans who had worked initially she was kind of one of the ones who helped us set up
where's my money going and she is interested in how how governments publish their data or if they
publish their data essentially budget transparency in government and there were also a couple of people
interested in civil liberties and they had put together a cycle police state UK I believe which
was really interesting just on basically a collection of ways in which reports from various sources
on how the UK basically runs its police operation and it was really interesting to see from the
political perspective how they how laws which affect the police system often go through and just
from kind of a government government somebody who's interested in government issues that was a
really interesting one but probably the most interesting one for my point of view was the very last
talk that I went to see which was on the group that had had created a cycle judgmental and it
was basically they put judges case decisions online for people to see so people had been
able to see the way that people had ruled in certain situations so I think it was a massive
step forward for the legal system to be able to see to have this type of information in the
public domain and I spent quite a lot of time speaking to Nick Wal who did the presentation afterwards
about how they were going to develop it in the future but I was really pleased to see that
well sounds like a lot of fun at OpenTech yeah it was extremely busy on the day who was
talked back to back there just wasn't the time in between talks to actually sit down and talk
to people so was that many good talks back to back so I'll be going next year definitely
and I'll probably budget in a lot more time to talk to people yeah see that's all the questions
done with glad to glad to answer and hopefully I've given you as much information as there's
I can click and we're back in the room I love these sort of shows I can just sit back for a bit
and just be a listener it's great we'll put all the links to our guests websites in and I'm
looking at the Open Knowledge Foundation at moment and just on the front page we've got the
Secan Data Registry we've got the the Open Knowledge Definition we've got Open Shakespeare that you
talked about upfront weaving history creating factlets just a strange little word but I like the sound
of it where does my money go on UK public finances which you alluded to and European energy policy
there's not many there's not many websites that cover that kind of spectrum no it is quite broad
isn't it broad doesn't even begin to cover it and from all from the recent event they've had the
event the end of June starts a July there's going to be a lot more coming out of that because it's
two-day event people getting together and working on open data to produce new applications
and new websites that we can use in the coming months that's what it's all about data that we
can all use more power to their elbow all right marvelous thank you for being our roving reporter
no problem what what did you actually take to record on just for the technically minded amongst us
zoom h2 well well which I'm using right now is the other microphone everybody else we'll see you
on the next episode of the full circle podcast thank you les see you next time
and that's all from Les Pounder and myself Robin Kathleen this has been the full circle podcast
on Hacker Public Radio we'll be back again soon thank you for listening and goodbye
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does our we are a community
podcast network that releases shows every weekday on day through friday today's show like all our
shows was contributed by a hbr listener like yourself if you ever consider recording a podcast
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is Hacker Public Radio was founded by
the digital dot pound and the economical and computer cloud hbr is funded by the binary
revolution at binref.com all binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages from shared
hosting to custom private clouds go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs
unless otherwise stasis today's show is released under a creative comments
attribution share a like read us our license