OKCon 2011: Call for Participation

[Apologies for cross-posting]*

*The 6th Annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) will take place on 
30th June -- 1st July 2011 in Berlin.
Website: http://okcon.org/2011 <http://okcon.org/2011/cfp/>
Call for participation: http://okcon.org/2011/cfp/

We are looking forward for your participation! It would be great to meet 
you at OKCon 2011 in Berlin.
Please get in touch with us at okcon@okfn.org <mailto:okcon@okfn.org> if 
you want to participate, have any questions or suggestions.

There are several ways to participate (the deadline is /May 1st/). 
Please have a look at the *How To Participate *Section below. *

*Regards,
Sebastian Hellmann*

*
*
Announcement*

OKCon is a wide-ranging conference that brings together individuals and 
organizations from across the open knowledge spectrum for two days of 
presentations, workshops and exchange of ideas.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a 
wide range of areas from governance to science, culture to technology. 
Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and 
reuse, bridge gaps, improve transparency and thus foster innovation and 
increase societal welfare.

In Berlin, we will be surrounded by a variety of interesting 
communities. These include open access and open bibliography communities 
to the OpenStreetMap, hacker and artist groups to the various free 
culture and commons research communities. We look forward to jointly 
discussing with all of them the latest developments and aspects of 
open knowledge in their work.

This is a time of great change. In addition to high profile initiatives 
such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is 
enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all 
levels and in many countries. Moreover, in the last year, many 
governments across the world have begun opening up their data.

And it doesn't stop there. In academia, open access to both publications 
and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up 
learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore this 
gathering flood of open data plus content is the creator and driver of 
massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how 
can we connect it together, how can we use it to collaborate and share 
our work? We will explore these issues, and more, at OKCon 2011 in Berlin.

*Topic areas*
*
*We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing 
content or data that is open in accordance with 
http://opendefinition.org. Topics include but are not limited to:

*Open Science and Open Data in Academic Research
*
. Open license models for scientific data, adaption of licenses for 
special domain requirements
. Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models
. Open models for scientific innovation, for funding and for publication 
('open-access')
. Tools for analysing and visualizing open data

*Open Law, Society and Democracy
*
. Open licensing, legal tools and the Public Domain
. Open government data and content (public sector information)
. Open knowledge and international development
. Opening up access to the law and lawmaking processes

*Open Technologies
*
. Semantic Web and Linked Data in relation to open knowledge
. Infrastructure, platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and 
curating open knowledge
. Light-weight, adaptive interaction models
. Open, decentralized social network applications
. Open geospatial data

*Open Culture, Education and Commons Research
*
. Open educational tools and resources, open textbooks
. Public Domain digitisation initiatives
. Incentives and rewards for open-knowledge contributors
. P2P production and sustainability models for open content
. Governance of the knowledge commons

*Important Dates
*
. Submission deadline: May 1st, 2011
. Notification of acceptance: June 1st, 2011
. OKCon: 30th June & 1st July, 2011

*How To Participate
*OKCon 2011 will have several formats and ways in which you can participate:

. presentation sessions
. lightning talks
. hands on workshops
. open space
. exhibition spaces
. open design and fablab
. hackspace

We are especially interested, if you want to organize a an event in one 
of the above formats and topic areas. You are also more than welcome to 
propose additional formats and topics. If you would like to organise, 
participate or have a proposal of another format please submit your 
ideas and proposals here: http://okcon.org/2011/submit/

*OKCon Formats & Submission Details
*
*Presentation Sessions and Proceedings
*To reserve a slot in one of the presentation sessions you can apply in 
the following manner: You can submit an extended abstract of 2-4 pages 
describing the topic of your presentation. OKCon also has an academic 
stream and will publish proceedings. If you additionally want your 
submission to be included in the conference proceedings please prepare 
an extended 5-10 page paper submission and format it according to 
the LNCS Style

Please Note: Proceedings of OKCon will be published at http://ceur-ws.org.

To make a submission for the presentation session and proceedings please 
visit: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=okcon2011

*Lightning Talks
*Lightning talks are short presentations, which last 2-3 minutes with 
2-3 slides. Submission of lightning talks can be done directly at the 
conference up to 5 minutes before the Lightning talk session starts. 
Make sure you get your message through and please: don't be boring ;)

*Hands-on Workshops
*The hands on workshops is the format where you can intensively work 
with a relatively small group of people on your presented topic or 
project. This is not for lectures but for hands-on collaboration, 
exchange and skill sharing. If you are interested to run a workshop on 
OKCon 2011 please submit your proposal here: http://okcon.org/2011/submit/

*Open Space
*The open space offers a place for all kind of spontaneous 
interventions, meetings and the like following the concept of the open 
space technology. The open space area will be close to the exhibition 
space area and is open for you all the time. The open space can be used 
all times by anybody without submission. However, if you would like top 
run an event at the open space you might submit your idea here: 
http://okcon.org/2011/submit/ to help us planning.

*Exhibition Space
*The exhibition space is an open area where people, projects and 
organisations can present their ideas and projects to the public. 
Projects can have a permanent desc for a point of reference of their 
project. If you want to be present in the exhibition space at OKCon 2011 
please submit your proposal here: http://okcon.org/2011/submit/

*Open Design and FabLab work area
*The open design and Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is an area 
dedicated to open processes in creating, sharing, reusing and producing 
of all kind of art, designs and other products. If you are interested in 
contributing to the open design and fablab work area at OKCon 2011 
please submit your proposal here: http://okcon.org/2011/submit/

*Hackspace / Hackathon
*The hackspace is a dedicated space for you hackers. This is the right 
place to get your hand dirty and organise your hackathon. A hackathon is 
a collaborative decentraliced event of short timespan like one or two 
days with the aim to having a lot of fun with code & data. If you are 
interested to run a hackathon at OKCon 2011 please submit your 
proposal here: http://okcon.org/2011/submit/


-- 
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org