Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
| Open Knowledge Foundation Germany | |
|---|---|
|
|
| legal form | registered association |
| founding | 2011 |
| Seat | Berlin |
| Action space | Germany |
| Chair | Andreas Pawelke |
| Employees | 39 |
| Website | okfn.de |
The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany e. V. ( OKFDE ) is a non-profit organization based in Berlin that was founded in 2011. It continues with several projects in the areas of freedom of information , open government action , open data , civic and public interest technology as well as education and the like. a. for the dissemination and use of “open knowledge”. Further goals are to demonstrate the democratic potential and to demand ethical use of technology, the promotion of digital maturity and community building in active civil society to strengthen (digital) volunteering.
description
Open Knowledge Deutschland e. V. is part of the international open knowledge network from a total of 24 countries. The association's work is independent, non-partisan, interdisciplinary and non-commercial. With the association's purposes of promoting science and research as well as public and vocational education, OKFDE is recognized as a non-profit organization.
The Mission Statement was adopted at the founding meeting on February 19, 2011 in Berlin and was last amended in 2017.
subjects
The association is present in numerous areas of society and is considered to be one of the leading organizations for innovative projects in the areas of rule of law, transparency and accountability, access to knowledge and participation, digital competence and public control in Germany and Europe.
Projects
According to its own information, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany currently operates 29 projects in the areas of freedom of information , open government action , open data , civic and public interest - tech and (digital) education . There are also 13 projects that have already been completed. Six projects are highlighted on the homepage.
OffeneGesetze.de
Since the Bundesanzeiger Verlag, which was privatized in 2006, claims a copyright to the Federal Law Gazette published in its database and on this basis only offers the further use of the content and all extended research options for a fee, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany has been providing an alternative free of charge to the public since 2018 , which offers a full-text search, text research in older editions, the printing of documents, the complete download, the free reuse, stable links and an open programming interface.
Youth chops
In youth chops is a support program for young people in terms of programming skills and their social use. The hackathons that have been taking place since 2013 are an essential part of the program . In addition to the main Berlin event, there will be events in eight other German cities and one in Switzerland in 2019. In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut , events will also be held in Tokyo and Busan in 2019.
FragDenStaat
FragDenStaat.de is a portal that supports citizens in submitting inquiries according to the Freedom of Information Act to state and federal authorities and directly documents these inquiries publicly. In addition, the project is also generally committed to strengthening the information rights of citizens in Germany. This is how it emerged in Berlin in cooperation with Mehr Demokratie Landesverband Berlin / Brandenburg e. V. also the referendum transparency, which wants to introduce a transparency law in Berlin with the help of a referendum .
Code for Germany
The Code for Germany project, launched in 2014, is an umbrella for local groups in many German cities, so-called OK Labs (Open Knowledge Labs), in which a wide variety of projects related to free knowledge and often with a local focus are implemented or funded. In addition to the term OK Lab, many groups also appear under the name “Code for X”, followed by the respective name of the city. Code for Germany is also part of the worldwide Code for All network.
The project aims to stimulate making public data accessible to third parties in a simple and clear way. In initially 14 OK Labs , volunteer programmers, designers, journalists and interested laypeople will develop practical applications from open data , also in exchange with politicians or administrative staff. According to the company, there are now OK Labs in 26 cities.
In 2020, Code for Germany, together with the Protoype Fund, was one of the co-initiators of the world's largest hackathon, WirVsVirus, of the federal government for projects against the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic .
Data school
The data school is an educational project that aims to train non-profit organizations in working with data and technologies and to implement data-supported projects with them. In 2017, together with Bildungscent e. V. the platform jedeschule.de, which is a collection of nationwide school data. During this period, the project was funded as a lighthouse project as part of the Google Impact Challenge. Since 2019 the data school has been implementing the environmental data school together with FragDenStaat.de.
