CKAN Turns 20
20
2006 – 2026 Celebrating 20 years of open data →
20

Twenty years of powering
open data worldwide

What started as a scrappy tool inspired by a Perl archive has become the world's leading open data infrastructure — powering governments, researchers, and NGOs on every continent.

Take part in the celebration Read our stories
20
Years open source
1,000+
Data portals worldwide
5,000
GitHub stars
200+
Contributors
Our Story
From a frustrated student to global infrastructure

In the early 2000s, Rufus Pollock was trying to answer big questions — how many people can the Earth support? The data was either impossible to find or locked behind paywalls costing thousands of dollars.

Inspired by CPAN — the Perl package archive — he built CKAN: a catalog for data. Two decades later, it powers national open data portals on every continent, from data.gov to open.canada.ca to datos.gob.mx.

CKAN is now recognized as a Digital Public Good, helping achieve 9 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

You'd read a book with loads of data... but when you went looking for the datasets, they just weren't available. The data existed — it just wasn't findable. That was the problem CKAN was built to solve.
— Rufus Pollock, Founder of CKAN
History
Twenty years, one milestone at a time

Click any event to learn more. From a scrappy open-source experiment to global data infrastructure.

Major milestone
Release
Community
2006
CKAN v0.1: the first commitMilestone▼
Rufus Pollock releases the first version of CKAN under the Open Knowledge Foundation. Inspired by CPAN, it was a simple catalog for open datasets.
"CKAN was never meant to become a big open source project. It started because I needed something that didn't exist — a CPAN for data."— Rufus Pollock, Founder
2010
CKAN 1.0 & data.gov.uk launchMilestone▼
Version 1.0 introduced critical improvements to authorization, search capabilities, and resource previews — and saw a major new production deployment with CKAN powering data.gov.uk.
2011
CKAN 1.3: harvesting & federationRelease▼
CKAN 1.3 introduced harvesting capabilities, enabling users to aggregate and import data from external sources. A pivotal step toward federated open data ecosystems.
2013
CKAN 2.0 & Data.gov migrationMilestone▼
Version 2.0 brought a significant architectural overhaul that drastically improved performance and scalability, supporting multiple organizations and enhancing user management and permissions. That same year, the US Government migrated Data.gov to CKAN, and Canada launched data.gc.ca (now open.canada.ca), featuring a comprehensive and fully bilingual metadata schema.
2015
Linked data, previews & visualizationsRelease▼
CKAN 2.3 brought support for linked data and the semantic web. CKAN 2.4 introduced resource views for tabular data, enabling users to visualize and explore their data in new ways.
2019
Datopian & Link Digital become co-stewardsCommunity▼
The Open Knowledge Foundation Board supported the joint stewardship proposal put forward by Link Digital and Datopian, with OKF remaining as purpose trustee to ensure the stewards remain true to the purpose and ethos of the CKAN project.
2020
CKAN 2.9: built for the modern webRelease▼
CKAN 2.9 replaced CKAN's web framework from Pylons to Flask and added support for Python 3. A landmark release that future-proofed the platform for years to come.
2021
CKAN Monthly Live launchesCommunity▼
Launched in June 2021, CKAN Monthly Live brought the global community together every third Wednesday for open demos, discussions, and connection — organised and moderated by Yoana Popova.
2023
Recognized as a Digital Public GoodMilestone▼
CKAN was recognized as a Digital Public Good for addressing multiple United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through enhanced data accessibility.
2024
CKAN 2.11: performance & data qualityRelease▼
CKAN 2.11 brought performance improvements in template and snippet rendering, as well as the new Table Designer feature to easily create and validate DataStore resources from the UI.
2026
20th Anniversary: the celebration yearMilestone▼
CKAN 2.12 — the final release in the 2.x series — lays the architectural groundwork for CKAN 3.0. The global community gathers to celebrate two decades of open source, open data, and open collaboration. You're part of this moment.
Global Reach
Open data,
everywhere

CKAN is the backbone of open data infrastructure on every continent — powering national governments, intergovernmental bodies, and research institutions since 2006.

0+
Active portals
0
Continents
0+
Countries
20
Years running
Featured portals
Portals by region

CKAN's reach spans every continent, with the strongest presence in Europe and Asia–Pacific.

🌍 Europe400+
data.gov.uk · data.gov.fr · govdata.de · opendata.swiss · and hundreds more
🌏 Asia–Pacific250+
data.gov.au · data.gov.sg · data.gov.in · data.govt.nz · and more
🌎 Americas200+
catalog.data.gov · open.canada.ca · dados.gov.br · datos.gob.mx · and more
🌍 Africa100+
data.humdata.org · opendata.go.ke · data.gov.za · data.gov.gh
🕌 Middle East50+
data.gov.ae · bayanat.ae · opendata.gov.qa
Ecosystem Catalogue
Discover the CKAN ecosystem
in one place

ecosystem.ckan.org is where the CKAN world comes together — a living catalog of CKAN-powered portals, extensions, and datasets from across the globe.

Explore ecosystem.ckan.org
📊
1k
Extensions
🌐
700
Sites
60+
Countries
Community Voices
The people who built, shaped,
and championed CKAN
"
Over the last 14 years, I've given to CKAN, and it's never failed to give back. As a software project, as a group of people, as a group of customers — it's never failed to give back. Every time I give in to it, it creates value. After 20 years, I just think this project is amazing. It deserves more people to invest in it.
SC
Steven De Costa
Co-Steward · Link Digital
"
What keeps me coming back to CKAN is the community. Twenty years in, it's still a place where a single motivated contributor can make a real difference. The codebase has grown enormously, but that spirit hasn't changed at all.
AM
Adrià Mercader
Lead Developer · CKAN Tech Team
"
I especially enjoy working across disciplines and sharing the experiences of CKAN users. Publishers are excited about sharing their data; data librarians improve classifications and help people find what they need; policymakers create new tools for ingesting and cleaning data. CKAN's real strength is its global and longstanding community of catalog owners, extension developers, integrators and users.
IW
Ian Ward
CKAN Tech Team · Link Digital
"
In the past 20 years, I've seen CKAN evolve from an Open Data Publishing application into a full-fledged Data Management System. With the ascent of AI — metadata, data governance and CKAN is back in fashion. As it turns out, FAIR data is AI-Ready Data — a token-efficient, fast, cost-effective way to relay context to AI.
JN
Joel Natividad
CEO · datHere
"
Every month I get to bring together people from governments, NGOs, and the open source world — all using CKAN in completely different ways. That diversity of use is what tells you a platform has really made it.
YP
Yoana Popova
Marketing & Comms Lead · Datopian
"
CKAN has outlasted frameworks, funding cycles, and political changes. Twenty years later, governments still choose it — not out of habit, but because it keeps delivering. That kind of staying power is rare in open source.
PD
Patricio del Boca
CKAN Tech Team · OKF
"
Every commit touches real infrastructure — datasets that inform policy, that citizens rely on, that researchers build on. CKAN is one of those rare projects where the line between code and public impact is genuinely short.
SM
Sergey Motornyuk
CKAN Tech Team · Link Digital
"
The plugin architecture means you're never trapped. You get the stability of a battle-tested core and the freedom to adapt it entirely to your context — whether that's a national government portal or a niche research dataset.
ES
Eric Soroos
CKAN Tech Team · Derilinx
Get Involved

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