Since the start of the Panton Principles, we have had several different Panton Discussions with different people talking about Open Data in Science.

A couple of them have been recorded on video. These recordings have now also been made available as podcasts which allow you to listen to them while travelling, working or just relaxing.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is involved in lots of interesting discussions. In the future, we will make sure to bring an audio or video recording device to as many of these discussions as possible to make them available for everybody. For now, please enjoy this wealth of interesting discussions and topics

• Panton Discussion 1: Richard Poynder, Independent Journalist (2010)
• Panton Discussion 2: David Dobbs, “writing on science, medicine, culture” (2010)
• Panton Discussion 3: Richard Grant, The Scientist/Faculty_of_1000 (2010)
• Panton Discussion 4: Ian Hrynaszkiewicz, BioMed Central (2011)
• Panton Discussion 5: Brian McMahon, International Union of Crystallography (2012)
• Panton Discussion 6: Cameron Neylon, Science & Technology Facilities Council (2012)

All recordings are available under a CC-BY license.

For future podcasts, we are looking for people who are interested in helping with sound equalising, publishing and maybe even creating a true radio show out of it with a short introduction etc. If you are interested in this, please get in touch with joris.pekel [at] okfn.org

In early March, we embarked on a project to map out projects which use technology to further the aims of fiscal transparency, accountability and participation. Today, we are happy to announce the official release of the resulting report, Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance. Preliminary findings were presented at last month’s GIFT meeting in Brasilia. Since then, we’ve been building on the comments, follow-up questions and feedback from the session.

Looking at government revenue, expenditure and off-budget information – we have attempted to identify projects from both governments and civil society which use innovative approaches to:

• Publish more or better data related to fiscal processes (aid, revenues, budgets, audits, etc. — see below),
• Help understand this data through the creation of better visualisation and data analysis tools,
• Educate citizens about fiscal processes, and assist civil society organisations promoting accountable governance,
• Facilitate direct participation in fiscal matters through participatory budgeting, citizen auditing and the like,
• Provide policymakers with complete and reliable data relevant to their work, enabling them to make better decisions.

We focussed in particular on the question: ‘Who are the users?’. We examined their motivations for getting involved, the scalability and applicability of given solutions to other contexts. The report also aims to highlight gaps that prevent users from taking up these tools.

Report now available online

Today, the first edition of the report is published on OpenSpending.org. It is also available for download as a PDF. Accompanying the report is a project database – bit.ly/TTAPF-projects which contains many more projects that publish, analyse and demystify fiscal data.

The section on participatory budgeting deserves special mention. We discovered so many projects that they merited their own listing, which can be found here. As we go through, we are building up a catalog of government finance portals in the ‘finance’ group of datacatalogs.org. There’s still a lot of work to be done there, but the group already contains the portals mentioned in the report.

As our work continues, we’d love to maintain these connections and hear updates from the projects and learn about new projects. If you have come across an interesting project and think we should feature it, please let us know!

Key Findings

We have tried to highlight specific roles which GIFT could play in promoting the good practice requirements of the report. The slides from the session can be found below:

Read about the highlights in context in the Highlights, Gaps and Recommendations section

Read the report

See below for a quick overview of the contents:

• Chapter 1 – Introduction and Methodology
• Chapter 2 – Publishing Fiscal Data: Government Perspectives
• Chapter 3 – Using Fiscal Data: Civil Society Perspectives
• Chapter 4 – Standards for Fiscal Data: Towards an international framework
• Chapter 5 – Case Studies – Where Does the Money Come From?
• Chapter 6 – Case Studies – Where Does the Money Go?
• Chapter 7 – Case Studies – The Invisible Money
• Chapter 8 – Putting the Parts Together, OpenSpending and Publish What You Fund
• Final Observations and Review
• Further Resources
• Appendix

Get involved in the next edition

This release is version one, and we hope that the research will be ongoing as the OpenSpending community grows and the tools and network develop. As this happens, we’d really love your input. Some suggestions:

1. Feedback – let us know what you thought of the report and suggest improvements, particularly feedback for GIFT, what role would you like to see them play in this important field?
2. Keep your eyes peeled for interesting projects. We’re hoping to feature information about new projects in the blog, so drop a line to the mailing list if you know of any we should feature.
3. Help us build up the finance group on datacatalogs.org and review the sites for their usefulness. Ever tried to get fiscal information out of a portal? Did you get what you were after? And importantly, could you use it once you had it? Let us know here.

