CKAN at 20: What the Community Says Matters Most Now (recap fom CKAN Monthly Live #39)

On January 21, the CKAN community met for the first CKAN Monthly Live of 2026. The session marked two milestones: Year 2 of the NSF-funded POSE Phase II project and the start of CKAN’s 20th anniversary year.

The session was focused on specific activities planned under the POSE project and how the community can participate in CKAN@20 initiatives throughout 2026.

This article summarizes the most valuable takeaways from the session.

POSE Phase II: From understanding the ecosystem to strengthening it

Bob Gradeck (University of Pittsburgh) opened with a brief framing of POSE Phase II. After a Phase I focused on listening and mapping the CKAN ecosystem, Phase II is about putting structures in place that make the ecosystem easier to join, easier to sustain, and easier to grow.

The team’s current goals are clear:

• Create clear onboarding pathways for new contributors and users
• Define practical roles and participation models across the ecosystem
• Support adoption and long-term use of CKAN
• Explore sustainability and funding models
• Establish ecosystem health metrics that can be tracked over time

The throughline: CKAN’s technical strength is well proven. The next gains will come from improving how people find each other, learn from each other, and contribute over time.

Storytelling isn’t “nice to have” — it’s infrastructure

One of the strongest signals from last year’s listening sessions — and reinforced again in this call — is that CKAN needs a better way to capture and reuse its stories.

Storytelling: What kinds of CKAN stories do you want to hear — and what stories could you share?

Liz Monk and Nora Mattern introduced two upcoming storytelling workshops as an open invitation to the CKAN community to share input and help shape how CKAN stories are captured and sustained.

The workshops are designed to gather community perspectives on how to capture and share practical knowledge about using and sustaining CKAN in a consistent, low-barrier way.

In the first workshop, participants will work together to identify what information actually makes a CKAN story useful and to co-create a simple, shared template that can support different story types. In the second workshop, the conversation moves to how stories could be collected, stewarded, maintained, and shared over time — an idea that surfaced during listening sessions and is referred to as a potential “storytelling core.”

The goal is not marketing content, but shared, reusable knowledge that supports adoption, peer learning, and long-term sustainability across the CKAN ecosystem.

Register below to join the workshops:

With that framing, the community was invited to respond.

What kinds of CKAN stories would actually be useful to you?

Community input: what stories people actually want

The discussion quickly got specific — and very useful. Participants were not asking for promotional case studies. They described stories as valuable when they help people make decisions, justify investments, and learn from real experience.

Several themes emerged:

1) Show end-user and societal impact, not just dataset counts

Impact stories help justify investment and expand adoption beyond the usual open data circles. People want to see more “why” and less “how many datasets” stories focused on:

• how published data is used,
• what impact it has,
• and how to trace that impact (e.g., citations in academic publishing).

How is the data actually used? What changes because it exists?
David Caraway

2) Explain “why CKAN” decisions

Multiple participants reinforced the value of “why CKAN” stories — because these are the stories new adopters look for when choosing a platform.

Why was CKAN chosen? What alternatives were considered? What tradeoffs mattered?

3) Migration stories

Experiences migrating from proprietary solutions to CKAN (benefits, tradeoffs, lessons).

4) Document long-term sustainability

Long-term survivability is a differentiator — people want the “how did you keep it running?” playbook.

How do 10-year-old CKAN deployments survive upgrades, funding cycles, uncertainty, sustainability questions, institutional change?
Patricio Del Boca

5) Support peer learning between operators

Portal operators want to find others with similar setups so they can compare approaches and avoid solving the same problems alone. Stories aren’t only outward-facing — they’re also internal knowledge exchange and community-building tools.

I run a CKAN portal in Toronto — who else has a similar setup so we can compare notes? We use CKAN in a particular way — how unique is that?
Mackenzie Nichols

6) “Meta stories” — connecting CKAN to bigger themes like trust, AI readiness, and open societies

A strong narrative thread is “trusted data infrastructure for society,” especially as AI increases demand for reliable sources.

• trustworthiness of data,
• the rising role of data in AI,
• and why CKAN-backed data portals matter more (not less) in an AI era.

CKAN isn’t just catalogs — it’s part of the infrastructure for open societies. Trusted, well-described data matters more - not less - in an AI-driven world.
Fergal Marrinan

CKAN Ecosystem Catalog

Joel Natividad and Abdur Rahman Mohammed previewed the CKAN Ecosystem Catalog, a new platform built with CKAN itself to catalog the ecosystem — not just data.

What’s live today (in preview):

• A directory of CKAN extensions
• A growing catalog of public CKAN deployments
• Automatically captured metadata (CKAN version, extensions, dataset counts)
• Discussion spaces linked to extensions and sites
• Weekly time-series updates for ecosystem analytics

Why this matters:

• The ecosystem currently suffers from low visibility — people rebuild similar things because they can’t find what already exists.
• Existing resources (like extensions.ckan.org) are hard to maintain centrally.
• Operators want to know: Who else is doing something like this?

Key feedback from the community:

• Extension metadata today is often too thin — people want clearer descriptions, screenshots, examples, and real-world usage notes.
• There’s a need to handle forks and abandoned extensions thoughtfully.
• Many CKAN deployments are not publicly listed anywhere, making self-reporting and easy curation essential.
• The catalog must stay community-curated to avoid becoming stale or misleading.

The catalog is intentionally launching as a work in progress, with an invitation for maintainers and operators to claim and improve their entries. A broader public launch is planned around Open Data Day in March.

Github: https://github.com/dathere/ckanext-pose_ecosystem_catalog

Events, funding, and shared discussions

Following the Ecosystem Catalog preview, Jamaica Jones shifted the conversation from tools to how the community connects and collaborates in practice.

Drawing on last year’s listening sessions, she explained that the POSE team is exploring ways to support shared discussions and community-led activities around topics that repeatedly come up across the CKAN ecosystem. These are not predefined programs, but open invitations to coordinate where there is interest.

Examples raised during the session included:

• responding collectively to policy consultations (such as the European Commission’s open digital ecosystem strategy),
• sharing awareness of funding and research opportunities relevant to open-source and open data infrastructure,
• and creating space to discuss recurring operational topics like AI readiness, bots and scrapers, standards and best practices, and long-term sustainability.

The open question the POSE team is now exploring with the community:

What lightweight structures, platforms, or toolkits would help people spin up working groups quickly — by topic, region, or opportunity?

CKAN@20: a distributed, community-led anniversary year

Rather than one central event, CKAN’s 20th anniversary is shaping up as a year-long, globally distributed celebration.

The vision:

• Many local or thematic events
• Anchored moments like Open Data Day
• Shared storytelling, templates, and communications support
• A small coordination layer — but lots of community ownership

The invitation is open: if you want to collaborate or contribute, the POSE and CKAN teams want to support you.

What to do next

If any of this resonated:

• Join the Storytelling Workshops
  • Workshop 1 — February 19 · 14:00–15:30 UTC — Register here
  • Workshop 2 — March 19 · 14:00–15:30 UTC — Register here
• Explore and contribute to the Ecosystem Catalog
  • https://ecosystem.ckan.org/
  • Github: https://github.com/dathere/ckanext-pose_ecosystem_catalog
• Share ideas for topics, events, or working groups (you can write to poseckan@pitt.edu)
• Get involved in CKAN@20 planning or local celebrations
  • contact Yoana Popova yoana.popova@datopian.com or Jamaica Jones JAJ160@pitt.edu, if you want to get involved

Stay tuned for the recording!