[OpenSpending] Early bird tickets deadline for Open Knowledge Festival approaching

Tue Aug 7 05:37:20 UTC 2012

Hi All,

Just a quick note that there are a couple of days left to apply for
early bird tickets for OKFestival, which will take place on 17th-22nd
September. (http://okfestival.org/early-bird-okfest-tickets/).

Also, there is a small amount of funding available for development
practitioners taking part in the development stream:
http://okfestival.org/travel-bursaries/#development

Some highlights for those interested in financial topics:

IN THE TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY STREAM

* Opening debate with food for thoughts on the Open Government Data
movement & the Open Government Partnership - by Warren Krafchik
(International Budget Partnership) including talk on Global Open Data
Standards by Martin Tisne from Omidyar Foundation
* Data, Use and Spending - ’Budget Cycle Monitoring, Hack’ - At
present, the only way to find out when to expect a document to be
released is to trawl the legislation of a country and find references
to legally mandated release dates, but there may be another way… Our
mission is to align a calendar of internationally-recognised best
practice guidelines for publication of key budget documents with
calendars of the fiscal year in different countries and build services
which can relate to this. Possible features include: 1) The ability to
send out notifications to journalists, CSOs, budget monitoring orgs at
the last acceptable date for the docs to be published to check whether
they are available. 2) Integrating with FOI request services to allow
organisations to have a mechanism to request budget documents
directly. For example, autogenerated FOI letters processed through
Alaveteli.
* Corporate transparency, Corruption & Open Data - Led by Global
Witness and Open Corporates, this presentation will detail how poor
access to even the most basic company data — such as whether a company
exists — is enabling corruption, money laundering and fraud to
flourish.

OPEN DEVELOPMENT

Hackdays, workshops and discussions on 3 major themes:

* Open development and aid flow exploring developments in the
International Aid Transparency Initiative, and tracking aid to
developing countries.

* Open = accessible? Is open data enough? How can we design for
accessibility in developing countries? Who are the new infomediaries?
Join us for this session exploring the practical issues for citizens
in developing countries accessing open information.

* Technologies for open development – focusing on the role that ICTs
and open technologies, from open source to open hardware can play in
development.

Read more: http://okfestival.org/topic-stream-open-development/

Looking forward to continuing the debate with many of you at the event!

Lucy

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator,
OpenSpending & Data Journalism
Open Knowledge Foundation
Skype: lucyfediachambers
Twitter: @lucyfedia