OKFestival 2018  – It’s time for a competition!

Update 30 November 2017: Despite earlier announcements, Open Knowledge International have decided not to run OKFestival 2018. There have been some recent major changes in the organisation that have adversely affected our ability to produce a Festival which would match the expectations of our networks and partners. We are, obviously, disappointed by this decision but […]

Open Knowledge Festival comes to Thessaloniki in 2018

Update 30 November 2017: Despite earlier announcements, Open Knowledge International have decided not to run OKFestival 2018. There have been some recent major changes in the organisation that have adversely affected our ability to produce a Festival which would match the expectations of our networks and partners. We are, obviously, disappointed by this decision but […]

OKFestival 2014: we made it! A write-up & Thank You note

Open Knowledge Festival 2014! We built it, made it and ran it – it was a blast, thank you! 1056 participants from 60 countries 215 facilitators and moderators 17 Programme Team members 70 volunteers made it all happen. Who says that numbers are dry? Just by writing them down, our hearts are melting. Group work! […]

Thank you for joining us at Open Knowledge Festival 2014!

Thank you for joining us in Berlin and helping to shape OKFestival and the future of the open knowledge movement! We hope that the event provided you with the opportunity to learn, to share and to connect with open knowledge advocates from around the world. While we were excited and inspired by the collaborations and […]

OKFestival: Day Two Highlights & Wrap Up

What a Week! Between five incredible keynotes, 70+ participatory sessions, an unFestival and countless fringe events, not to mention informal strategizing in the courtyards of the Kulturbrauerei, I am sure that we are all still taking some time to process all the information. Last week, our incredible volunteers put together a Day 1 roundup, highlighting […]

#OKStory

Everyone is a storyteller! Just one week away from the big Open Brain Party of OKFestival. We need all the storytelling help you can muster. Trust us, from photos to videos to art to blogs to tweets – share away. The Storytelling team is a community-driven project. We will work with all participants to decide […]

Capture your events

We’re on a skillshare craze leading up to OKFestival. A few weeks ago we hosted a session all about how to create great videos with our guest Sam Muirhead. This week we are inviting you to join a Photography Skillshare. Events is one of the top ways that you are involved in Open Knowledge. So, […]

Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches

At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]

OKFestival 2014 Provisional Programme is now live!

Over the last few months we have received hundreds of terrific proposals for this year’s Open Knowledge Festival programme. Thank you for your ideas and your input! There have been more sessions proposed than we could possibly accommodate and as a result, we’ve had the incredibly difficult task of whittling down all of those great […]

OKFestival financial aid announcement delayed

Our Financial Aid applications closed on May 4th and we’ve been working hard to review all the applications and get word out to you as soon as possible if you’re one of those selected. However, we’ve had many more applications than expected and while we’re thrilled so many of you want to come, it does […]

Only 4 days left to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid!

The deadline to apply for OKFestival Financial Aid is this Sunday 4th May: hurry! Diversity and inclusivity are a huge part of our festival ethos and we are committed to ensuring a broad variety of participation from all corners of the world; creating a forum for all ideas and all people. To achieve this, we’ll […]

Open Knowledge Festival Call for Volunteers Opens Today!

What: Join the Volunteers Team at OKFestival 2014! When: July 15-17th, Berlin, Germany Why? Lots of reasons! Find them here! The OKFestival team is launching our call for volunteers today, and we are excited to bring on board amazing members of our community who will help us to make this festival the huge success we […]

OKFestival 2014 Financial Aid Programme Launches Today!

The OKFestival 2014 Team is happy to announce that we are launching our Financial Aid Programme today! We’re delighted to support and ensure the attendance of those with great ideas who are actively involved in the open movement, but whose distance or finances make it difficult for them to get to this year’s festival in […]

OKFestival Call for Proposals ending soon! Submit your proposal now!

We extended the deadline to give you an extra 2 weeks to come up with unusually brilliant, inventive, participatory session proposals for OKFestival 2014, but we’re getting very close to crunch-time now! This Sunday, March 30th, is the final deadline to submit the session you want to run at the festival. Then it’s over to […]

Deadline to submit your OKFestival 2014 session proposals extended to March 30!

Event: OKFestival – July 15-17, 2014. Berlin, Germany. Call for Proposals: Find the call, FAQs and the submission form here Deadline: Deadline extended! New deadline to submit your proposals is March 30, 2014. Tickets: Early Bird tickets are now on sale! This year’s OKFestival Call for Proposals was due to end on Sunday and our […]

OKFestival streams – concept and how to get help!

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we aspire to create environments that connect diverse audiences, thus enabling a diverse groups of thinkers, makers and activists to come together and collaborate to effect change. This year, the Open Knowledge Festival is fuelled by our theory that change happens when you bring together knowledge – which informs change […]

Tips & Tricks – A Hangout for OKFestival Session Planners

The Open Knowledge Festival call for session proposals is now open! The better the proposals, the better the festival, so we’re inviting you to put on your thinking caps and come up with revolutionarily brilliant ideas for sessions at OKFestival 2014. We know you can do it, and we know you’ll make this festival a […]

The Open Knowledge Festival 2014 website is now live!

We know you’re as excited as we are about this year’s Open Knowledge Festival, which will be taking place in Berlin from 15th – 17th July. Today, we’re pleased to unveil the new website for the event which includes the festival ticket shop, details of how to contribute to the programme and other key information […]

Global events update: join the OKCon survey and get ready for OKFestival!

