Annual Report

We entered 2022 with enthusiasm for finding ways to work together on the many challenges we face today, starting with climate data, so we gathered with climate researchers, activists and organisations to brainstorm ways to collaborate and use the Frictionless Data tooling to make open climate data more usable, accessible, and impactful (read about it here). This work was well-received and there is a lot of enthusiasm from potential collaborators and funders in this area.

Software

We have released Frictionless Framework (v5), a data management framework for Python that provides functionality to describe, extract, validate, and transform tabular data. It’s the second public version of this software, incorporating functional and performance improvements based on user feedback. It now also includes a CKAN, GitHub, and Zenodo integration. These features were highly sought after by the community.

We have also released Frictionless Repository (v2), a data management service that brings continuous data validation to tabular data in your repository via Github Action. This service is based on the Frictionless Framework and now supports all the new features of the framework.

We continued research on Livemark (v1), a data presentation framework for Python that generates static sites from extended Markdown with interactive charts, tables, scripts, and other features. In 2022 we didn’t have this work prioritised but we’re going to continue development in 2023 as this project is very promising and we have already been able to migrate all our documentation portals to Livemark.

We started working on Frictionless Application (MVP), a data management application for Browser and Desktop that provides functionality to describe, extract, validate, and transform tabular data with a UI. This project is a logical continuation of the Frictionless Data project's standards and software with a focus on the non-technical audience: data publishers, librarians, and people who prefer visual interfaces over command-line interfaces and programming languages. We’re targeting Q1 of 2023 for the first public release.

We focused on Frictionless Adoption work and we participated in the development of valuable CKAN extensions based on Frictionless Software: ckanext-validation, providing the ability to validate uploaded tabular resources, and ckanext-datapackager, which exports a dataset as a Frictionless Data Package.

We continued enriching the Frictionless Team and contributors community. Since April 2022, a new developer, Shashi Gharti, has joined the Frictionless Data core team. Shashi worked on the GitHub and Zenodo integrations for the Frictionless Framework and also presented her work at two community calls in August 2022 and October 2022. During November and December 2022, Polina Ganina, an intern at OKF, participated in the Frictionless Application work. During the year we received many contributions from our community – We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the work!

Fellows

The 3rd cohort of Frictionless Fellows, mentored by Lilly Winfree, officially ended their fellowship in July 2022. Melvin Adhiambo Ochieng, Guo-Qiang Zhang, Victoria Stanley, Kevin Kidambasi Ogola, Lindsay Gypin, Zarena Syrgak were an amazing cohort. You can read about their experience in packaging data and in reproducing someone else’s research data (not such a frictionless experience as some may think!).

At the end of their fellowship, they shared their thoughts and what the fellowship meant to them in the form of blog posts. We encourage you to read them all, because they are really insightful and moving:

• A road to openness by Guo-Qiang
• The end by Melvin
• Is this really goodbye? by Victoria
• A Frictionless Future by Lindsay

Community

In 2022, OKF was involved in the development of the Digital Transformation and AI Competency Framework for Civil Servants report as part of a multi stakeholder group working with the UNESCO Broadband Commission Working Group on AI Capacity Building. The commission conducted a series of consultations on the global level in order to assess the critical capacity needs for public sector digital transformation. Alongside CEO Renata Avila, both Carolina Matos, based in Brazil, and Ben Hur Pintor, based in the Philippines, participated in expert global and regional consultation sessions and also provided written inputs to the draft.

The challenge was to strengthen capacities of government officials to leverage digital technologies, especially from a developing country perspective, and to respond to the socio-economic and human rights challenges engendered by their use. The digital era governance requires a new set of skills and competencies from civil servants to ensure that digital transformation and regulatory initiatives are in line with a human Rights, Openness, inclusive Access and Multistakeholder participation and gender equality-based (ROAM-X) approach. The output was the development of a set of nine recommendations in three competency domains that are context-sensitive and adaptable for use to support capacity building for civil services across ICT Ministries and Digital Units in governments all over the world.

In recent decades, Barcelona has been a benchmark for openness on multiple levels, from immigration policies that welcome refugees, to sophisticated citizen-driven processes to define data governance. From resilient connectivity through groups and cooperatives to strict rules to limit dominant digital platforms leading local alternatives to flourish. It is also a historical place, where many of the global initiatives to promote our global digital commons were launched, from the oXcars to the City Data Commons.

The transversal generativity that open practices led Barcelona to world leadership was the inspiration for the Open Knowledge Foundation to choose the city as the setting for its first post-pandemic meeting, in partnership with The Center for Digital and Democratic Innovation / Open Canòdrom, under the leadership of Arnaud Monterde.

Collaborators from more than fifteen different nationalities and backgrounds met to exchange with different digital communities and validate a re-examined open agenda prepared to face the upcoming challenges at a one-day Open Knowledge Symposium, which reflected the past, present and future of our movement, with conversations ranging from the early days of the open movement to cutting edge topics such as decentralised finance, Web3 and dark DAOs. The majority of staff and representatives from the Board and Network attended the meeting, committing to a joint agenda in the future.