The 5th COMMUNIA Workshop will take place in London next week – on the 26-27th March. There’s a great programme of speakers – and details of which are below. There are a handful of tickets left – so if you’d like to come along, make sure and register now! If you aren’t able to make it – we are going to publish audio and video documentation after the event.
Also, if you plan to attend OKCon 2009, which will take place on Saturday 28th March – we encourage you to get your ticket as spaces are limited!
5th COMMUNIA Workshop: Accessing, Using, Reusing Public Sector Content and Data
- When: 26-27th March 2009
- Where: New Academic Building, London School of Economics, London, UK. (map of buildings, map of area, recommended hotel)
- Register: Attendance is free, but you must register in advance.
Across the world there is a growing recognition of the social and commercial value of public sector content and data: be that the text of laws, the holdings of public museums, or the geospatial and environmental information collected by government agencies. Moreover, it is likely that better access to and use of such information is central to improving governance and increasing democratic participation.
The 5th COMMUNIA workshop, co-organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and London School of Economics, will focus on how we can unlock the huge potential of public sector material. It will also examine the current obstacles to doing this — legal, technological and social — as well as how they can be overcome. In particular, much of the value of public sector material can only be realized if it is reused and interlinked — both activities that are currently difficult for a variety of legal and technological reasons.
The workshop will bring together researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from across Europe for presentations and discussions about projects, policies and practices aimed at disseminating, connecting and building upon public sector material.
Agenda
26th March
- 09:30-09:40- Welcome, Professor Ian Angell (London School of Economics)
- 09:40-10:00 – Keynote: Tom Watson MP (Minister for Digital Engagement and Civil Service Issues)
- 10:00-11:30 – Social and economic value of public sector material
- Jamie Love (Director, Knowledge Ecology International)
- Rufus Pollock (Fellow, University of Cambridge + Director, Open Knowledge Foundation)
- Tom Steinberg (Director, mySociety)
- Michael Nicholson (Deputy Chair, PSI Alliance + Expert Member, APPSI)
- 11:30-12:00 – Coffee
- 12:00-13:30 – Getting the rights right: law and policy
- Mr. Luis Manuel Ferrão (European Commission)
- Brian Fitzgerald (Queensland University of Technology)
- Mireille van Eechoud (IViR)
- Naomi Korn (JISC SCA Consultant)
- 13:30-14:30 – Lunch
- 14:30-16:00 – Getting the right tools for the job: technology and communities
- Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski (World Food Programme)
- Carol Tullo (Director, OPSI)
- Simon Field (Chief Technology Officer, Office for National Statistics)
- Brian Hoadley (Head of Product Design and Customer Insight, Directgov)
- Ton Zijlstra and James Burke (Open government data project commissioned by Ministry for Interior Affairs, Netherlands)
- Simon Grice (BeLocal)
- 16:00-16:30 – Coffee
- 16:30-18:00 – Discussion and statement
- Facilitated by Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation + Royal Holloway)
27th March
- 09:30-10:00 – Keynote: Richard Owens, WIPO
- 10:00-11:30 – Public sector content and cultural heritage institutions
- Ben White (British Library)
- Tom Moritz (Internet Archive)
- Edward Betts (Open Library)
- Frances Pinter (London School of Economics + Bloomsbury Academic)
- Irini-Mirena Papadimitriou (Victoria and Albert Museum)
- Paul Gerhardt (Archives for Creativity)
- Mathias Schindler (Bundesarchiv image collection at Wikimedia Deutschland)
- Hilary Roberts (Imperial War Museum on Flickr Commons)
- 11:30-12:00 – Coffee
- 12:00-13:30 – Discussion and statement
- 13:30-14:30 – Lunch
- 14:30-18:00 – COMMUNIA Working Groups
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
