[open-government] Help to internationalize the Open Food Facts project + G-8 conference in Washington

[Stéphane Gigandet]

Hi Everyone,

I presented the Open Food Facts project at the Open Data Day event 
organized by the French local group of OKFN in Paris.
We are creating a kind of "Wikipedia" for food products: a crowdsourced 
database of food products from around the world with ingredients, 
nutrition facts, labels etc. published under the Open Database Licence.

We started in May 2011 and the project took off very quickly, with 300 
contributors adding 5500 products. But so far we have not been very 
successful at developing other languages than French (Spanish being the 
exception). We have versions more or less translated in 10 languages, 
but very few products. You can see the number of products for each 
language on http://openfoodfacts.org

We would be very interested to find people who could help us to develop 
the project and make it known in other countries.
One thing that was suggested during Open Data Day is that the OKFN's 
network could be of great help to find persons interested in the project 
from around the world.

We also have a very concrete short term need: the G-8 is organizing on 
April 29th a conference on Open Data for Agriculture and Food Security. 
There is an open call for ideas: 
https://sites.google.com/site/g8opendataconference/preces
We will answer that call to try to present our project, but if we are 
selected, we may not be able to fly from France to Washington. But we 
were thinking that we may be able to find someone living close to 
Washington who could present the project. And of course we would be more 
than happy to return the favor and present some projects from abroad at 
conferences in Paris or other conferences we go to elsewhere.

By the way we have an "open draft" of our answer to the open call: 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IsRV4R3nJuF145H_6jGprMj5ZSTBWYz-Gt_-bO2P2jU/edit?usp=sharing
Any comments or suggestions welcome!

At the Open Data Day event in Paris, it was also suggested that we could 
start an OKFN working group related to food. Would some of you be 
interested in starting and participating in such a working group?

Thank you!

Stéphane Gigandet
http://openfoodfacts.org

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