CKAN turns 20. Explore how an open-source experiment became global data infrastructure, powering governments, research, and public-interest data worldwide.
In 2026, CKAN — the world's leading open-source data management system — marks its 20th anniversary.
What started as a scrappy tool inspired by a Perl archive has grown into global infrastructure powering data portals for governments, research institutions, and organizations on every continent. This is a moment to look back, celebrate, and shape what comes next.
In the late 1990s, a curious teenager named Rufus Pollock was trying to answer big questions — how many people can the Earth support? Are we running out of fossil fuels? What will the population be in 2050? He found books filled with charts and tables, but the raw data behind them was either impossible to find or locked behind paywalls costing $10,000 or more.
That frustration planted a seed.
While studying at Cambridge, Rufus encountered the world of open-source software — Linux, Debian, and especially CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), a centralized catalog where developers could publish, discover, and build on each other's code. The experience was revelatory. The idea clicked: what if data had the same kind of collaborative infrastructure as software?
In 2005–06, Rufus created the first version of CKAN — the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, named directly after CPAN. The very first iteration was a wiki built with MoinMoin, powering a single catalog site: ckan.net (now reborn as DataHub.io). In 2007, it was rewritten in Python using the Pylons framework and officially launched at the Creative Commons Summit in Dubrovnik.
There was no grand roadmap. As Rufus has reflected — including later on how CKAN evolved into open infrastructure in an AI-first world —
"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
The timing turned out to be perfect. Around 2008–2010, the open data wave gained serious political traction. Governments in the US, UK, and elsewhere needed working tools to publish public datasets — and CKAN was already functional, open source, and ready.
The UK's data.gov.uk was one of the first major government portals built on CKAN. The US followed — Data.gov relaunched on CKAN in 2013, unifying previously scattered federal datasets into a single catalog. Canada's open.canada.ca, Australia's data.gov.au, the Netherlands' data.overheid.nl — one by one, national governments adopted CKAN as their backbone.
By the time CKAN 2.0 launched with its powerful plugin architecture, it had firmly established itself as the leading open-source data management platform in the world.
But CKAN's growth was never a one-person story.
Its codebase is maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, and a global community of developers and stewards. Long-time contributors like co-steward Steven De Costa and Adrià Mercader of the CKAN technical core team helped shape CKAN into the extensible, production-ready platform it is today. Their work sits alongside the efforts of dozens of maintainers, developers, designers, documenters, and community members who have contributed over the years — many of them quietly, and often over long periods of time.
In a joint stewardship model, Datopian and Link Digital serve as project co-stewards, with the Open Knowledge Foundation remaining as the "purpose trustee" to ensure the project stays true to its ethos.
Today, CKAN powers hundreds of data portals worldwide.
It's used by national governments across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania, as well as enterprise organizations in sectors like energy, pharmaceuticals, health, trasport and finance. Multilateral organizations including UNHCR, OCHA, WFP, and FAO — and foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — rely on CKAN for their data operations. The Humanitarian Data Exchange runs on CKAN. So do portals for cities like Toronto, Barcelona, Montreal, and Buenos Aires.
CKAN is no longer just for open government data. It's used for internal data governance, academic data sharing aligned with FAIR principles, machine learning pipelines, and NGO workflows.
In 2023, CKAN was officially recognized as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance — acknowledged as helping tackle 9 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The ecosystem around CKAN continues to evolve — including active work toward CKAN 3.0, modern frontend experiences, APIs, and integration with emerging AI-driven data workflows.
And the questions CKAN was built to help answer? They're more urgent than ever. In an age of AI and information overload, the need for trustworthy, findable, reusable data isn't going away — it's growing.
Throughout 2026, the CKAN community will mark this milestone with a series of activities — not just celebratory branding, but meaningful efforts to document CKAN’s history, strengthen its ecosystem, and increase its global visibility.
And we want your input: the POSE team is inviting the community to take part in a two-part CKAN Storytelling Workshop series. The workshops are a space to meet others from the CKAN community, exchange perspectives, and work together in real time on how CKAN stories should be told — from adoption journeys and user experiences to collaboration and community building. Across the two sessions, participants will help define what makes a CKAN story useful and explore how those stories can be collected, shared, and maintained over time as a shared community resource. If you’re unable to join live, you can also share ideas via the short form, but the workshops are where the collective thinking and shared direction will take shape.
Your experience and insights will help build a low-barrier, reusable approach to CKAN storytelling that supports peer learning and long-term sustainability across the ecosystem.
Twenty years after its first release, CKAN continues to evolve — not by chasing trends, but by solving enduring problems around data access, governance, and reuse.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI and automation, open, well-structured data remains foundational. CKAN’s role is not finished — it is entering its next chapter.
Rufus Pollock is a British economist, technologist, and social entrepreneur born in 1980. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he held the Mead Research Fellowship in Economics (2007–2010). He went on to become a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow (2010–2013) and was appointed an Ashoka Fellow in 2012.
In 2004, Rufus founded the Open Knowledge Foundation, a global nonprofit that became a driving force behind the open data movement. Under his leadership until 2015, OKF incubated a remarkable set of projects that shaped how the world thinks about and works with open data.
Beyond CKAN, Rufus formulated the Open Definition in 2005 and created the Frictionless Data standard. He launched DataHub.io, and later worked on PortalJS and Flowershow. He also co-founded the Open Rights Group and contributed early work that helped seed Creative Commons in the UK.
In 2009, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee credited Rufus for starting the “Raw Data Now” meme. In 2010, he was named one of four founding members of the UK Government's Public Sector Transparency Board and has advised on open data policy for the US White House, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
In 2018, he published The Open Revolution, making it freely available online.
Today, Rufus is President at Datopian and co-founder of Life Itself.
We are inviting the community to help shape how CKAN stories are collected and shared. What stories should be told? Which moments, use cases, or community contributions deserve the spotlight? What do you want to learn — or remember — about CKAN?
This short form is a way to share what kinds of stories would actually be useful to you — to support learning, adoption, and long-term sustainability across the CKAN ecosystem. There are no right answers. We’re looking for input, not polished responses.
A recap of CKAN Monthly Live #39 covering POSE Phase II updates, the two upcoming storytelling workshops, a preview of the CKAN Ecosystem Catalog, and how the community can plug into CKAN@20 anniversary activities in 2026.
CKAN's new interface brings WCAG 2.2 AAA-compliant accessibility, mobile-responsive design, HTMX-powered performance improvements, and a modern design system to the world's leading open data platform. The revamp eliminates technical barriers for smaller organizations while maintaining CKAN's extensive feature set. The update is now in the master branch, with release targeted for 2026 and full integration in CKAN 3.0.