OPEN KNOWLEDGE FINLAND
ANNUAL REPORT 2020
OKFI highlights 2012-2020
Year 2020 was exceptional and affected by the covid-19 pandemic. All face-to-face events were organised online or cancelled. Also the board has had online-only meetings since March. There were also changes in the board membership. Tarmo Toikkanen, the chair between January and March, started as a project coordinator in the CreaTures project and executive director of OKFI. Thus, he had to resign from the position of the chair. I temporarily took this position as the vice-chair, and this change was made official in the spring general assembly. The board also got slightly smaller during spring as two members resigned. When the pandemic landed to Finland in March, active discussion started also within OKFI about our possible role to help and bring expertise in open data and open democracy to the administration. Our members were actively participating in various self-organised groups about covid-19. In the end, there was less communication and collaboration between the administration and the civic society than what we had expected and hoped for. I applaud our members who have politely but persistently contacted covid-19 modellers and asked them to open the source code of the models that are an important basis for many of the government | decisions. Democracy needs openness also in technical details, because they make a huge difference in a pandemic. OKFI is still looking for an optimal focus and way of working now when the MyData activities are happening in our sister organisation MyData Global. We are seeking for some permanent funders, but that has proven difficult. In the meantime, we must be very active in applying for new projects, as they are our most important source of funding in the current situation. As the membership fee was introduced, we lost many nominal, passive members. However, I am happy about a fairly large amount of people, who actively want to participate in our mission: 128 individual and 10 organisational members at the end of the year. As the covid-19 vaccinations progress, we see light at the end of tunnel. |
Chair’s review of 2020
Jouni Tuomisto
chair
A major philosophical change happened in the autumn general meeting of 2019, when our members decided to make OKFI membership fees mandatory. Since the foundation of OKFI in 2012, membership fees have been voluntary. During spring and summer of 2020 we have been contacting our 500+ members. In the end, over 100 of them we more than happy to support OKFI with a paid membership. Of the 400 that did not, quite a few did not even remember being members, or were unreachable due to obsolete contact information. In the end, we now have a more solid and functional member base, with up-to-date contact information and a commitment to help the open knowledge movement in Finland. In 2019 we experimented with four separate part-time support roles. Understandably it is hard for people to commit to a part-time contract, so people were finding new opportunities and keeping these roles filled was quite challenging. In 2020 the roles of sysadmin, project support and financial controller were in fact being handled by me, and thus it seemed simpler to just coalesce them into a single part-time executive director position. So from April 2020 onwards I changed by role from chair to executive director. | Of course, covid-19 was the global big news of 2020. OKFI’s events were cancelled and turned into online versions of themselves. Our various projects continued without face-to-face meetings. Generally this virtual work mandate has not been a problem for OKFI, since we have implemented all our activities so they allow for both physical and virtual attendance, whenever possible. But some project activities planned for 2020 have been understandably delayed. I continue in the executive director role during 2021, keeping the daily gears of OKFI turning, handling administration, membership, finances, system administration, project support, representing OKFI in various committees, and looking for new opportunities. |
Executive director’s review of 2020
Tarmo Toikkanen
tarmo@okf.fi
Numbers 2020 (2019)
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Numerot 2020 (2019)
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*) Vuonna 2020 käyttöönotettu pakollinen jäsenmaksu siivosi jäsenrekisteristä suuren määrän passiivisia jäseniä.
WORKING GROUPS
AvoinGLAM is a Finnish OpenGLAM working group for Open Access to cultural heritage.
Contact person: Tuomas Nolvi
Web: AvoinGLAM
Facebook: Avoin GLAM
Twitter: Avoin GLAM (@avoinGLAM)
Highlights in 2020
The Hack4FI hackathon was set out to take place in March 2020 at the Finnish National Gallery. The pre-event university tour introducing OpenGLAM, open licensing, linked open data and APIs was organized in 5 institutions, but the event itself was cancelled due to the coronavirus precautions.
Instead, the event was transformed into an international online Hack4OpenGLAM hackathon that was attended by over 100 participants over a 5-day program, including a 14-hour workshop marathon. Most of the Finnish GLAM partners in Hack4FI joined Hack4OpenGLAM as well.
Highlights in 2020
The Creative Commons Global Summit was originally planned to be held in Lisbon in May, but it had to me transformed into an online event due to the coronavirus situation. The virtual Creative Commons Global Summit took place on 19.–23. October 2020.
Susanna acted as the program co-chair of the event.
She was elected a member of the CC Global Network Executive Committee starting in 2021.
The Creative Commons Finland chapter was established in the end of 2018. The country lead is Tarmo Toikkanen and the Global Network Council representative is Susanna Ånäs.
FINLAND
PUBLIC SERVICES
tietopyynto.fi
OKFI provides a free online service for anyone to perform a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to any public entity in Finland. The service has been in use for many years and is an important resource for citizens, activists and non-profit organizations.
