Welcome to the Open Know-Where Data Awards

Do you know a person or organisation that has mapped or wants to map manufacturing capabilities and could use some financial support to adapt their data to the Open Know-Where standard? Round 2 of the Open Know-Where data awards is now open: nominate someone, or apply here!

In April 2021, the IOP Alliance launched the Open Know-Where (OKW) standard, a mapping standard for documenting and sharing information about the location of manufacturing facilities and capabilities globally. It is never sufficient for standards to exist; their adoption needs to be supported.

Our objective for 2023 is: at least 150,000 points of interest (i.e.: machines & tools) have been mapped according to the OKW standard. This will enable us to develop a key part of the infrastructure for the distributed production of Open Hardware: a global map of machines and tools, based on a shared open standard and open APIs.

We know that there are already great datasets out there, in fact, many were used in the research leading up to the creation of the OKW standard. We also know that reworking data to align it to a standard is time-consuming. We are therefore launching the Open Know-Where Data Awards:  

What: $10.000 divided up into 5-10 one-shot financial awards. The award will fund time and operational costs to do one, or both, of the following:

• Adopt the Open Know-Where standard into existing datasets e.g.: database reconfiguration, data wrangling or writing APIs.  
• Conduct mapping of manufacturing capabilities

For whom: Priority will be given to volunteer-based organisations such as: national maker networks, open science hardware groups etc.

How: an overview of the process:

• Internet of Production Alliance members and partners will be invited to nominate possible awardees.
• 3 calls for nomination will be made between December 2021 and June 2023.  
• The applications will be reviewed by a selection panel: 2-3 awardees will be selected at each round.

• Criteria: Diversity (see below) - Type of organisation (volunteer-based initiatives will be prioritized) - Geography (to avoid overlap and map a growing number of locations) - Quality (experience, local organisational impact, credibility in its location).

* Diversity can include the following characteristics: language, gender, gender identity, disability, cultural background, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, education, professional skills, and life experiences.

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