Month: May 2014

OKFestival fringe events – CSVConf call for proposals is now open

Posted on by Lou Woodley

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Last week we released the provisional programme for this year’s Open Knowledge Festival. We’re starting with an opening evening event on July 15th followed by two full days of the festival on July 16th and 17th. However, the fun isn’t confined to our official festival events! There are also going to be various fringe events taking place in Berlin around the festival – one of which is CSVConf on July 15th.

CSVConf will bring together data makers/doers/hackers from backgrounds like science, journalism, open government and the wider software industry to share tools and stories. It’s not just about CSV tools – the organisers would love to hear about a wide range of data-based projects, so if this sounds like your thing the call for proposals is now open and tickets are also on sale. Don’t delay though – the deadline to submit suggestions is May 31st!

You can check out the other OKFestival fringe events that are taking place here – and there’s still time to organise one of your own. If you’re planning to do so, do let us know. We’d be happy to help you to spread the word!

OKFestival Provisional Programme is now live!

Posted on by Beatrice Martini

Over the last few months we have received hundreds of terrific proposals for this year’s Open Knowledge Festival programme. Thank you for your ideas and your input!

There have been more sessions proposed than we could possibly accommodate and as a result, we’ve had the incredibly difficult task of whittling down all of those great ideas into a 3-day festival. It wasn’t easy, and it’s with regret that we can’t include every one of your great proposals in the final programme.

However, after this tough task of creating our final programme, we’re happy to be able to give you the first glimpse of the Open Knowledge Festival 2014 programme. Read on to find out more about what translating “Open Minds to Open Action” is going to look like!

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Festival Schedule & Preliminary Programme

Please note that information about sessions is still a work in progress. A full list of sessions and facilitators will be finalised and updated in due course.

July 15 – The Open Knowledge Fair

OKFestival 2014 will kick off at 18:00 on Tuesday 15th July with the Open Knowledge Fair; an opening extravaganza to set the scene for the following two days. This dynamic start to the 3 days of the festival will be comprised of demo stands, performances, interactive hands-on things to do and make, and the opportunity to enjoy music and drinks.

Here’s a taste of what will make it an unforgettable night:

  • GIF animation jam session (Kati Hyyppä, Sanna Marttila, Adam Green)
  • Politaoke – the non-partisan political karaoke (Diana Arce)
  • Let’s make music and food from data! (csv soundsystem)
  • Security in a Box & Digital Security Help Desk (Tactical Technology Collective)
  • Tracka: Crowdsourcing Service Delivery – Oluseun Onigbinde (BudgIT)
  • Opening Closistan – Tarek Amr, Ahmad Gharbeia
  • Public Lab – Shannon Dosemagen
  • Sensors, Uncensored: Using Sensors to Enrich Storytelling – Lily Bui
  • Open Bank Project
  • Open Steps – a journey around the world discovering and showcasing open knowledge projects
  • Open Access Button
  • and many more!

July 16 and 17 – The Core Festival Days

Each day will kick off with two inspiring, engaging plenary sessions to fuel the activities for the day ahead. We have some truly incredible keynote speakers joining us – stay tuned to discover more about them soon. After the plenaries, there will be community-led sessions from 11:00 to 18:30 each day. There will also be breakout spaces available throughout the entire festival and another space where you’ll be able to pitch and run emerging sessions on the fly.

Here’s a taster of some of the sessions that have been confirmed – more updates soon!

Knowledge Stream (in alphabetical order by session title)

  • An Exploration of Global Social and Economic Policy Data: Tools to Improve Well-being and Equity – Amy Raub, Nicolas deGuzman, Isabel Latz (WORLD Policy Analysis Center)

  • Can Open Data Go Wrong? – Tin Geber, Alix Dunn (The Engine Room), Lindsay Beck (NDITech)

  • Citizen Report Knowledge Sharing – Mariana Mas (DATA), mySociety, Ushahidi

  • Defining and Designing Successful Data Journalism Initiatives in Developing Countries – Eva Constantaras (Internews)

  • Enabling Reliable Narrators: Opening up Openness beyond the Usual Suspects – Penny Andrews

  • Exploding Open Science! Awareness, training, funding, training – Alexandre Hannud Abdo

