We announced city and dates of our upcoming Open Knowledge Festival 2014 less than a month ago (Berlin, Germany! July 15th-18th!) and we’re pleased to start giving you more information about it.

The Open Knowledge Festival in 2014 will be the biggest open data and open knowledge event the world has ever seen. We’ve taken a step back, listened to your feedback and talked with you since the first Festival in 2012, and now we’re ready to help create the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival with you.

The Open Knowledge Festival is a global, inclusive and participatory event. It is organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation Central and owned by the open knowledge community in the broadest sense.

What does this all mean?

  • Global: we aim to welcome more people from all around the world than ever before. This includes community members from countries we haven’t yet reached, providing financial aid to people travelling from very far away, and real interaction with all of you, wherever you are during the entire production process of the event.

  • Inclusive: this event is about the open community as a whole, not just the Open Knowledge Foundation community. Whatever role you play or want to play in the open movement, this is for you – anyone can submit proposals, provide feedback and get involved. We support a diverse participation and all the open domains, and welcome everybody – not only members from the Open Knowledge Foundation community – to be part of it.

  • Participatory: participants shape the agenda before and during the event; at the event, participants will be truly active! Our vision: participants will be running a session, making a presentation, giving a lightning talk, joining a hack – you’ll be owning the event.

  • The Open Knowledge Foundation Central will facilitate the process and the scheduling in terms of logistics and best practices, communicate and promote the festival broadly, encourage connections, support diversity of perspectives and backgrounds.

  • The open knowledge community, the wide open world beyond what we are as the Foundation, will own the event. Sessions will be proposed, reviewed and selected by members of the community. We, Open Knowledge Foundation Central, as facilitators of the community’s brilliant work and will to take action, are working on establishing a sustainable process to best support this.

Further details will come soon – we’re working on it. Watch this space!
In the meantime, if you want to give any feedback about or share any ideas for the Open Knowledge Festival, please feel more than welcome to drop us a line at
events@okfn.org
.

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As the Open Knowledge Foundation's Events Manager Beatrice leads the team organising OKFestival 2014 (Berlin, July 15-18 – see you there!). Furthermore, she coordinates other Open Knowledge Foundation events working to expand the organisation’s global network through a variety of in person and online actions and formats.
She's also a core member of OpenTechSchool, a community initiative offering free programming workshops and meetups. Follow her on Twitter @beatricemartini.

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