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These last few days - September 16-19 - I've been in Geneva with most of the other Open Knowledge Foundation staff to organize the world biggest event for open knowledge, the Open Knowledge Conference, with over 900 people attending from over 55 countries.
The full program of the conference was chug full of sessions focusing on topics such open government, open science and research and open sustainability. I was involved in several ways; for one by co-hosting a workshop on the Open Data Census (with Ton Zijlstra) that focused on not only showcasing the assessment tool that monitors government data across the world based on citizens reporting, but also invited participants to contribute. The slides and full video of the session is available here:
Open Data Census - Workshop from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.
Additionally, I co-facilitated and chaired a few panel sessions. One was focusing on Open Data Toolkits and Assessment Tools and featured ao. Amparo Ballivian from the World Bank and Barbara Ubaldi from OECD. Another one was titled Opening Up The United Nations which summoned a series of UN agencies including UNICEF, UNOPS and UNDP to discuss the implementation of open data and more transparency in general. Lastly, I supported the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Support Unit run a workshop session on raising the bar for ambition and quality in OGP - to develop a ‘Civil Society National OGP Review’.
All in all a great event with myriads of great conversations and hundreds of bright-minded leaders of the open knowledge and open data movement. As a supplement I recommend reading my colleague Zara Rahman's account of the event which features many great points.
