Thank you for joining us at Open Knowledge Festival 2014!

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Beatrice Martini

Thank you for joining us in Berlin and helping to shape OKFestival and the future of the open knowledge movement!

We hope that the event provided you with the opportunity to learn, to share and to connect with open knowledge advocates from around the world. While we were excited and inspired by the collaborations and activities we saw springing up over the course of the week, we know that we can always do better and we want to hear from you about what we did well and what you would change. Furthermore, we'd like to encourage all the festival participants to keep sharing – ideas, blogposts, photos, videos, anything which can make the work done last week together resonate with everyone who was there but also everyone who couldn’t join us in person but can still fuel the upcoming projects online!

So, in the spirit of Open Minds to Open Action – let's call for action!

i) Tell us how it was for you! Firstly, we'd like to ask for your feedback about the event to help us with planning for the future. We’d really appreciate your answers to this survey, which shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete: okfestival.org/feedback

ii) Content from the festival Next, we'd like to remind you of all the great content created at – and around – the Festival, and to encourage you to check it out and contribute to it.

Etherpads
Every session had an etherpad, which is an online tool for note-taking. You can find them listed on the Sched page for the corresponding session or you may want to browse the “pad of pads” where they're all listed.
Photos
We saw lots of great photos being tweeted from the event and would love to collect as many as possible in the festival Flickr pool so that everyone can find them. So whether you snapped people enjoying ice cream or artists creating graffiti, please do add your images to the group here.
Articles & blog posts
Again, we've seen lots of tweets sharing blog posts about the festival – if you’ve written one or seen one you liked, please add it to this document so we can gather them all in one place and put the links up as a record on the festival website.

Finally, if you’d like to relive some of the festival, you might want to check out our short video celebrating the event. Enjoy!

Thanks once again for your energy, contributions and enthusiasm in making Open Knowledge Festival 2014 our best event yet.

With love,
Your OKFestival Team

OKFestival Stream Spotlight: Tools Stream

Posted on July 10, 2014July 10, 2014 by Katelyn Rogers

The Open Knowledge Festival's Theory of Change postulates that there are three levers of change, knowledge informs change, tools enable change and society effects change We’ve already taken a closer look at the Knowledge stream & the Society Stream and today we are are turning the spotlight on tools!

Tools connect society, facilitate the flow of knowledge and enable change. But what are we talking about exactly when we say tools?

When the Open Community talks about tools we are often talking about tools crafted with technology. From the many open source projects that seek to increase transparency or access to information by making it easier for citizens to process, understand and analyse available data to the platforms that seek to improve government accountability by making it easier for citizens to directly connect with their representative – as a community we are pretty good at building tools with technology and that is awesome. However, sometimes the most powerful tools don't require technology at all and the best tools are the ones that result in the simplest solution to a given problem. Tools also happen to be designed and built by people, with all of our imperfections, and sometimes their use results in unintended consequences.

The facilitators of Tools Stream sessions have set out to investigate everything from the can of spray paint to the smartphone and we can't wait to join them as we uncover how we can repurpose old tools as well as build new ones, all of which are designed to enable change! Finally, don’t fret, there will also be a hearty dose of good old fashion hacking.

Here is a small taste of the range of exciting session you will have the opportunity to participate in:

The Restart Project will lead us on an E-waste exploration where you will have the opportunity to open up your gadgets (literally open them up!) and look into what happens when they die. This mini-data expedition is designed to get people thinking about the lasting impacts of some of our favourite tools by examining the existing data on electronic waste and examining the inner-workings of our own devices.
Although usability tests have been proven to be a low-cost and effective method of making sure that your app or website is usable, few open source projects do usability tests. This is your chance to take part a Usability testing workshop to learn how facilitate your own usability tests!
So you want to publish some personal data as open data but don't want to end up on our list of Open Knowledge horror stories, join the Open Data Institute in a user friendly Hands-on anonymisati on and risk control open data publishing workshop!
Join DATA Uruguay and Stef van Grieken in compiling a comprehensive of tools and resources for a Global Election Toolbox.
Commons Machinery will be leading us on a mission to Give credit when credit is due. Together, we will discuss how we can provide better support for including licensing or author information when sharing or reusing digital works and how all this should work in the open knowledge environment.
In Tools, Tools and more Tools: Building the Data Pipeline participants with find and explore tools to make use of open data taking into account the complete data pipeline.

Toolkits, Usability tests and E-Wastes explorations are just the beginning, check out the full list of tool stream session here. There is still time – buy your OKFestival Tickets today!

Announcing the narrative streams at this year's OKFestival and the call for session proposals

Posted on February 20, 2014February 20, 2014 by Beatrice Martini

Now that the OKFestival website is live and tickets are on sale, we can share more details about the narrative streams that will run through the event. We're also pleased to open the call for session proposals at this time.

A Theory of Change

The programme for the 2014 edition of the festival is fuelled by a theory of change. Using this theory as our outline, the event provides an ideal opportunity for the open movement to come together to co-create the roadmap that will guide its next steps.

Our Theory: we believe that Knowledge, Tools and Society are the levers of Change. As such, Knowledge, Tools and Society will be the three streams that form the architecture of the programme.

Knowledge: Knowledge informs change. At OKFestival we’re keen to discuss ways of unlocking, expanding and sharing knowledge through open access, open research data, open educational resources, open science, data journalism and campaigning, data visualisation and literacy.

Tools: Tools enable change. We’ll be discussing facilitating the flow of knowledge through non profit technology, open source software, open hardware, design, architecture and urban planning.

Society: The group(s) who effect change. Topics may include designing institutions, building communities and protecting environments. Additionally, powering economies through open government, transparency, open tech businesses, open development, open education, open culture, open sustainability and open economy will feature on the programme. Security and privacy-related topics also fit into this stream.

The festival will weave together these three streams of open knowledge innovation and impact. Each session will go deep within its realm as well as identifying interdisciplinary features that span different domains or disciplines.

Submit your proposal

Never facilitated a session at an event before? Don’t let that stop you! We encourage proposals from folks who don’t often attend events and we’re ready to support you to run an awesome session. All you need to do is complete the form here by March 16, 2014, 23:59 CET.

We will be hosting two information hangouts on Proposing OKFestival Sessions in March. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or sign-up for our newsletter to learn more about them.

Please share this call far and wide!

The selection process

Once the deadline for proposals has passed, all submissions will be reviewed by the Programme Team. The proposals that we'll select will consider:

Does the proposal advance the overall goal of the event and agenda (see the festival's theory of change)?
Does the proposal give concrete value to participants via its proposed outcome?
Does the proposal offer unique benefit to the agenda?
Is the proposal interactive? Hint: slides and lectures strongly discouraged
Does the proposal value and build on OKFestival's principles of inclusivity and diversity?

If you'd like some more guidance, check out our Programme FAQs. You can also find out more about the Programme team under the Programme tab.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas about how to shape the programme at this year's festival!

Key details at a glance

Event: OKFestival 2014: 15 – 17th July in Berlin.
Deadline: The deadline to submit your session proposals is March 16, 2014, 23:59 CET.
Tickets: Earlybird tickets are currently on sale. Session coordinators will need to purchase a ticket to attend the festival so don't miss out on the limited number that are on sale at the reduced price!