okfestival planning in helsinki, 2012

For those just arriving back to daily life after the summer holidays (and the Mars Curiosity landing!), we have some good news regarding OKFestival – our Early Bird ticket deadline has been extended to this Wednesday, August 8th, 2012.

This will give you more time to get those tickets reserved well in advance so you can start planning your week with us in Helsinki, Finland this September.

While we’re at it, a few more bits of OKFestival-related news:

  • The organisers of the world’s first open data cuisine workshop, the “Art of Data Cooking”, would like to invite you to their event here. Interested parties are encouraged to send an email to opendatacooking AT pixelache.ac as capacity is limited.
  • We’re still finalising the details, but there will be two exclusive announcements during the OKFestival week regarding Europeana and the EC Open Data Portal – stay tuned for more info.
  • Applications for Sida’s Travel Bursary Scheme for development practitioners and coders are also open until August 8th.
  • For those who didn’t propose a session in time, but still want to share their projects with OKFestival participants, we’re working on a public Lightning Talk Corner in the main atrium of Aalto University. Details will be released before the festival begins so you have time to prepare.
  • Coming to Finland and want to stay with a local Finn? The OKFestival Couchsurfing community is growing, and invites those interested in hosting or being hosted to get involved.

With hundreds of tickets already booked in the last month alone by government representatives, programmers, civil society members, hackers, students, teachers and open knowledge advocates around the world, festival organisers are becoming increasingly excited about what is in store for all of us this autumn.

We already can’t wait to see the new ideas and projects yet to come – and our teams of Guest Programme Planners are working hard to finalise the details of their programmes for public release later this month.

As the countdown continues, we encourage you to talk to other festival participants on Twitter using the hashtag #okfest. Want your tweet shared with the entire OKFestival community? Drop a line to @okfestival. We are also talking on Facebook here.


OKFestival 2012 runs from the 17th to 22nd of Sept in Helsinki, Finland. More info: okfestival.org.


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Kat is Mozilla's Hacking Popular Culture Liaison. As part of the Open Knowledge Foundation's community team from 2011-2013, Kat coordinated OKFestival Helsinki and led the Local Groups network. She is a co-founder of the Open Design + Hardware working group and editor of The Open Book. Tweet @kat_braybrooke.