In Category on 08 Jun 2026
What CKAN Made Possible: A Sixteen-Year Open Data Story
From NYCBigApps to federal metadata standards — a co-founder's story of why CKAN's real value was never the portal
We're proud to announce the launch of DataGM, another public sector open data portal built using CKAN software.
We've been working hard with the team at Trafford Council to launch a beta version of the site. It catalogs and showcases data from across all the councils that make up Greater Manchester.
As well has helping customise the look and feel, we introduced a couple of new features into CKAN to support DataGM's requirements: content management for creating and editing blog posts and pages like "About us"; and integrated package download statistics, which allowed us to list "popular data" on the home page.
Content management is provided via Wordpress integration, which we've already released as a CKAN extension called Wordpresser; watch this space for news of the statistics extension (which integrates with Google Analytics).
The site has been seeded with data from nearly every council, and has already has some coverage in the Guardian Data Blog.
We've been working hard with the team at Trafford Council to launch a beta version of the site. It catalogs and showcases data from across all the councils that make up Greater Manchester.
As well has helping customise the look and feel, we introduced a couple of new features into CKAN to support DataGM's requirements: content management for creating and editing blog posts and pages like "About us"; and integrated package download statistics, which allowed us to list "popular data" on the home page.
Content management is provided via Wordpress integration, which we've already released as a CKAN extension called Wordpresser; watch this space for news of the statistics extension (which integrates with Google Analytics).
The site has been seeded with data from nearly every council, and has already has some coverage in the Guardian Data Blog.
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In Category on 21 May 2026
CKAN in the Age of AI: A Call for Agnosticism and Provenance
CKAN co-steward Steven De Costa makes the case for CKAN as the trusted data foundation for AI — providing provenance, machine operability, and the cold reasoning that keeps AI outputs grounded in reality.