Prototype Fund
The Prototype Fund is a funding project for public interest technologies that supports independent software developers and small teams in the development and implementation of open source ideas. Its aim is to contribute to digital-social innovation and to strengthen the ecosystem for experiments with non-profit software (even without profit orientation) - in the areas of civic tech, data literacy, data security and software infrastructure.
The Prototype Fund is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and should initially run over 8 tendering rounds from 2016 to 2020. On April 1, 2020, the project announced that the BMBF would fund a further 8 rounds. In seven funding rounds so far, 140 projects have been funded with around € 5.75 million (as of May 2020). At the end of May 2020, special funding of 1.5 million euros was also announced for 34 projects of the WirVsVirus hackathon of the federal government.
| round | Main topic | Finalists |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | (no main topic) | [1] |
| 2 | Tools for a strong civil society | [2] |
| 3 | Diversity - open source for everyone! | [3] |
| 4th | Power to the user! | [4] |
| 5 | Let machines learn - technologies for the future | [5] |
| 6th | Commit - renew system | [6] |
| 7th | Engineering trust - building trust | [7] |
| 8th | not a fixed topic | not yet known |
Turing bus
The Turing Bus is a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with the aim of enabling young people and young adults in rural areas to deal with the role of digitization and technology. For this purpose, the bus brings experts from FabLabs , hackerspaces and other digital areas to the regions to enable an exchange.
Controversy
In 2018 the Open Knowledge Foundation started the Openschufa project . The aim was to collect information about the algorithm that Schufa uses to carry out its credit ratings. For this purpose, a crowdsourcing platform was created on which citizens could upload their Schufascore and answer a few questions about their life situation. This data should then be used to draw conclusions about the algorithm. On the day of the announcement, Schufa published a press release that described the campaign as "misleading and against security and data protection in Germany" .
In cooperation with the Foodwatch association , FragDenStaat launched the Topf Secret campaign in 2019 , which should make it easier to request information on hygiene control reports in accordance with the Consumer Information Act . These control reports are not published in Germany, but it is possible to make an inquiry as to whether there are deficiencies in specific companies. The German Hotel and Restaurant Association criticized the project several times (“ populist hygiene pranger campaign ”) and announced that it would take legal action. He also recommended that its members make use of the opportunity to request disclosure of the applicant's name and address. The initiators of Topf Secret saw in this step an attempted intimidation of the inquirers.
Legal disputes
In particular in connection with the FragDenStaat project, there were repeated legal controversies with authorities.
In 2014, a user of FragDenStaat submitted a request to the Federal Ministry of the Interior regarding the Freedom of Information Act after the ministry had given its opinion on the threshold clause for the European elections. The ministry replied to the request but invoked copyright law and forbade publication on the website. FragDenStaat published the document anyway and thus became the target of a warning from the ministry. Both the Berlin Regional Court and the Court of Appeal in the second instance came to the conclusion that the present document had not reached its level of creation and that it was therefore not possible to invoke copyright law. A similar situation arose in 2019 when the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment issued an interim injunction for the platform to publish an opinion on the weed killer glyphosate.
As part of a request to the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution for environmental information, the latter cited an exception in the Constitutional Protection Act, according to which the Berlin Freedom of Information Act was not applicable to the authority. However, in an oral hearing on April 25, 2019, the Berlin Administrative Court made it clear that this position was illegal and stated that the exception was in part not in conformity with European law. Inquiries about the Environmental Information Act are therefore also possible with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
financing
The association is mainly financed by government grants (2017: 81% of total income, EUR 1.7 million) and donations (2017: 8%, EUR 0.17 million). The largest private donor in 2017 was Google (for Jugend hackt and CodeforGermany).
Awards
The projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been awarded various prizes.
