History 📖

Datopian’s story begins in 2004, when Dr Rufus Pollock founded the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), now an internationally-renowned non-profit that works towards a fair, free and open future.

While at OKF, Rufus started the open-source project CKAN, a tool for building data solutions that is now used by the likes of data.gov and the Fortune 500. Over the course of a decade, CKAN grew rapidly to become the most attractive open-source option for organizations of all sizes.

As more commercial opportunities for CKAN arose, in 2014 Rufus founded a sister-organization, Datopian (then Viderum), to provide a vehicle for these CKAN projects. Datopian continues to work closely with OKF to promote the adoption of CKAN across the globe. You can read more about our collaboration here.

Ethos

Datopian is driven by the conviction that the digital economy should empower everyone. Whether you’re a citizen searching online for a bus timetable, a human rights campaigner looking into government military intervention, or a CEO trying to work out how to increase profits, data is your primary ally.

Data holds the power not only to better understand our organizations and societies, but to actively influence and shape them. This is why data must continue to be democratized, taken out of the privileged remit of data scientists and made the everyday currency of all kinds of staff and citizens.

Datopian’s approach to working with data, particularly when designing solutions with clients, is informed by our commitment to democratizing the digital economy. Through equipping organizations with high-quality data and tooling, Datopian seeks to empower others to drive the world forward with data.

Values ⚖️

Datopian values judgement over rules, meaning that we put effort into explaining why we do things, rather than just stating how we do them. After all, every client is different, and so it follows that no one of our approaches should be the same.

Much like a master carpenter, we are driven by the belief that quality can only be achieved through a combination of rigour, hard graft and skill. We put time into refining our processes and strive for a job well done, a product well made.

Above all, we value simplicity. Systems for working with data should provide exactly what you need, with nothing missing and nothing in excess. Datopian is committed to removing the boundaries that prevent the free flow of data between people and organizations; innovation and transparency depend on it.

Projects

A number of projects are showcased in the featured section, however, there are other popular repositories that Datopian helps to maintain and support.

• Datopian is a co-steward of CKAN project https://github.com/ckan/ckan, an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals.
• Important, commonly-used datasets in high quality, easy-to-use & open form as data packages - https://github.com/datasets - where we have created our response to COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 by standardizing data and making it easy to read and work with.
• See more featured work below 👇🏼