Open Data Handbook 1.0 introduces open data

To help guide organisations that wish to open their data, the Open Knowledge Foundation has released version 1.0 of the "Open Data Handbook" which "discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data". The handbook is targeted at a broad audience, according to the announcement, but has a particular focus on open government data. It began development in October 2010 as the "Open Data Manual" at a book sprint in Berlin, organised by members of the Open Government Data and Open Data in the EU working groups at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It was then added to and refined by a wider group of editors to produce the current handbook.

The handbook explains what open data is, offers a process to choose datasets to be opened, and gives advice on selecting licences, making the data available and making it discoverable. It also covers what opening data can enable and what organisations opening up data can do to encourage a community of data consumers around that data with social media, hackdays, unconferences and meetups.

The "Open Data Handbook" is the first of a number of Open Knowledge Foundation publications being developed on data journalism, data patterns and finding public domain works. The "Open Data Handbook" is supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence.

(djwm)