  • How to Teach Open Data – Milena Marin (Open Knowledge School of Data) & more

  • Lobby Regulation and Transparency: standards and campaign plans – Victoria Anderica (Access Info Europe), Julia Keseru (Sunlight Foundation)

  • Low-Tech Data: Story-Finding and Storytelling – Rahul Bhargava (MIT Center for Civic Media), Gabi Sobliye (Tactical Technology Collective)

  • Maintaining a healthy and thriving Public Domain – exploring the notion of originality and copyright when digitising analogue works – Joris Pekel (Europeana), Paul Keller (Kennisland), Lieke Ploeger (Open Knowledge Foundation), Thomas Margoni (University of Amsterdam) & OpenGLAM Open Knowledge Working Group

  • Mapping the Corporate Web: an Open Data Approach – Johnny West (OpenOil)

  • Open Access Review – Michelle Brook (Open Knowledge) & more

  • Open Educational Resources and Policy: Overview and Connections to Others

  • Open Education Smörgåsbord – Marieke Guy (Open Knowledge), Alek Tarkowski, Tom Salmon, Kristina Anderson, Miska Knapek, Darya Tarasowa

  • OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey Workshop – Beat Estermann (Bern University of Applied Sciences), Lieke Ploeger (Open Knowledge)

  • Open licenses for a free press – Hauke Gierow (Reporter ohne Grenzen)

  • Open Movements – Alek Tarkowski (Centrum Cyfrowe), Nicole Allen (SPARC), Delia Browne (P2PU), Melissa Hagemann (OSF)

  • Openness Divide? — How Openness Can Help the Unfinished Arab Spring – Salwa AbdelTawab (Al-Jazeera)

  • Panton Principles for the Humanities. Do we need one and what would it look like? – Iain Emsley

  • Reimagining scholarly communication – Stuart Lawson (Wikimania)

  • Storytelling for Social Change – Javie Ssozi (Rural Farming 4 Devt & Speak Out Uganda!)

  • Testing the efficiency of open versus traditional science – Daniel Mietchen, Jenny Molloy, Alexandre Hannud Abdo (Open Science Open Knowledge Working Group)

  • Transportation data: traffic and transit – different path, same result? – Peter Hicks & Open Transport Open Knowledge Working Group

Society Stream (in alphabetical order by session title)

  • A crowd sourced manifesto: what is the open data ‘social contract’ between governments and citizens – Kitty von Bertele, Antonio Acuña (Cabinet Office UK)

  • Budget Data Package: toward an open standard for budget and spending data – Samidh Chakrabarti (Google), Open Knowledge

  • Building the open coalition – developing a wider community of open – Stevie Benton (Wikimedia UK), Bekka Kahn (P2PU)

  • Business Revenue Models for Open Data or Getting Rich with Open Data

  • DIY Making for Social and Environmental Justice – Shannon Dosemagen (Public Lab)

  • Global Elections Toolbox – DATA Uruguay & more

  • Ground-up open data intermediaries – Who? Where? How? – Tim Davies (Web Foundation), Michael Canares (STEP Up Consulting), Satyarupa Shekhar (Transparent Chennai), Gisele S. Craveiro (University of Sao Paulo & Open Knowledge Brazil), Zachariah Chilliswa (Jesuit Hakimani Center, Kenya), Omenogo Mejabi (University of Ilorin)

  • How Do You Win Fiscal Transparency Campaigns? – Follow The Money network

  • Land rights data: quality control, challenges and new strategies

  • Money, Politics and Transparency – Julia Keseru, Lisa Rosenberg (Sunlight Foundation), Alan Hudson (Global Integrity)

  • Open Contracting: Disclosing Data, Engaging for Results – Michael Roberts, Tim Davies (Web Foundation), Felipe Estefan, Marcela Rozo (The World Bank), Sarah Bird

  • Open Data Charter and the G20

  • Open Government Data updates from around the world – Daniel Dietrich & more

  • “Opening” Society in Challenging Contexts – Ethan Wilkes, Panthea Lee, Adam Talsma (Reboot)

  • Opening up ‘open’: how do we strengthen the base of people who care about open? – Elliott Bledsoe

  • Open Surveillance? – Fabrizio Scrollini (DATA), Renata Avila (Web Foundation), Javier Ruiz (Open Rights Group)

