EVOLUTION
representatives combined in fascinating combinations of methodologies, backgrounds and ideas. Over 19,000 people virtually and physically watched the final keynote speech by revered data visualisation guru Hans Rosling, many leaving with tears in their eyes. At the Open Knowledge Festival, we witnessed the unfurling of a global movement for social change in the midst of its own cultural renaissance, and we are increasingly seeing these manifestations across all sectors of society. From makerspaces to the School of Data, from digital archive workshops to international conferences, peer-fueled learning is being combined with concepts about open knowledge and innovation to build new projects and share ideas in ways we have never seen before. From its crowdsourced historical timeline to longer pieces from a diverse group of thought leaders, this book aims to explore these concepts, looking at value that can be generated by opening up knowledge, the ecosystems of organisations that can benefit from such sharing, and the impacts transparency can have in our societies as a whole. In ending, while we hope that this very public chronology of thought will illustrate the continued importance of these aims for you as it has done for us, we encourage you to disagree with, debate and discuss this book with its contributors, to submit events to its live timeline on the Web, and to use it as a launching pad for your own ideas. In a period of rapid technological and social progress, a cultural artifact like The Open Book is only as successful if it is shared, mixed and remixed—and we challenge you, as its reader, to start that process. The future quite literally lies in your hands, and we already look forward to seeing what you come up with next. Kaitlyn & Jussi PS: You will notice that in this book we don’t attempt to define open knowledge at all. Neither do we talk much about what open data is. This is because we hope that you as the reader will make your own conclusions about these ideas. However, if you’d like further clarification, we recommend doing a browse of wikipedia.org and the opendefinition.org. It is our belief
that open knowledge and open data can truly change the world for better—and now, what do you think? 5