A total of 733 FOI requests have been sent through the service.
meet.okf.fi
OKFI provides a free video conferencing service based on the open source tool Jitsi. This service is hosted in Finland and has no tracking of users whatsoever. The service is provided as-is.
meet.okf.fi is suitable for small to medium meetings in Finland where paying for premium video conferencing is not an option, and where the privacy violating tracking of free online services is a problem.
OKFI discussions
OKFI’s discussions are open to all members, but also by invitation to all others interested in discussing topics around open data, open knowledge and open society.
Currently over 700 people participate in and follow the discussions, of which about 50 are engaged in daily regular dialogue. Messages are spread out quite evenly (⅓ each) between public channels, private channels and direct messages.
PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
2020
The Internet plays a vital role in how we see the world, from capturing acts of strength and courage to shining a light on injustice. Whatever the purpose or the user, access to information has become paramount at the local and global level. But who gets to own our digital identity? How can we put an end to today’s digital divide? How can we be sure of getting high-quality information online? On October 10, take a seat at the Global Citizens’ Dialogue on Internet and directly influence the digital developments of your own city and region.
OKFI organized the dialogues in Finland during autumn 2020. Due to the covid-19 situation, the dialogues had to be organized as video meetings, which was suboptimal. Results were translated and collected into WTI’s database.
More information: https://wetheinternet.org/
Global Citizens’ dialogue “We, the Internet”
We The Internet first results video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP3a6oMX_V4
An important role of OKFI materialised when the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) published several epidemic models about the covid-19 situation and prognosis in Finland. They did not, however, publish all source codes and parameters used in these models.
Therefore, It was very difficult for outsiders to understand the details and rationale of the models. This resulted in an intensive and still ongoing discussion - partly private, partly public - between THL modellers and OKFI members, many of whom are modelling experts themselves. Some codes have been released, but some disputes are even being handled in the administrative court.
The case demonstrates that even organisations that have committed to open science struggle to change their daily practices. These difficulties only become visible when openness is required.
Opening covid-19 models
Example predictions made by THL published in March 2020.
The CreaTures project promotes action for social and ecological sustainability by identifying those aspects of creative practices that contribute most effectively to positive social transformation.
Funded by the EU Commission, this 11 partner project is ongoing, timeline 2020-2023.
More information at: https://creatures-eu.org/
CreaTures - Creative Practices for Transformational Futures
DigId seeks to understand how MyData concepts and possibilities are communicated effectively to various citizen groups. This is achieved through a series or workshops where we work with eg. youth, families, immigrants, companies, non-profits, and the public sector.
The project is funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The two year project started in autumn 2020 and continues at least until the end of 2021. Covid-19 has complicated the arrangement of effective workshops.
DigId - MyData Media Literacy
The first-ever Hack4OpenGLAM was arranged to replace the cancelled Hack4FI – Hack Your Heritage hackathon at the Finnish National Gallery in March 2020. The core team from AvoinGLAM Tove Ørsted, Tuomas Nolvi, Ranjit Menon and Susanna Ånäs prepared the event together with students of the H2020 European Training Network POEM Angeliki Tzouganatou, Franziska Mucha, and Quoc Tan-Tran. The project listing of the event, the Hack4OpenGLAM Dashboard was developed by Mikael Hannolainen.
The program kicked off with a 14-hour workshop day with presenters spanning the entire world. During the Creative Commons Summit days, the participants worked independently on their projects and convened again for a final gala one day after the summit.
AvoinGLAM is seeking to organize Hack4OpenGLAM again in 2021.
Read about the event in OpenGLAM Medium.
Hack4OpenGLAM
PROJECTS ACTIVE DURING THE YEAR 2020 ��
Project | Funder |
DSM Transposition | Wikimedia Deutchland |
Hack4FI 2020 → Hack4OpenGLAM | City of Helsinki |
Tietopyyntö.fi | self-funded |
CreaTures | EU Commission |
We the Internet | Missions Publiques, France |
DigId - MyData Media Literacy | Ministry of Culture, Finland |
Supporting Creative Commons Licenses | self-funded (previous funders: Ministry of Culture, Finland) |
Opening covid-19 models | self-funded |
PEOPLE, PARTNERS & EVENTS
FUNDERS 2020
ADVOCACY GROUPS IN 2020
MEMBERS OF THE BOARD 2020
Covid-19 is still keeping us away from meeting each other and from our great new facilities in Maria01 / Urban3. This situation hopefully improves during summer 2021 and we can get back to normal in the fall. Enhanced collaboration with sister organisations: MyData Global, COSS, Open Knowledge Foundation. There is still room for a more active advocacy work. The world is changing rapidly. Although the support for openness is mainstream, this does not mean that organisations actually can and want to open their data and processes for the society at large. The activities about opening covid-19 models has raised an idea of an OKFI project to nudge organisations toward openness by offering practical guidance and training. | |
Chair’s thoughts on 2021
Jouni Tuomisto
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All texts CC BY 4.0.
Editing and layout
by Riia Järvenpää