  • Power, politics, inclusion and voice – Duncan Edwards (Institute of Development Studies), Ben Taylor (Twaweza), Kersti Wissenbach (Open4Change), Rebecca Latourell (AidData)

  • Taking privacy considerations forward- the role of the data publisher – Javier Ruiz (Open Rights Group), Sally Deffor (Open Knowledge)

  • The Problem with Participation – Nancy Schwartzman (Circle of 6 / Tech 4 Good), Lina Srivastava, Linda Raftree

  • Tracking development in the open – Mark Brough, Shreya Basu (Publish What You Fund)

Tools Stream (in alphabetical order by session title)

  • An E-waste Hackathon: hacking/fixing our gadgets and learning what happens when they die – Janet Gunter, Ugo Vallauri (The Restart Project)

  • Bring the Public Domain Calculators Worldwide! – Pierre Chrzanowski (Open Knowledge France), Samuel Goëta, Primavera de Filippi (Open Knowledge France, Public Domain Working Group), Marco Montanari (Open Knowledge Italy)

  • CrisisNET: An Interactive Introduction – Jonathon Morgan (Ushahidi)

  • Detecting Climate Change in Open Weather Data – Brian Abelson (Enigma)Transparent Cities – creating a shared framework for city governments to use data and technology to be more open, transparent and participatory – Satyarupa Shekhar (Transparent Chennai), Instituto Polis, GPoPAI/Colab and Indonesia Lab, Web Foundation & more

  • Giving credit where credit is due – Jonas Öberg, Leena Simon (Commons Machinery)

  • Open Decisions API’s – Global Standardization – Markus Petteri Laine (Open Knowledge Finland)

  • Save the Titanic: Hands-on anonymisation and risk control of publishing open data – Ulrich Atz, Kathryn Corrick (Open Data Institute)

  • Humanitarian OpenStreetMap mapping workshop – Katie Filbert, Shoaib Burq, Christian Lenz (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team)

  • Introduction to Text and Data Mining (TDM): Technical and Legal Considerations – Puneet Kishor (Creative Commons), Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge), Ross Mounce (University of Bath)

  • Open Design Definition workshop – Sanna Marttila, Peter Troxler, Christian Villum (Open Hardware and Design Working Group)

  • Opening Politics: Collecting and Organizing Political Data – Scott Hubli (National Democratic Institute), John Wonderlich (Sunlight Foundation), Jakub Gornicki (ePanstwo)

  • Open Product Datification – Thomas McNally & Open Product Data Open Knowledge Working Group

  • Sensors, Uncensored: Using Sensors to Enrich Storytelling – Lily Bui

  • Skills and tools for web native open science – Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab), Karthik Ram (rOpenSci)

  • Understanding the civic space – Stef van Grieken (Google), Knight Foundation, MIT Media Lab

  • Usability testing workshop – Claus Höfele, Lydia Dreyer

 Fringe Events

We encourage people to plan and run fringe events which will complement the Festival, both before and after the official programming. If you are organising a Fringe Event, please let us know so we can help publicise it for you. If you want to know more about Fringe Events already in the pipeline, check out this page.

We hope you’re as excited as we are by this provisional Programme line-up, and that you’ll agree that this year’s Festival is going to be an amazing place full of possibility, learning and action!

If you’ve not already bought your ticket, make sure you don’t miss out – we’re looking forward to seeing you in Berlin!

With excitement,

The OKFestival Team

 

Financial Aid Announcement Delayed

Posted on by Megan McGrattan

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Our Financial Aid applications closed on May 4th and we’ve been working hard to review all the applications and get word out to you as soon as possible if you’re one of those selected.

However, we’ve had many more applications than expected and while we’re thrilled so many of you want to come, it does take our small team longer to review hundreds of applications than it would dozens! We’re also looking into other ways that we might be able to provide support for all the great potential attendees so we don’t want to make any final decisions until we’ve had time time to consider these additional options.

For this reason, we’ve had to extend the timeline on when we’ll be informing you about whether you’ll receive financial aid from us.

We know delays are frustrating, but we’re working as hard as possible to ensure that our Financial Aid applications are thoroughly reviewed and fairly distributed. We’ll be in touch as soon as is possible if you have been selected for financial aid.

In the meantime, hang tight and keep checking the website – our preliminary programme is launching very soon…