CKAN Monthly Newsletter #1, February 2023

Dear CKAN community,

Welcome to CKAN Monthly Newsletter #1! It's been a while since we last connected! We're thrilled to bring you the first edition of our monthly newsletter! We believe that this newsletter will become an essential source of information for our community, and it's going to evolve and improve every month.

In this newsletter, we aim to provide you with a summary of what's happening in the CKAN world each month. From new developments to upcoming events and everything in between, you'll find it all here. But we can't do this alone! We would love to hear from you and hear about any news or events that you would like to share with the community. If you have any information that you'd like to see included in next month's newsletter, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the first edition of our newsletter! And, a big shoutout to our enthusiastic and dedicated Product Owner, Alex Gostev who’s leading this initiative and all those who contributed to make this first issue a reality! Alex’s passion and drive continues to inspire the team to strive for excellence and constantly enhance the project!

We all know that 2022 has been a year of change and growth for CKAN. As we enter a new year, we thought it was a perfect time to reflect on all the exciting things that happened in our community over the past 12 months. If you haven't already, we highly recommend checking out Yoana Popova's summary of the highlights from 2022!

Announcements

• Hiring Update
  
  • The search for a developer to join the CKAN 3.0 team is underway.
  • Initial interviews are scheduled.
  • Thanks to Anuar Ustayev for driving this forward!
• Chatbot
  
  • The chatbot on ckan.org is now live and active.
  • During the first week, we received 5 conversations, including 1 commercial lead and 2 questions from developers, among others.
  • A big shoutout to Alex for pushing on this!
    
• FAQ Page
  
  • A new FAQ page has been added to ckan.org, with the first 20 questions filled out by Yoana Popova and Adrià Mercader.
  • The page was delivered by Aleksey Morev, and it's still being updated.
    
• National Science Foundation CKAN POSE project
  
  • Phase 1 has started, led by Bob Gradeck and Nora Mattern from the University of Pittsburgh and supported by datHere.
  • This phase is a research phase, where CKAN is being evaluated alongside other open-source projects of national and societal importance.
  • Ecosystem Discovery Workshops: A series of workshops will be conducted in the next few months with different communities of practice of the CKAN ecosystem (e.g. data portal operators, system integrators, contributors, data publishers, data journalists, data scientists, etc.). This is all being done in preparation for a Phase 2 proposal that could provide $1.5 million to support and scale-up the CKAN ecosystem.
    
    • Questions you’d like to ask about CKAN: The team is compiling a list of questions you may have about CKAN. Please feel free to add your questions to the list.
    • Sign-up for the workshops: The schedule and sign-up form for these workshops will be available and shared on ckan.org in the next few weeks.
    • Contact Information: For questions or concerns, you can reach the team at pose.ckan@pitt.edu.
      
• CKAN Monthly Live
  
  • The January CKAN Monthly Live was about taking the CKAN Datastore to the next level with DataPusher+. Thanks to Joel Natividad for the great presentation! Don't miss out on our upcoming meetup featuring Oleg Lavrovsky who will delve into the latest advancements in DCAT standards and will also announce his exciting plans for several hackathons throughout the year, including a major one in March that could be of interest to our international community.

News

• Upcoming authentication changes in CKAN 2.10
• New security Advisory on some of the CKAN Docker images

Extensions updates

• Ckanext-scheming 3.0 and Dataset Form Pages: check it out here
• Ckanext-spatial 2.0 is out, with a complete rewrite of the spatial search, new map search widget and revised documentation. It also drops the PostGIS requirement to make installation and deployment easier. Check it out here.
• DataPusher+ is a fork of Datapusher that combines the speed and robustness of ckanext-xloader with the data type guessing of Datapusher.

GitHub Updates

Contributors to the CKAN core

• Adria Mercader
• Sergey Motornyuk
• Anuar Ustayev
• Shashi Gharti
• Jesse Vickery
• Eric Soroos
• Gaurav Pandey
• Sam
• Patricio Del Boca
• Konstantin Sivakov
• Fuhu Xia
• Brett Jones
• Rukshan Ranatunge
• Rabia Sajjad
• Ian Ward

1-question survey

What are the best sources for discovering open data peers, news, and portals in your region? Can you suggest the top information sources you use for finding open data?

Hit the button below and share your top sources for discovering open data with Alex Gostev. Your contribution will greatly benefit everyone by expanding our collective knowledge of valuable open data resources. Share with Alex here.

Want to get involved?
We're a diverse and distributed community of 240 contributors from all over the world and diverse backgrounds, united by our mission to create the best data management system on the internet.

If you love data and python then join one of the weekly Dev Meetings. These are open to anyone so feel free to drop by and ask questions or just listen in. Maybe you can even help with issues marked as Good for Contribution or tackle some of the project's Rockstar Tickets listed here.

• Chat to us on Gitter
• Join Dev Meetings

Need help with CKAN?
If you’re stuck on anything, chances are the answers awaits you on Stackoverflow or in the docs. GitHub Discussions is the place to connect with the community, share your projects and ask questions or support requests about CKAN.

If you want to report a bug or an actual issue with the CKAN software or documentation, please post it on the issue tracker. For security related issues please email security@ckan.org.

• GitHub Discussions
• Check Stackoverflow
• Create an issue on GitHub
• Chat to us on Gitter
  

Share Your Experience
Join the conversation on @CKANproject and share your experience using #CKAN! Don’t forget to subscribe to the CKAN Association YouTube Channel to receive updates!

Stay Connected
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube and join our LinkedIn Group to get notified and be able to sign up for future sessions. You can also visit our website and blog to learn more!

Our LinkedIn Page is brand new - follow us there and spread the word!

Thank you for being a part of the CKAN community, and we look forward to keeping you informed and engaged in the months ahead!

Best regards,
CKAN Project Team