Follow up posts on the findings in detail coming soon!

I had arrived there to provide kick-starting support to the new OKFN:LOCAL Greece group that had recently been created by Prof Charalampos Bratsas and several of his colleagues at Aristotle University and to explain the vision of the OKFN’s global chapters network. However, as I leapt from the plane into the midst of the 1st International Conference on Medical Education Informatics where the OKFN:LOCAL group had organised a lecture track on “Open Knowledge”, I realised the truth: I was about to learn a great deal myself about the international potentiality of open data.

The event, OKFN:LOCAL Greece’s second (details here), was marked by an exciting release – several hundred copies of the Open Data Handbook, translated into Greek, had been printed and were being distributed for free. It was the first time we’ve ever seen a local community publish the Handbook in paper form to be shared with the public, so it was amazing to see it in the hands of many students, professors and friends throughout the time I spent in Thessaloniki.

The OKFN:LOCAL group had also brought together some of the biggest names in the region for the evening’s programme, which featured several members of the OKFN:LOCAL Greece Steering Committee, including Prof Ioannis Antoniou, Prof Panos Bamidis who also organised the MIE2012 conference, Prof Nicos Komninos, Prof George Metaketis, Prof Pull Spirakis, Marinos Papadopoulos with Creative Commons Hellas, Kostantinos Stampoulis with Wikimedia Greece and Soren Auer. Each spoke about his own perspective regarding open knowledge in the region, featuring discussions ranging from open data innovation to open data and evolutionary games to linked data to open educational data and open licensing.

It was a prodigious turnout with a diverse audience – faces both young and old of many different backgrounds – and I found myself increasingly impressed by the breadth of opinion amongst the individuals I met in Thessaloniki. Each person I spoke to interpreted ‘openness’ in a different way, shared a unique perspective on the causes of the debt crisis, and had their own ideas about how to engage new participants in their work. The main characteristic I saw uniting such a varied group was their passionate commitment towards provoking positive change within Greece. Coming from the UK, it was an inspiring thing to see.

Indeed, the OKFN:LOCAL Greece group has wasted no time in getting things moving. With a team of researchers, students, academics and community-builders from Aristotle University’s faculty of MSc WebScience and Medical Informatics, the URENIO Smart Cities initiative, Wikimedia, Creative Commons and other organisations, they have already used existing data management systems like the Data Hub to build an impressive suite of Greece-focused visualisations and installments.

These include the facilitation of projects such as FIREBALL, an European Commission-funded initiative which connects communities involved in Living Labs and urban policy, and ICOS, a new global community for intelligent and open source-focused cities. Students in the Webscience MSc programme at Aristotle University have also conducted an assessment of the current status of open data in Greece, finding that Greek datasets lie between 2-3 stars of Tim Berners-Lee’s 5 star open data quality scheme.

In the future, as the OKFN:LOCAL Greece group matures into an incubating regional chapter, its community members plan to translate and host a Greek version of CKAN at the university and populate it with data acquired through those working with the university’s Semantic Web Unit. Other plans include using OpenSpending with a subset of Cl@rity’s Government Linked Open Data (LOD) project (an effort of the Greek government to publish decrees on the Web in raw file formats with metadata) and producing visual representations from datasets in the Greek LOD Cloud.

In ending, I’d like to give my heartfelt thanks to all of the OKFN:LOCAL members I met Thessaloniki, whose passion for this work has left me feeling quite excited about what’s next to come in the future of this emergent community. I have no doubt that despite the current economic complexities the nation faces, the path towards openness and transparency in Greece will be an interesting one.

Slides from the meetup can be found here. For more information about the many current projects of OKFN:LOCAL Greece, go here, and to get updated on upcoming events and ideas, check out their blog and @okfngr on Twitter.

All photos have been provided by the OKFN:LOCAL Greece group and on Flickr here.

‘All Things Come To Those Who Wait’ is an older version of the more common proverb ‘Good Things Come To Those Who Wait’.

