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

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.

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Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.

2 thoughts on “Open Knowledge 1.0 Nearly Here”

  1. Thank you for listing Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects as the top listing on the http://www.okfn.org/open%20knowledge%20trail/open_projects/ page and I only wish we had known about Open Knowledge 1.0 a bit earlier than 21:57 the night before (by accident) as we’d have loved to come along and talk about increasing involvement, new projects, and how the Wikimedia UK Chapter (of which I am Chair) is acting as a focus for activities in the UK.

    Open Knowledge requires Open Communications. Good luck for tomorrow.

    Alison Wheeler
    Chair, Wikimedia UK

  2. We’d have loved to have you at the event — in fact, I specifically spoke with Erik Moeller earlier in the year about how to get in contact with people from Wikimedia/Wikipedia to invite them along (he himself was unable to come). He suggested I email the wikimedia foundation-l list which I did. Unfortunately, despite a few responses there, it appears we missed yourself and other members of the UK chapter which is a real shame. We should certainly keep in contact for the future and should anyone from Wikimedia still be able to come they’d be more than welcome to give a talk in the Open Space session.

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