Making AI work for communities

Hello Open Knowledge community, The future of our knowledge is at stake. Designing a public digital architecture to shift its accelerated enclosure course is our top priority at Open Knowledge Foundation. This month, we are turning that vision into tangible, cross-border collaboration, expanding our traceable AI pilots from Brazil to Uruguay, and diving deep into the delicate work of digitising at-risk physical archives alongside partners in Guatemala. Our AI Learning Labs are certainly fostering many insights. We have discovered that making AI trustworthy for public data is about far more than just the technical bridge; it requires a profound understanding of what the data actually means – by a human. We shared these lessons in a reflective text and in a webinar with the UN Big Data Hub, which brought together over 200 practitioners from across Latin America. Still on the Labs, scroll down for more lessons unpacked through ‘living learning resources’: bits of knowledge we are harvesting and sharing for community input, even without full development. On the advocacy front, we are preparing two major events in July: The Tech We Want for our Brain Commons and the launch of the SkyCommons Observatory. We have also listened to fresh insights from global policymakers on how to make open technology research genuinely influential, while an in-depth profile by the UK Data Service offers a rare look inside how we operate. There’s more: this newsletter brings you updates on CKAN 2.12 (almost here!) and the latest from the Open Knowledge Network around the world. Enjoy the reading. Roundtable Recap: How to digitise a physical archive to work strategically with AI? This question was at the heart of an online roundtable Open Knowledge hosted last month as part of our AI Learning Labs partnership with AVANCSO – the Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences in Guatemala – whose documentation centre is at risk. We heard from initiatives around the world that digitised archives of documents, photos, and audio, following different paths to preservation. Each told a story of breathing life into dusty archives by changing the way people are able to interact with the content. “The gap between the Global North and South shapes what is preserved and who can access historical records.” Alejandro Flores Aguilar 🎥 Watch New Uruguay/OKFN Partnership: Scaling reliable AI for open data across Latin America OKFN is announcing a new collaboration with the Agency for Electronic Government and the Information and Knowledge Society (AGESIC), a body under the Office of the President of the Republic of Uruguay, to make public data more accessible, reliable, and usable in the age of AI. As part of the AI Learning Labs initiative, we are prototyping an integration with Uruguay’s open data catalogue that enables citizens to ask natural-language questions and receive responses traceable directly to the underlying datasets – the same open bridge with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that is used in our concurrent pilot with Brazil. By running parallel pilots with two distinct national ecosystems, we are creating a reproducible blueprint for responsible AI integration with open data infrastructure with the potential to be shared by any government. MCP for Open Data Portals: Trust Depends on Understanding the Data In this text, Project Manager Kannika Thaimai shares some of the early lessons from OKFN’s most recent work on AI for public data. “Once we started building, we discovered that connecting an AI assistant to an open data portal was relatively straightforward. The bigger challenge was helping the system understand what the data actually means. A column name is not a definition, a dataset title is not a methodology, and a time series does not explain its own gaps. When an AI system lacks that context, it will often try to fill the gap itself.” When Open Data and Open Science met AI: MCPs bridging the gap To everyone attending Wikimania 2026 in Paris, please join our team for a workshop on our latest experiments with AI to enable data to be accessed and shared easily by anyone and to power other knowledge ecosystems. Living Learning Resources: Bits of knowledge to encapsulate what we are learning One of the principles of the AI Learning Labs is learning by doing and as a community. However, it is often difficult to find the time needed to distil discussions or the resources to produce more fully developed pieces of knowledge. That is why this year we are experimenting with a format of snippets gathered from project discussions – bits of open knowledge that we have come to call ‘living learning resources’. ‘Living’ because they are not in their final form and serve as an initial input, giving our communities space to collaborate. See below two resources published last month: Save the dates for two major events that OKFN is promoting in July. Freedom of thought is a precondition for open societies. The ability to think privately and freely, and to act without coercion, underpins all other fundamental rights. This freedom is now at risk as commercial brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are quietly entering consumer markets, workplaces, and public institutions. The vendors are racing to market with closed firmware, proprietary data and technology, cloud-only products that embed defaults hostile to user control. This one-day online summit, part of The Tech We Want series, will discuss how openness, understood as auditability, portability, and user control, can function as a practical governance mechanism, not in isolation, but as a structural enabler of institutional oversight and rights enforcement. The rapid deployment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services across the Global South and conflict zones reveals a consistent pattern: a tension between the urgent need for connectivity and the preservation of national digital sovereignty. While these services provide vital lifelines, they also introduce systemic risks, such as potential for market lock-in, data flow opacity, and a “single point of failure” risk where a nation’s critical infrastructure is subject to the political or personal interests of foreign actors. The Open Knowledge Foundation is addressing these issues with the SkyCommons Observatory. This platform will provides visualisations of current and prospective satellites, as well as a map of providers and associated risks. At this event, we will publicly launch the platform and discuss the future of LEO satellites with experts in digital policy, telecommunications infrastructure, and geopolitics. Open Knowledge and Critical Infrastructure: a Nordic Conversation Last week in Oulu and remotely, the Nordic Open Movement and their friends, comprised by archivists, researchers, Wikimedians, open data advocates, Open Knowledge Network members, journalists, cultural practitioners, and digital rights experts, gathered around a question: What would change if societies recognized and protected knowledge systems as critical infrastructure? The discussion was part of a new initiative led by the Open Knowledge Foundation in collaboration with the Wikimedia Policy team and other partners across the open knowledge movement. Our shared concern is that while governments are investing