[OKFest14] Introducing the engine room Liveblog for OKFest 2014

This post is part of the live coverage of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin by the engine room. For more information you can read the intro post, follow the liveblog, read the flash interviews and follow us on Twitter.

OKFest 2014 will be the biggest Open Knowledge event yet. And with over a hundred sessions and 1000 participants, it promises to capture 360 view of the state of things in the open data movement. The engine room will be liveblogging the event, conducting flash interviews, surfing sessions for insights, and sitting down with a few open knowledge projects to to learn more about the state of the art and evolution of the open data movement. We will be updating this space with pictures and other media, session aha’s, and trends we see throughout the event.

After scouring the OKFest program, we’ve been noticing a few trends:

• There is more on increasing the circle of people that can and want to engage with open data. (Growth in the open coalition, addressing inequalities in access to open data, the role of power and politics in open data, enabling reliable narrators.)
• There is more talk than ever before about the importance of responsible data in open knowledge (sessions include: hands-on anonymization, making sure open data is useable, open data in closed contexts, battling e-waste, can open data go wrong, (@engnroom’s @tingeber and @alixtrot will be on the panel for this session), responsible data publishing, open data and surveillance.
• We’ll see if corporate sponsorship changes the flavor of the event. (Google this year versus the Swiss government sponsorship last year.)
• Expect art. Creative and artistic uses of data will be on display in sessions and at the OKFest fair. Sessions will include: using street art in messaging, making art with political data, low-tech visualizations.

The engine room team will be on the ground in the Kulturbrauerei, Berlin, capturing OKFest highlights and insights for the WeGov audience. We will be:

• tweeting about goings ons at sessions
• retweeting insightful voices at the event
• capturing twitter discussions in the liveblog post
• regularly updating this liveblog post
• interviewing 5 to 10 interesting people about their open data projects
• doing flash interviews with as many people as we can to get a sense of participants’ views on open data

For live updates, watch this space.

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