Open Knowledge 1.0 Nearly Here

Open Knowledge 1.0, which takes place on Saturday March the 17th at Limehouse Town Hall in London, is now just over a week away. While there are still some places left we are nearing capacity so, if you would like to come, we advise you to register as soon as possible via: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

Open Knowledge 1.0

• When: Saturday 17th March 2007, 11am until 6:30pm (Doors open at 1030)
• Where: Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Road, London, E14 7HA.
• Programme: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme/
• Registration: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/
• Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon/

On the 17th March 2007 the first all-day Open Knowledge event is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum and includes panels on open media, open geodata and open scientific and civic information.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

Speakers

Open Scientific and Civic Data

• Tim Hubbard, leader of the Human Genome Analysis Group at the Sanger
  Institute
• Peter Murray-Rust, Professor in the Unilever Centre for Molecular
  Science Informatics at Cambridge University
• John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector
  Information

Geodata and Civic Information

• Ed Parsons, until recently CTO of the Ordnance Survey
• Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map
• Charles Arthur, freeourdata.org.uk and Technology Editor of the
  Guardian

Open Media

• Paula Ledieu, formerly Director of the BBC’s Creative Archive
  project and now Managing Director and Director of Open Media for
  Magic Lantern Productions
• Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum of Platoniq
• Zoe Young of http://www.transmission.cc/

Open Space

Lightning talks and mini-presentations. See: http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon/

Theme: Atomisation and Commercial Opportunity

Discussions of ‘Open Knowledge’ often end with licensing wars: legal arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open Knowledge 1.0 will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility.

Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the opportunities and problems of this approach for forms of knowledge other than Software?

Atomisation also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted access to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates commercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?

Bringing together open threads from Science, Geodata, Civic Information and Media, Open Knowledge 1.0 is an opportunity for people and projects to meet, talk and plan things.