[open-development] your ideas needed! open tech, open development data, open minds?

[Johns, Sarah]

Hello all,

This is an OK Festival post, but even if you're not coming, you might have an idea or two to spare ... so please read on.

We've got a 90 min session at the Open Knowledge Festival (18 - 20 Sept, Helsinki) to talk about open technology, open data and development.

Rather than do the usual debate/panel discussion on ICT4D, what do you think about this?

The idea would be to get the techhies at OKFest (who are not from a development background) to engage with and get inspired by tecchies from 'developing' countries who are working with development issues, through a practical workshop of sharing experiences.

The ideal audience would be development folk from the field (who would be there to share their experiences) plus the techhies from the other streams. In particular bringing in the folk from the open software and gender and diversity and geodata streams - having experienced other events where you could count the women on one hand, I'd love to see women as 50% of the audience.

The session would look at real-life examples of how open tech/FLOSS is used to support development, including some real examples of the opportunities and limitations of tech, and the opportunities presented by open data. It'd be amazing to get fellow coders from Africa or Asia to talk to the crowd.

And if anyone was up for it, we could have a quick debate on the value of development data challenges; creating economic opportunities for young people involved with tech or the rise of ihubs. I would also love to talk about 'why INGO's should back tech startups' but might be a lone voice ;O)

I'm sure there are too many ideas here for one 90 min session but if you've got ideas that can make this session even better, or ideas of who to talk to and you know folk going to OK Fest who'd be great for this session, please let me know? It'd be great to get a virtual linkup with some of the hub projects in Africa, although that seems a bit of a dream at the moment.

Anyway, love to hear from you. And .... GO TEAM GB!!!

Sarah



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