Announcing the CKAN Partner programme

The Open Knowledge Foundation is working to promote open data tools across the planet - through a programme to help partner organisations provide CKAN consultancy and support. The open source code of CKAN and related tools means that if you want support, you have the option of coming to the OKF, which leads the development effort - but you also have the option of going somewhere else. A number of other organisations are now providing CKAN-related services, and to recognise this, we've put together a partner programme, working with like-minded organisations around the world to help them provide high-quality CKAN set-up, customisation, support and hosting. There are currently 7 partners in 6 countries, and we are continuing to bring new partners on board. This means that organisations all over the world who want to deploy CKAN, configure it, integrate it with other tools, etc, can get expert services from local suppliers, while knowing that that organisation is an active member of the CKAN community. Among our partners is New Amsterdam Ideas, a New York-based firm that specialises in website development and Drupal support for public sector and other non-profit organisations. They are working with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning on a CKAN-powered data portal for Chicago, which will integrate a CKAN portal with other site content produced in Drupal. Another partner, Flo Apps in Finland, set up and support a similar portal in Helsinki. The Semantic Web Company in Austria has worked with CKAN for some time on the Europe-wide LOD2 project on Linked Data. We look forward to continuing to work with existing and new partners, giving clients more choice of supplier and increasing the tools available to them according to the specialisms of different partners.