2018
- BKM Prize for Cultural Education for the Jugend hackt project
- Theodor Heuss Medal for the Jugend hackt project
2017
- Excellent place in the land of ideas for the project kleineanfragen.de
- European Youth Culture Award for the Jugend hackt project
2016
- German engagement award for the youth hacking project
- Otto-Brenner Prize for the project in cooperation with FragDenBundestag.de abgeordnetenwatch.de
2015
- Excellent place in the country of ideas for the Politics project with us
- Dieter Baacke Prize for the Jugend hackt project
Furthermore, projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been nominated twice for the Grimme Online Award in the SPECIAL category. 2015 for the FragDenStaat.de project and 2019 for the OpenSchufa project .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ OKF profile. Retrieved May 26, 2019 .
- ^ Network. Retrieved May 26, 2019 (UK English).
- ^ OKF Association. Retrieved May 26, 2019 .
- ↑ How Young Hackers Defend Democracy. In: tip berlin. May 13, 2019, accessed May 26, 2019 .
- ↑ Christian Endt: Activists put all federal law gazettes online. sueddeutsche.de, October 12, 2018, accessed on October 8, 2019 .
- ↑ Jörg Thoma: Public data should really become public. Golem.de, July 21, 2014, accessed on March 22, 2016 .
- ↑ Kim Rixecker: Code for Germany: With open data for better cities. (No longer available online.) T3n.de, July 14, 2014, archived from the original on March 25, 2016 ; accessed on March 22, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Hilmar Schmundt: "WirVsVirus": The biggest hackathon in history. In: Der Spiegel . March 30, 2020, accessed April 9, 2020 .
- ↑ Jochen Schäfer: How Germany is hacking the corona virus. In: SWR Aktuell . March 22, 2020, accessed April 9, 2020 .
- ↑ Michael Metzger: #WirVsVirus: This is how the digital competition against the corona crisis went. In: t3n . March 30, 2020, accessed April 9, 2020 .
- ↑ Prototype Fund - We promote open source projects. Retrieved June 6, 2018 .
- ↑ Good News! In: prototypefund.de. Prototype Fund, April 1, 2020, accessed April 1, 2020 .
- ↑ Prototype Fund - We promote public interest tech. In: prototypefund.de. Retrieved May 22, 2020 .
- ↑ Government sponsors 34 projects from the hackathon on the corona crisis. In: Deutschlandfunk . May 20, 2020, Archived from the original on May 26, 2020 ; accessed on June 6, 2020 .
- ↑ Karliczek: Innovative ideas help us through the crisis. In: Federal Ministry for Education and Research . May 20, 2020, accessed May 22, 2020 .
- ^ Prototype Fund - Projects. In: prototypefund.de. Retrieved May 22, 2020 .
- ^ Turing bus. Retrieved June 23, 2019 .
- ↑ "Open Schufa" campaign misleading and against security and privacy in Germany. Retrieved June 23, 2019 .
- ↑ Elena Erdmann: OpenSchufa: The Schufa warns against complete disclosure . In: The time . March 17, 2018, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed June 23, 2019]).
- ^ DEHOGA Leipzig: Topf Secret: Authorities send hearing letters to the first companies. Retrieved June 23, 2019 .
- ^ Matthaes Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart Germany: The dispute over "Topf Secret" continues. Retrieved June 23, 2019 .
- ↑ heise online: Open Data: “Ask the State” wins against the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Retrieved June 23, 2019 .
- ↑ Freedom of information: FragdenStaat may not distribute glyphosate reports . In: Spiegel Online . April 2, 2019 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 23, 2019]).
- ↑ Arne Semsrott: Administrative Court: The Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution must provide information on environmental information. April 25, 2019, accessed June 23, 2019 .
- ↑ Financing on okfn.de
- ↑ Cultural education strengthens cohesion. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ Südwest Presse Online-Dienst GmbH: “Jugend hackt”: young talents receive Theodor-Heuss-Medal. June 19, 2018, accessed June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ kleineAnfragen.de. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ admin: The 2017 winners - European Youth Culture Award. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ Youth hacking. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ Online platform "Politics with us: Local politics for you". Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ GMK: Jugend hackt - Improving the world with code. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ All nominees - Grimme Online Award. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ All nominees - Grimme Online Award. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
