Mark your calendars! Next Friday, 28 March 2025, the Open Knowledge Foundation will host a new iteration of The Tech We Want initiative — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used. This time we’ll focus on our decade-long Frictionless Data project, a progressive open-source framework for building data infrastructure – data management, data integration, data validation and data flows. The goal is to bring together maintainers, users, and contributors to discuss challenges, priorities, and governance for the project moving forward.
The Frictionless Data project aims to make it easier to work with data by reducing common data workflow issues (what we call friction). Its software and standards are the basis of many projects developed by the community all over the world, ranging from climate scientists, to humanities researchers, to government data centres.
At the summit, we want to promote successful cases and projects, and collectively discuss how such a long-running project adapts to the current context and Open Knowledge’s current vision of technology.
What to Expect
👩🏽💻 We will start the event with short presentations of Frictionless use cases, in order to have some examples of how Frictionless is used today.
🗣️ Open Knowledge’s Tech Lead, Patricio del Boca, will then briefly present The Tech We Want initiative, to share the current vision of technology that is driving all development efforts at OKFN today.
🤗 Following that, we will have a genuine community discussion on how to envision the future of the project with selected active members of the community leading the discussion.
Programme
🕒 15:00 CET – Frictionless Today (demos)
Here’s how we are using Frictionless today.
Confirmed speakers and projects:
- Pierre Camilleri, Johan Richer: Validata (government data)
- Romina Colman: Open Data Editor (data quality for non-technical audiences)
- Peter Desmet: Camtrap DP (bioinformatics)
- Nicholas Kellett: Deploy Solutions (climate/disaster response + citizen science)
- Phil Schumm: Data curation with Frictionless at NIH/University of Chicago (biomedical data)
- Adam Shepherd, Amber York: BCO-DMO (oceanography data)
- Ethan Welty: Global englacial temperature database (glaciar monitoring data)
🕓 16:30 CET – The Tech We Want Vision
A presentation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting and focused on solving people’s real problems.
- Patricio Del Boca – Open Knowledge Foundation
🕔 16:45 CET – Frictionless Tomorrow (community discussion)
What will Frictionless be like tomorrow and how will the current tech changes impact it?
Confirmed discussion leaders:
- Pierre Camilleri
- Peter Desmet
- Stephen Diggs
- Keith Hughitt
- Kyle Husmann
- Phil Schumm
Although it’s an event with and for the Frictionless community, the event is open to anyone interested, especially the open data community (technical and non-technical). If you use Frictionless Data or the Data Package in any project, please come along. If you want to learn more about how to optimise your data workflow and learn more about the future of the project, please come along too.
For updates, follow the Open Knowledge Foundation on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and LinkedIn.
We can’t wait to see you there! 🚀