heavily in digital sovereignty and digital public infrastructure, they continue to overlook knowledge infrastructure. Our objective is to make a strong case for sustained support. Policymaker Perspectives on Open Technology Research As part of developing the Open Technology Research (OTR) shared research agenda, the initiative conducted a series of interviews with policymakers and public sector practitioners across multiple regions and institutional contexts. These ranged widely, from national digital transformation agencies in the Global South to digital ministries in Asia Pacific and Europe to sub-national legislative staff in the United States. This article summarises the (early) key findings from our ongoing conversations with policymakers. Our findings focus on how policymakers actually engage with evidence on open technology, where the most consequential gaps lie, and what the research community would need to do differently to have genuine influence on public decisions. OKFN profiled by UK Data Service: How open principles become open practice A few weeks ago, the UK Data Service brought together members of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Knowledge Network teams to discuss our work in depth. The discussion was so fruitful that the collective interview was split into two posts. 🌱 How can many perspectives share one voice in the Open Knowledge Foundation? 🌱 How can open principles become open practice? This is an important resource to help you understand how OKFN operates, working across so many fronts yet always committed to openness as a fundamental principle of knowledge, content, data and technology. CKAN 2.12 is coming: help us ship the best CKAN yet KAN 2.12 is the most significant release in years. Faster large dataset downloads – up to 15x in some configurations. A meaningfully leaner, more secure Docker base. A stack of long-standing issues finally resolved. If you’ve been running a CKAN portal and quietly absorbing its rough edges, this release is for you. We’ve formally opened the release process. The code is ready to be tested, translated, and documented – and the quality of this release depends directly on how many people do that work over the coming weeks. 📘 The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices (Open Book Publishers, 2026) examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts. 📖 This article by our partners at OpenForum Europe analyses how the EU’s Tech Sovereignty Package breaks new ground by finally positioning open source as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought. While the initiative is a welcome shift with ambitious goals for public sector adoption and critical infrastructure, the authors caution that its success hinges on overcoming several practical hurdles—namely, clarifying the relationship with open standards, expanding the focus to include hardware, securing more substantial funding, and building deep technical skills rather than just surface-level awareness. 📉 Is AI profitable yet? This site tracks cumulative spend versus revenue across most major AI companies in one place, allowing you to see approximately how much money is flowing into the industry and how far it is from breaking even. So is commercial AI profitable yet? No, everyone’s broke. These are the latest discussions on the Open Knowledge Forum. Have your say! @jamaica on CKAN Category Mods & Admins ↗ “There is a small team of CKAN ecosystem members working behind the scenes (and sometimes upfront through posts like these!) to help coordinate this discussion space, and to keep it functional, welcoming, and respectful.” @kannika on AI Learning Labs ↗ What kind of metadata or documentation is most useful when open data is accessed through an AI interface?” @petermr on AI Learning Labs ↗ “My main fear of chatbots is that the general models on the web are untrustable. Most of the time they’ll be reasonably ok, but occaisonally they’ll hallucinate.” Check out the latest highlights from our global movement. 🇳🇵 Open Knowledge Nepal MuLCAM linguistic corpus launched: OKN introduced MuLCAM, an open linguistic corpus building the language foundation for Nepal’s digital safety needs, supporting better evidence and cross-border coordination on online harassment cases. Open Data Nepal gets smarter and easier to use: Three major upgrades are now live, including AI integration for natural-language data exploration, plus Seamless Publishing and a Comprehensive Data Explorer that make contributing and finding data simpler than ever. When Algorithm Decides: OKN’s new zine, drawing on stories from Nepali creators, journalists, and activists, documents how automated content moderation systems (built far from Nepal and trained mostly in English) silence local voices, and the transparency, language, and accountability gaps behind it. 🇸🇪 Open Knowledge Sweden is attending Almedalsveckan (Almedalen Week), an open and democratic meeting place where everyone is welcome to participate and contribute. Recognised as a leading political festival, Almedalsveckan has inspired similar events in several countries over the years. We are part of a panel about lobbyism and government transparency, “Can Transparency hinder Trumpism?”, hosted by a new civic tech project called The Government Check (Regeringskollen), which intends to gather and analyse data about government and if it has done what it promised during election campaigns. Save the dates! Wikimania 2026 Paris 21–25 July Wikimania is celebrating 25 years since the creation of Wikipedia. Yet the world has never been so dangerous for the free encyclopedia and its entire ecosystem. Wikimania 2026 is an opportunity to take action to preserve free access to knowledge. Open Technology Research Symposium Barcelona 26–27 October This global, multidisciplinary research symposium brings academics and practitioners together to advance understanding of the role of open technologies in the modern world and produces policy-relevant research that helps decision-makers drive impact. Entry is free of charge. Abrelatam Condatos 2026 Guatemala City 7–9 October Abrelatam is at the heart of the conversation on open data in Latin America and the Caribbean, bringing together governments, academia, the private sector and civil society to tackle local and global challenges. This event facilitates collaboration and dialogue across multiple sectors to advance transparency, inclusive development and the strengthening of democracy through data. Internet Governance Forum 2026 Nairobi 14–18 December The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a global multistakeholder platform that facilitates discussions on public policy issues pertaining to Internet governance. The IGF was one of the most important outcomes of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that mandated the United Nations Secretary-General to formally convene the Forum. About us. Open knowledge is any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s mission is to create a fair, sustainable and open digital future, advancing open knowledge as a design principle beyond just data. We do it by guiding and supporting the creation of digital infrastructure, developing policies and methodologies, harnessing communities and advocating for literacies and standards in a sustainable, ethical and agile manner.