This is a cross-post from the Open Knowledge blog, by Katelyn Rogers, Working Groups Community Manager at Open Knowledge.

Save the Date: We are thrilled to announce that the Open Knowledge community is organising a community session on Tuesday July 15th, 2014 from 1pm – 4pm, before the festival officially starts. This will be taking place at the OKFestival Venue, situated in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin.

We are delighted that so many community members will be in Berlin this summer and are pleased to have the opportunity to bring everyone together to reflect on the opportunities and challenges we face as the Open Knowledge community. Christian (International Community Manager at Open Knowledge) and myself will be helping by taking care of the logistics but the session and its agenda is completely community driven! Rayna Stamboliyska, co-founder of Open Knowledge France and the main initiative-taker behind this session, already volunteered to help lead this but she would love to get help from 2-3 community members (write to local @ okfn . org and we’ll connect you).

Outreach will be made to all of you over the coming days for ideas for the session. Already, people have suggested topics such as:

• Mechanisms for providing better support and follow up to local groups and ambassadors.
• Developing mentorship opportunities and peer-to-peer support within the community.
• Discussing the different challenges, depending on local contexts and more globally how do we root more of some shape of organized effort in the Global South.

We are thus expecting a great deal of ideas, proposals and topics to discuss. We have decided to let the discussion of topics happen over the next week or 10 days in order for everyone to chime in. We’ll then organise the input and set up a community call to finalise and strategise the program of the session.

In summary: Help brainstorm more issues to discuss and put together the agenda and other details. As the Open Knowledge community grows and diversifies, it is important that we get together and address opportunities and challenges but also take advantage of these rare moments to enjoy each others company!

Photo CC-BY by Volker Atüeras Gäng