When the poor fellow waiting in the picture above was published, copyright in printed matter in the UK expired at the same time the author did. By 1842 copyright outlived the author by 7 years. By 1911 it became 50 years post mortem. Now copyright lasts for 70 years after the author’s demise. Admittedly rather a long wait.

At least our very patient friend above has time on his side. And at least he can console himself with the fact that – if he can wait long enough – everything will enter the public domain eventually ¹.

If, like us, you probably won’t be able to wait that long, you can catch a glimpse of a bright, free, copyright-unencumbered world at The Public Domain Review. If you like what you see then you can sign up for free articles and collections to your inbox, and follow it on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

If you can think of somewhere nice to put it, the graphic is on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.

The debate around data in our community has been densely concentrated around the question of openness. That’s not surprising. Words like “free” and “open” have dominated the conversations in the digital commons for most of its existence, mainly because most of the digital commons has been centered on copyrightable works.

Software, text, photos, videos, music are all creative works under the law, all carrying the powerful, relatively internationalized protections of copyright, and this very power allows creators to invert that power using free / libre copyright licenses. That reality has led to a set of definitions of freedom for software, for cultural works, and for knowledge, all of which are very centered on the intellectual property regimes surrounding digital objects. We’ve also propagated the idea to hardware.

And that’s carried over into the debate around data. We ask, “is it open data?” of the world.

But I spend a lot of time around data people for whom open is an afterthought. For many people it’s Big Data, right down to the requisite O’Reilly branded events. They’re worried about whether we should leverage machine learning or domain experts, not openness. Or it’s Social Data. They’re worried about privacy policies and selling the data to as many vendors as possible. It’s Blue Button, and Green Button. They’re worried about getting data into people’s hands. It’s Quantified Self. They’re worried about getting their own data into their own hands. In Washington and other capitals large and small it’s on Government Data.

Open is almost never mentioned.

And I think that’s because we’re so focused on intellectual property, on share alike and attribution and public domain, that we lose the bigger context.

Creative works came online in a cultural and technical context that allowed us to focus on freedom, and intellectual property. We have decades of history with software, photo, and video, and hundreds with text. We had a technical infrastructure ready to create, distribute, consume, and remix creative works: mailing lists, sharing websites, wiki software.

We don’t have that with data.

Data is entering the world at a rate that is so fast it’s almost incomprehensible to human brains. It’s like trying to comprehend geologic time. The cost of generating data is so low in so many spaces, and dropping like a stone in so many others, that the real challenge is to do interesting things with it. The gulf between those who can do something with data and those who can’t is a serious new case of digital divide, and licensing is just a tiny part of that gulf. Important, to be sure, but tiny.

There’s a people gulf – 190,000 machine learning experts and 1,500,000 managers in the US alone that don’t exist, but need to, to take advantage of data. That gap is worse in the developing world, and will only accelerate in coming years.

But perhaps most important is a cultural gulf – we live in a world right now that (implicitly in most cases, but increasingly explicitly) accepts the natural state of data as transactional. We trade our data, rather than our cash, for services like Facebook, Google, apps, and more. We don’t get a copy of it. We don’t know who does. We’re on the outside of the black box, but our data’s on the inside.

So my argument is that we as an “open” movement need to understand and integrate our concerns over property rights into the broader debate. We need to talk about citizen’s rights. We need to talk about the right to understand how our web searches are returned. We need to talk about how our privacy rights may be negatively impacted by more openness.

Because unlike the web, and the internet, which grew quietly in obscure corners of the world, allowing open designs to flourish, data has already drawn attention, money, and closed business models. We’re in active competition against powerful, rich opponents to create an open ecosystem at the core of data, one that TCP/IP and HTML didn’t have to fight.

Here’s hoping we can bridge the gaps before other, closed systems can do so for us. The good news is that open systems have a lovely little history of outcompeting closed ones, given time, freedom to compete, and even a small group of committed people.

As faces filled the Panton Arms last week, it was great to see a healthy mix of the familiar and the new. The third meet-up in the #OpenDataCBG series proved to be one of the most friendly and interactive yet.

