We are glad to announce our first official Community Mentoring and Skillshare Gathering to be held in Mexico City on October 3, 2014 in connection with the ConDatos and AbraLatam conferences. The event will kick off a series of similar regional events on other continents later this year and into next and will serve to enhance our virtual skill sharing and mentoring activities.
The Community Mentoring and Skillshare Gathering is a 1-day event scheduled to take place right after the ConDatos and AbreLatam conferences in Mexico next week. Open Knowledge community members from Latin America will join other grassroots open activists from across the region to build relationships, share skills, and find mentors.
The event is a pilot that will explore new ways of supporting the global (and often virtual) open knowledge community by organising face-to-face skill sharing and mentoring activities around relevant regional open events. The intention is to use these gatherings to jumpstart a community lead mentorship programme, an idea that we have been discussing with community members for a few months (see here for more details). The mentorship programme is intended to be largely self-sustainable, community/peer-to-peer driven and of benefit to both newcomers and more experienced community members. The program should run on volunteer basis, to ensure broad commitment and inclusivity.
We are honoured to be able to experiment with this idea in collaboration with our community in and around Latin America following AbreLatam/ConDatos this month in Mexico, and hope to learn a lot about the needs and desires of community members seeking mentorship – as well as how we can make the most of in person gatherings to strengthen both our skills and community.
Powered by the Partnership for Open Data
The series of events are organized in close collaboration with the Partnership for Open Data and in partnership with SocialTIC. One goal of the Partnership for Open Data is to support the development of strong open knowledge communities around the world, and the aim of the community summit will be to run a number of peer to peer skillshares designed to strengthen the open community’s ability to continue to grow and diversify.
A day full of activities
Activities at the event will include a mentoring brainstorming session, where we will discuss how and why mentoring is needed in the network, actual skill sharing sessions as well as some time dedicated to discussing how we continue to support and teach each other online after we return to our respective cities and countries.
In this same spirit of peer-to-peer support, the Partnership for Open Data and Open Knowledge will host a skillshare corner at the ConDatos. One of the activities that we will be running is a Open Data Census community sprint in which we will try to expand the community of contributors to the open data census.
Community building of the programme and upcoming community calls
In order to ensure that we make the most of the time we have all together and put together a programme that suits the needs of the Latin American open community, we would like to invite you to participate in one of the following community calls to discuss the ideas mentioned above:
- Tuesday, 23th of September, 6 pm CET/12 pm EDT (HANGOUT LINK)
- Thursday, 25th of September, 9 pm CET/3 pm EDT (HANGOUT LINK)
If you are unable to attend one of the above calls but would like to suggest ideas, we would love to hear from you via this idea submission form or on email local (at) okfn (dot) org.
How to join
If you are in Mexico next week and would like to participate, please register for the event to let us know you will be coming.
As this event is being organised with and for the Latin American open data community, the event will be facilitated in Spanish.
Lastly, we would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at SocialTIC for helping to make this happen! We are looking forward to seeing you all next week in Mexico!
Christian is the International Community Manager for the Open Knowledge global network and additionally volunteers with the Danish Open Knowledge Local Group. He has a background in media and culture entrepreneurship, community creation and hacktivism - and is a dedicated open-everything advocate.