Picture by Libertic. Dear OKCon speakers, workshop organisers, participants, partners and supporters, OKCon was a fantastic event, spanning over a total of four days, spreading out all around Geneva, attended by more than 900 people from 55 countries on site and with many more joining us online (and we’re currently counting you too). And the […]

See you at OKFestival 2014

OKFestival is back! As the banners are rolled up and the lights turned off in Geneva, we are already looking forward to the next time we’ll all come together. We are super-excited to announce that OKFestival 2014 will take place on the 15-18 July in Berlin, Germany. OKFestival is the biggest gathering of the open […]

News from the Open Knowledge Foundation Events Team

Events have a significant role for the Open Knowledge Foundation. They focus attention on the key issues of the day, gather interested individuals and organisations around specific topics, and represent the public face of the open knowledge community and its many and various projects. They also provide occasions for open data enthusiasts to meet face-to-face, […]

Announcing the Open Knowledge Conference 2013: Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected

The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2013 Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) will take place in Geneva, Switzerland on 17th -18th September. The theme of this year’s edition will be Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected. When: 17th – 18th September 2013 Where: Geneva, Switzerland at the CICG – Centre International de […]

Exploring ‘Openness’ Together: The Open Book to be Launched Friday at FutureEverything

From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. New concepts about public information, transparency and the Commons are combining in unprecedented ways, resulting in a breadth of transformative collaborations. Nations across the globe seek formal understandings of […]

“Carbon dioxide data is not on the world’s dashboard” says Hans Rosling

Professor Hans Rosling, co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation and Advisory Board Member at the Open Knowledge Foundation, received a standing ovation for his keynote at OKFestival in Helsinki in September in which he urged open data advocates to demand CO2 data from governments around the world. Following on from this, the Open Knowledge […]

OKFestival 2012: Official After Package Released

A Week to Remember After a few months of post-production work by the core crew and our ever-amazing organising partners, we are happy to release the official OKFest 2012 After package – a set of materials that commemorate what an amazing week we had with you in Helsinki and help set the scene for what’s […]

Your Timeline Submissions Wanted for the Open Book

The Finnish Institute in London and the Open Knowledge Foundation are publishing a book, and we want you to be a part of its history. The Open Book (publish date 2013, details here) is a crowd-sourced publication which will contextualise the international open knowledge movement in the words of those who are helping build it […]

OKFestival 2012 One Month Later: Successes and Happy Tidings

For the past month since the last OKFestival 2012 pioneers departed from Helsinki’s misty shores, I’ve been wondering how to breach the topic of a “thank you” message to the remarkable community that made this highly experimental event, run on a shoestring budget with a crowdsourced programme, such a spectacular success for Finnish and international […]

Video: Julia Kloiber on Open Data

Here’s Julia Kloiber from OKFN-DE’s Stadt-Land-Code project, talking at the OKFest about the need for more citizen apps in Germany, the need for greater openness, and how to persuade companies to open up.

“Demand carbon dioxide data” says Hans Rosling to open data advocates at OKFestival

Gapminder is one of the best known examples of a project which uses open data to improve public understanding of big global issues and trends. Yesterday Gapminder Founder Hans Rosling, who is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board, gave a spectacular keynote talk at OKFestival, for which he received a standing ovation. In […]

OKFestival Green Hackathon

When: 19th-20th of September Where: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Hämeentie 135 C Helsinki (Hack workshop 3) Welcome to two days of hacking for openness and sustainability at the OKFestival in Helsinki. This is an opportunity to meet great developers and sustainability experts and to help out our planet with some innovative […]

2 Weeks Left Until OKFestival! Online Schedule, Calls for Participation, Evening Events and Free Hackathons

A Special Gift for Festival Participants… For the 600+ brave souls already registered for the world’s first-ever Open Knowledge Festival, here’s our first-ever participant bulletin! The gems and secrets below have been built from the weekly-curated, community-written summaries we’ve been sharing behind the scenes with our teams of Guest Programme Planners around the globe – and with less than two weeks left until […]

Hackday for News Apps at OK Fest

GOAL: You have six hours to make a working news app. There are three of you, a coder, a graphic designer and a journalist. Is it possible? Yes. Five times in the last two years the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, has invited people to do just this, at HS Open hack days, which I […]

Introducing the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness

This guest post is by Scott Hubli and Andrew G. Mandelbaum from the National Democratic Institute (NDI). NDI is partering with the Sunlight Foundation and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency to enhance networking among parliamentary monitoring organizations on issues of parliamentary openness and democratic reform, with the support of the Omidyar Network, the […]

Open Culture and Science Hackday at OKFestival

At the OKFestival in Helsinki next month, the Open Heritage and Open Science streams will be kicking off their three days of activities with a joint hackday dedicated to working with and building things with open cultural and scientific data. The day will involve a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a digital humanities coding sprint working with tools […]

A Brief Summary of the World’s First Open Knowledge Festival

With only 4 weeks left until the OKFestival week starts in Helsinki, here is our latest rundown of everything you need to know about the event. We’re very excited about what’s in store for participants this year! OVERVIEW New to OKFestival? We are delighted to invite you to this year’s event in Helsinki, Finland – […]

Call for Papers: Open Data Academic Research at OKFest

At Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw last year, much discussion took place about academic research around Open Data. In response to these conversations, a specific ‘Open Data Academic Research’ session will be taking place at OKFest this year. The session will bring together a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines who are […]

OKFestival Call for Proposals Released With a Twist

For those looking for a reason to come to Helsinki with us this fall, the OKFestival Call for Proposals is released today – and it has an experimental, innovative focus. The spin? For this year’s OKFestival (the first event of its kind, organised almost entirely through virtual conference calls, IRC chats and co-written documents by […]

OGDCamp + OKCon = Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in Helsinki, Finland!

The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, London-based Community Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Regional Chapters and Groups) and a core organiser of OKFest. On September 17-22 this year, global communities will be descending on the shores of Helsinki for a week-long celebration called the Open Knowledge Festival – and you’re the first to […]