OKFestival is upon us! The festivities kick off tomorrow! Open data and open knowledge enthusiasts from around the world will be descending on Berlin's hottest spot – the Kulturbrauerei – for the largest open knowledge gathering the world has ever seen! The OKFestival programme team have spent months curating two and a half action packed days of keynotes, participatory sessions and hacks but for the open knowledge community, 2 days was never going to be enough! Community members, excited to dig deeper and explore more, have organised additional sessions and workshops to fill the entire week so come early and stay late because you won’t want to be anywhere else this week.

For the past two years, Open Development has been a core theme at our events and while this year we have not organised our programme around specific areas of knowledge, Open Development remains front and centre with three fringe events and a number of development focused sessions.

For development practitioners, researchers, civil servants, civil society representatives and anyone interesting in exploring the challenges and opportunities of open knowledge within the development context – here is just a taste of what the Open Development community has organised!

Fringe Events

Join the Partnership for Open Data first thing Tuesday morning for their Open Data Innovators Event. You will have a chance to hear from and discuss with open data leaders from Mexico and Burkina Faso who are driving innovation in their countries. We will also be announcing the winners of POD's first Open Data Impact Stories Competition! After, head on over to the Open Data in Developing Countries Research Sharing Seminar (waiting list only), to hear from ODDC partners as they share their findings  and discuss how to translate this research into action.

Post OKFestival, join the open development working group for an all day fringe event to further explore key themes that have emerged from the week, participate in sessions that we were not able to squeeze into the OKFestival programme and collectively develop new initiatives and action plans. This event is kindly sponsored by Making All Voices Count.

A Selection of Open Development Sessions

These workshops alone would probably be enough to get you to Berlin and we haven't even scratched the surface. Here are a few sessions to look forward to from the main Festival programme:

• Defining and Design Successful Data Journalism Initiatives in Developing Countries: Exploring the potential of data journalism l to drive transparency and uncover corruption in developing countries

• Power, Politics, Inclusion and Voice exploring issues related to the intersection of the open movement with people, power and politics and understanding the political environments and power dynamics from which data, information, knowledge is created.

• The Problem with Participation:The Problem With Participation will explore how the term “open” brings with it three fundamental challenges for people who live and operate outside of the “open knowledge” bubble: capacity, resources (including time), and privacy. Sessions participants will discuss and explore ideas on how to make “open” more “accessible.”

• Tracking Development in the Open a series of  lightning talks showing five new platforms showing development data (most of which are open source and use open data), and then focus on discussing how to confront challenges based on experience of designing the existing platforms and using the data.

• Opening Society in Challenging Contexts Exploring how can we ensure open government initiatives live up to their promise? The movement for more open, accountable governments is gaining momentum the world over. But too often, open government initiatives are deployed without careful designs that enable them to achieve their intended objectives.

Open Development is just one of the many sub-streams running through OKFestival. Don’t miss out – buy your ticket today and we will see you tomorrow!