[okfn-discuss] OKCon 2008

[Rufus Pollock]

Saul Albert wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 06:45:35PM -0800, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> For the record, third iteration of draft announce for next OKCon is 
>> inline below.
> 
> Hey, Jonathan - that's brilliant. Informative, attractive, concise. Well
> done!
> 
> I reckon that's ready to go.
> 
> Cheers, and thanks for all your work on this!

Ditto here. I've just got a couple of fixes. Rather than going on 
another comment + new version loop i've just made the changes direct and 
put the new version below. I hope this should be pretty much final.

I've also updated the wiki page substantially so its clear how people 
submit proposals and volunteer to help out.

That leaves one final question: how do we handle registrations? Last 
year we used our bespoke MoinMoin pluguin that just saved names + emails 
to a text file. While this works ok it does make it hard to manage stuff 
as you go along. Couple of possible options:

1. Use something like EventBrite (its free plus one can do charging 
through it -- though this isn't of much relevance we charge on the door)

2. Use mailman -- this might seem weird but basically signing up to a 
mailing list is pretty much the same as signing up to the event. Mailman 
has reasonable for facilities for subscribing and unsubscribing plus it 
makes it very easy to send emails to the registrants.

What do people think? We need to sort this out sharpish as it needs to 
be in place before we do the mail out (unless we don't mind putting up a 
notice saying register later -- but that's not so great as we lose all 
the immediate effects).

Regards,

Rufus


OKCon Announce and CFP (v1.0b2)
======================

Subject: OKCon 2008: LSE, London, 15th March 2008

* OKCon 2008 - 'Open Knowledge: Applications, Tools and Services'
* where: London School of Economics, London UK
* when: 15th March 2008
* www: <http://www.okfn.org/okcon/>
* wiki: <http://www.okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/>
* register: <http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/>

Following on from the success of our inaugral conference last year, 
we're pleased to announce that the second Open Knowledge conference 
(OKCon) will take place in March 2008. 'Open Knowledge' is material that 
others are free to access, reuse or re-distribute and may include 
anything from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. The 2008 event 
will again deal with the full range of 'Open Knowledge' issues but will 
focus specifically on Applications, Tools and Services.

In recent years we've seen the growth of successful open knowledge 
projects - from peer reviewed journals to community edited 
encyclopaedias - but what impact can open licensing have in education, 
research and commerce? Is sharing the key to scaling? What kinds of 
business models are available to open knowledge distributors and how is 
open knowledge applied in different institutional and professional contexts?

There now exists a vast amount of open content and data. But what kinds 
of tools are avaiable to analyse and represent this wealth of material? 
How can we sort, search, store it to maximise its visibility and 
reusability?

In the past few years we've witnessed the rise of web-based services - 
from social networking sites to online spreadsheet packages. While we 
have definitions for open software and open knowledge, what is an open 
service? What kinds of new services can be built using open knowledge?

The second Open Knowledge conference will bring together individuals and 
groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of seminars and 
workshops around the theme of 'Applications, Tools and Services'. Three 
main sessions will focus on 'Transport and Environment', 'Visualization 
and Analysis' and 'Education and Academia'. In addition there will be 
several 'open space' sessions for the presentation of general open 
knowledge related work.

We are currently welcoming submissions and suggestions and 
registrations. If you are interested in giving a presentation, 
facilitating or otherwise helping out, please either contact info [at] 
okfn [dot] org or vist the wiki page (see link above). Registration 
should be done via the registration page (see above). Early registration 
is encouraged as space is limited!