First post here after a long silence… maybe too busy with twitter, Nabuur, WebEnq, Ecampaigning Forum, NetSquared. And now preparing my short intro into "open everything" to set the stage for Thursday’s meetup of the E-collaboration group.
Within a smaller group, we had some discussions about "open", and about how choosing technology for your campaign or organisation is also a political, cultural, and ethical choice. Features and price often dominate, and lots of stuff on the internet is for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch: there are many lessons we learned in development aid that equally apply when your organisation gets such "free" web development aid. Lets not spend decades to learn them again.
So while on the one hand, people are trail-blazing the concept of "open everything", there are, on the other hand, many people working in international cooperation who are just starting to look at why all this "open" matters, and how it can help them achieve their mission.
We’ll be trying to bridge that gap on Thursday afternoon:
12.00 – 13.00 Welcome, coffee & tea13.00 – 13.20 Getting acquaintedPlenary
13.20 – 13.30 Introduction into the "OPEN" field by Rolf Kleef13.30 – 14.00 Concepts behind Open Standards and Free Software (Open Source) by Anne SedeeGroup workshops
14.00 – 14.45 Two group workshops
- "Free Software as a tool for social and economic development" by Karsten Gerloff (UNU-MERIT)
- "Crash course open formats" by Riny Heijdendael
Plenary
14.45 – 15.15 "Learning in Freedom: Open Content and Open Educational Resources" by David Jacovkis (Free Knowledge Institute)15.15 – 15.30 Coffee and tea breakGroup workshops
15.30 – 16.30 Two group workshops
- ‘making knowledge open and accessible’, experiences from the development community by Peter Ballantyne (Euforic)
- Debate Game: People bring in a case about an open/ closed dilemma
Evaluation & closing
16.30 – 17.00 Presentations and evaluation.17.00 – 18.00 Borrel
The meeting will take place on 22nd May 2008 at Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There are still a few places left, so get in touch if you want to join!