What's the future for Open Knowledge? - Institute of Development Studies

"Recent years have seen a rapid rise in demand for the adoption of open knowledge approaches by the development community – something that IDS, as a long time advocate, welcomes. But through our long engagement in this area we also recognise that smaller knowledge providers and users, including many based outside Europe and North America, often lack the technical capacity and resources to engage effectively in this area. This in turn means that they might not benefit from the increased visibility and reach for their ideas that open knowledge approaches potentially offer. It was this concern that led to the creation of Open Knowledge Hub. The project, with initial funding from DFID, brought together a group of international partners to create a new collaborative 'hub' that pays particular attention to supporting the sharing of content from these smaller organisations. The Hub itself, OKHub.org, builds on emerging approaches from the Open Access and Open Data movements to share open-licensed metadata (bibliographic data and links) about research documents, organisations and other materials. The idea is that by pooling our technical expertise and sharing what we learn, project partners can support each other to collectively adopt these approaches - something that individually we would struggle to achieve ..."