The Setting

Last Monday was a day of sudden torrential downpours. Perhaps for fear of another soaking, attendance was slightly lower at #OpenDataCBG than previously. But the rain did nothing to dampen the spirits of the twenty-odd folk who gathered in the Panton Arms for a lively evening of discussion and debate.

The Talks

The evening kicked-off with an excellent talk by Sarah Burge from the Sanger Institute, exploring how Wikipedia has been used to share RNA research at Rfam. Sarah’s talk was interesting and provocative, as proven by the questions and discussions it sparked as the evening continued – is Wikipedia taking over the internet?

Next Tom Oinn gave us an insight into Overtone. Whereas most music-sharing platforms only allow you to listen, Overtone is truly ‘open’ in that you can adapt, edit and build on the music in a new, collaborative way.

After a brief pause to re-charge glasses, Kat Braybrooke took to the floor to talk about OKFest, the experimental conference in Helsinki in September that many of us from the Open Knowledge Foundation will be involved with. It’s a long journey from Cambridge to Helsinki, but we hope that some of the faces from the Cambridge meet-up may come across and join us there!

Finally, Velichka Dimitrova shared the work she has been doing on YourTopia Italia, inviting everyone to log-in to the site and discover where their lifestyle priorities are best met. Once again, this sparked a lot of debate, with some interesting thoughts about whether GDP is an appropriate measure of economic performance and social progress, and the possibility of actually measuring happiness.

Newsflash Since Velichka gave her talk, YourTopia has won a prize in the Applications category of Apps4Italy. Apps4Italy is a competition to create tools and visualisations which demonstrate the value of public information. Congratulations Velichka and team! [Ed]

The Discussion

One of the best features of the #OpenDataCBG meet-ups is the fact that everyone has the chance to get involved. After a quick zip round the room for introductions, the floor is opened up to general discussion – whether to ask questions, to explore thoughts sparked by the talks, or to share an idea you’ve been pondering.

The discussion last week was particularly lively, with a lot of interesting points raised about the contemporary experience of the internet and the realities of working with information in the modern world. Much of the room joined in, and the insights of some first-time attendees were particularly welcome.

As the ‘formalities’ of the evening drew to a close, it was great to see people breaking up into smaller groups to continue an idea or to start up a conversation with someone who’s introduction had intrigued them. By the end of the evening, everyone had well and truly mingled and there was a great sense of new friends and exciting opportunities.

Hopefully the next #OpenDataCBG meet-up will see some of last times new faces becoming old friends, and new ones joining the mix to swell the ranks still more!

Get Involved

• Do you live in or around Cambridge? We’d love to see you at the next #OpenDataCBG meet-up! Sign-up on our mailing list
• Based elsewhere in the UK? We have regular meet-ups in London and Edinburgh, plus science meet-ups in Oxford and a host of occasional gatherings elsewhere. Check out our meet-up page for more details.
• Live somewhere else in the world? We have local communities spread across the globe! Find out about our local chapters and view them on our meet-up page.
• No meet-ups in your area? Start them up! Contact info [@] okfn.org for help and advice on getting going.

John Wilbanks, co-author of the Panton Principles and past OKFN Advisory Board Member, just launched a petition to ask the White House to mandate free access to publicly funded research in the US. Here’s what it says:

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

If more than 25,000 people sign it within the 30 day time frame, then the White House is required to consider the proposal and to give an official response. At the end of the first day there have been over 3,000 signatures.

Anyone can sign the petition – you do not need to be a citizen or resident in the US to support the initiative. If you believe in open access to research, please do consider lending your name, and encouraging friends and colleagues to do the same. You can find the petition here.

During recent years, the Russian Federation has undertaken a number of developments in its open data legislation strategy. This trend inspired a team of professionals to get together and start a non-profit organization, “INFOKULTURA”.

Understanding that data availability is crucial for an information society and the development of an information culture, we emphasise the establishment and promotion of Open Data concept though a number of activities, for example the Apps4Russia Contest, conferences, seminars, research and expertise provision. It is worth mentioning that not only technical capacities and access to the Internet are needed to promote the idea of informational culture as an important social topic: the lack of administrative burden, technological, legal, time and other constraints on the data availability are essential. These problems can be solved with the help of open licenses, open standards and open data sources.

