Any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. The main principles are:

1. Free and open access to the material
2. Freedom to redistribute the material
3. Freedom to reuse the material
4. No restriction of the above based on who someone is (e.g. their nationality) or their field of endeavour (e.g. commercial or non-commercial)

The main purpose seems to be to apply to culture and knowledge the same principles that were developed for free and open source software. To achieve their objectives they work on several projects, a couple of which revolve around the idea of open data and open government too. Some of their projects are:

• Where Does My Money Go?
  A tool to visualize data on public finance for the UK.
• Public Domain Works
  A catalog of artistic works (currently limited to books and sound recordings) in the public domain.
• Open Shakespeare
  The complete works of Shakespeare, with notes and tools like search and text analysis.
• Open Data Commons
  Legal solutions and licenses to publish data sets.
• Open Textbooks
  A registry of textbooks free to use and distribute.

If you want to participate, they are very open to suggestions, proposals for new projects and, of course, donations. You can also take a look at the tasks list on their wiki.

This site is building an overview of European initiatives and activities around Open Government Data. While working on Open Gov Data it became clear to us that there are lots of European initiatives, data sets and examples that are hard to find outside their own language area. Therefore this site aims to be a collection of pointers.

On a country by country basis we will collect and share pointers to three types of content:

• Data sets, pointers with short descriptions of what’s available;
• Initiatives, pointers to policy initiatives, competitions, barcamps. Also as examples of what you can do in your own country;
• Mashups, example applications based on open government data.

See how you can help.