Reinvigorating with clear, dynamic and invested leadership
Back in early June the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) supported the joint stewardship proposal put forward by Link Digital and Datopian.
Being appointed a co-steward of the CKAN project allows Link to be a key part of ensuring the CKAN community thrives as an engaged and active group of believers. It also recognises Link’s strong connection to OKF in both principle based action and specific alignment to CKAN’s mission surrounding a community of open data advocates contributing toward an open data project.
What does CKAN Stewardship really mean
Put simply CKAN is a tool for data sharing. That ‘sharing’ is at the heart of its very beginnings and critical to its future. Being open source, it is supported and nourished by a broad community of active, informed and devoted stakeholders – the true believers. With OKF retaining a trustee role to ensure ongoing commitment to the mission, appointing a small, highly accountable and identifiable group of stewards to provide leadership was identified as a timely response. Together with Datopian we aim to bring about the best possible future for the CKAN project, it’s stakeholders and end users. It helps too that Link is one of the longest standing current CKAN contributors . A long time Gold Member of the CKAN Association, we have provided expertise across the steering group, community and technical teams, demonstrating an unfaltering commitment to CKAN’s growth and prosperity.
As well as our ideas around working with, and for the community and, indeed, building the community, the CKAN co-stewards will address setting and implementing the technical direction of the project. We encourage all stakeholders, who have not already done so, to read our co-stewarding proposal to understand the thinking behind this CKAN Project leadership approach and our commitment.
Hitting the ground running alongside our stewarding buddies
Immediately following the bilateral stewardship appointment, Link Digital’s Managing Director, Steven De Costa and Datopian CEO Paul Walsh caught up in Tel Aviv to plan and bed down some exciting initiatives. A couple right off the bat include:
Call to action for Py3 nominations. A first step came in mid June with the call for registrations from users, vendors and developers to support shipping CKAN 2.9 on Python3. If you’re just hearing about this now, it’s not too late to join the Py3 team. For developers willing, able and ready to contribute to the 2.9 release, the date for an upcoming Sprint will be locked in shortly.
Freshening up. New branding and community development activities are on the 2020 horizon.
Investing from the get go! As stewards we are delivering on an immediate $70k combined investment.
As the two lead investors and curators of CKAN over the past 5 – 10 years, the Link Digital and Datopian co-stewarding appointment represents benefits for our clients and sets us apart from other CKAN vendors. Link Digital will shortly be contacting clients around their specific readiness in anticipation for the CKAN 2.9 release.
Existing and new clients are welcome to contact us if you would like an obligation free assessment of your CKAN configuration and set of extensions.