Warfly – one of last year’s Apps4Russia winners

Here in Russia, there is growing interest among society and State authorities in Open Data expertise, and in responding to it “INFOKULTURA” has developed a set of proposals in support of the development, implementation and promotion of effective tools for efficient and successful information interaction between government and society.

During discussions and team meetings it was agreed that the main goals of the organization should be focused on promoting the following ideas:

• Information Culture – human activity that is associated with self-actualization and the individual initiatives manifested within the information society. Information culture is based on new data production, communication, environment change, integration of humanity into a common information space and the development of digital tools in order to create more varieties of information.
• Open Government – new modes of interaction between the government authorities and other public institutions in which the bodies that compose the state government provide a broad disclosure of its activities, provide feedback mechanisms for citizens and public institutions, and an operational set of tools for citizens and public institutions to influence the decision-making process.
• Civilian Control – the way the society can have influence with government bodies and institutions, develop the public good, and help to solve social problems.
• Plain Language – the idea that the society deserves clear communications from the government authorities – clear and concise language designed to ensure the recipient understands as quickly and completely as possible. Plain language seeks to be easy to read, understand, and use.
• Understandable Government – a new platform to broaden and ease official communications between government and society via Infographic tools, Clear visualized guidance and other comprehensive interaction mechanisms that designed to help people find out new ways to engage with State agencies, and take action to improve the way they work.

Apps4Russia Contest

In April 2012 the second Apps4Russia contest was announced at RIF+CIB 2012, the Internet industry’s main event in Russia.

The Apps4Russia contest was initiated to promote the idea of Open Data. The main goal is to encourage Russian developers to create projects based on Open Government Data, aiming to increase public benefit and improve government transparency.

In 2011 the Apps4Russia was held in the private initiative format with a prize fund of EUR 4,000. This year the prize fund has been significantly increased since it is expected that more developers from various levels, inlcuding school students, will submit to the contest.

In 2011 the following Submissions were nominated and awarded:

• “Fire tracking concept” – public monitoring of the natural resources;
• “DataPult” – interactive infographics data based on downloaded statistics;
• “Warfly: World War II aerial photography” – aerial photographs of Russian and West European cities during the period 1939-1945. All photographs are synchronized with modern landscape.

Datapult – one of last year’s Apps4Russia winners

This year all submissions will be reviewed under the following categories:

• Great — main competition for all developers. (Examples topics: anti-corruption, clear and plain statistics, environmental monitoring, Russia’s role in the global world etc.)
• Junior — school students competition (individual and group entries)
• Visualization — interactive and poster infographics competition based on Open Data resources;
• Cities and urban life environment — web-sites and applications created to improve urban life environment, through citizens and community initiatives

Call for Proposals timeframe: April – September
Summing up date – 12 September 2012 (Day of the Programmer).

Official web-site: http://www.apps4russia.ru

Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved.

What is the School of Data?

The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.

The School of Data is a collaborative and community-orientated project, and we welcome partners and participants. We’ve already had exciting conversations with several organisations and individuals, and we look forward to drawing upon their expertise during the development of the School. We are particularly excited to welcome the Tactical Technology Collective to our sprint next week, and look forward to benefiting from their wide-ranging experience (see e.g. their drawing by numbers project). We hope many more will join us – read on to find out how you can take part!

For more information about the School of Data, please visit our FAQs

The Kick-off Sprint

Next week, a small team of us will be gathering in Berlin for the School of Data kick-off sprint. This is a great opportunity to get to know one another, and to start building materials and resources for the School.

During the sprint we will be holding a designated virtual session, and we warmly invite you to join us online!

Details of the sprint are as follows:

When: Thursday 24th May, 12pm-4pm UTC
Where: Online, through our IRC channel (#schoolofdata on freenode)
How: Sign-up on the etherpad and then just drop in!

Everyone is welcome, and we will try to have a range of hands-on activities to suit everyone’s interests. We particularly welcome:

• Suggestions for content and courses
• Recommendations (or donations!) of high quality, openly licensed materials and resources, including interesting datasets to work with
• Offers to build a specific learning challenge or track
• ‘Testers’ willing to try out and improve the content available so far

If you can’t make the IRC session, you can still get involved. Sign-up to the School of Data mailing list and introduce yourself, or drop a quick note to schoolofdata [@] okfn.org.

In Berlin? Join the Social!

If you are located in or around Berlin, join us for our social! This will be held on the evening of Thursday 24th May at St. Oberholz, (Rosenthaler Straße, 72a). This is a great opportunity for anyone in the area with an interest in Open Data to meet casually for a drink and a chat.

To give us an idea of numbers, please sign-up here.

Get Involved in the School of Data

As well as the kick-off sprint, there are many ways to get involved with the School of Data.

Right now, we are looking for volunteers to:

• Contribute ideas and suggestions for the curriculum.
• Help to build individual tracks and learning challenges.
• Help to source (or donate) high-quality, openly-licensed educational resources.

And once the School is up and running, we will also be seeking volunteers to:

• Act as mentors for people who are taking part in virtual School of Data courses.
• Translate materials.
• Make the School of Data more accessible in their local area.

If you’d like to get involved in these or any other ways, please sign-up to the mailing list and introduce yourself!

You can follow us on Twitter: @SchoolofData

You may also be interested in our recent blog post about job vacancies. The Data Wrangler’s role in particular will be closely involved with the School of Data.

Finally, if you are able to contribute towards the ongoing maintenance of the School, please do feel free to donate via our secure PayPal account.

For those looking for yet another reason to join us for OKFestival in Helsinki this September, the OKFestival Core Organising Team is proud to announce the inspiring public outcomes of our unconventional First Call for Proposals – and to request your participation for our Second Call to share your ideas in Finland.

As we’ve noted previously, because OKFestival is the first event of its kind, combining Open Knowledge Conference and Open Government Data Camp together for a week-long celebration of action and collaboration, we decided to take a risk by opening up over 2/3 of the week’s programme to you as festival participants.

So last month, we released the First Call for Proposals, crossing our fingers expectantly as we did it. A few of us on the Core Organising Team (photo) were, admittedly, a tad worried – would global communities rise to the challenge? Or would we be left alone in cyberspace without even a programme to our name? We presented the festival to audiences at FREE CITY in Tallinn, at Re:Publica in Berlin and to local stakeholders in Finland. And we waited in anticipation.

In the end, we didn’t have to worry at all. The response to our First Call for Proposals was both overwhelming and encouraging. Open knowledge and data enthusiasts around the world did take the reins – and now, a month later, we have a groundbreaking, action-focused programme planned in co-operation with citizen teams of Guest Programme Planners all over the world. For a summary of the Open Knowledge Festival planning process in 14 slides, see our first Slideshare presentation here.

As you'll see above, the First Call for Proposals allowed the Core Organising Team to determine the most important themes and salient ideas, the subjects of which are highlighted through our 13 guest-organised Topic Streams of 2012:

1. Open Democracy and Citizen Movements
2. Open Government Data
3. Open Cities
4. Open Design, Hardware & Manufacturing
5. Open Cultural Heritage
6. Open Development
7. Open Research and Education
8. Open Geodata
9. Open Source Software
10. Data Journalism and Data Visualization
11. Gender / Diversity in Openness
12. Open Business and Corporate Data
13. Open Knowledge and Sustainability

The breadth of these topics is quite diverse - indeed, the variance is somewhat unprecedented for an event of this kind. Going through the topics above and learning more about how their Guest Programme Planners are determining the programming on the Public Planning Wiki, it's hard not to feel a sense of excitement about what's to come.

For the Second (and last!) Call for Proposals, we encourage ideas that further enrich each of these themes with new perspectives. We want your lightning talks, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, hackathons and all things in between. Let's fill Helsinki's streets with innovative new ideas, new collaborations between civil society and government, and new projects that provoke openness in unexpected ways.

It is our hope that together, these themes will illustrate the importance of diverse understandings within open knowledge and open data communities - and we look forward to seeing even more of you get involved in this inspiring process.

The Second Call for Proposals is here. Deadline for submission is June 1st - go to okfestival.org for details. And feel free to mix and remix the Slideshare presentation above for your own uses - it's meant to be shared!