ODC Meets Open Knowledge Festival 2014

ODC Design Team Leader, Huy Eng, was supported by the OKFestival Foundation to attend the Open Knowledge Festival 2014, which took place July 15–17 2014 in Berlin, Germany. The event was held at the Kulturbrauerei, an aesthetically beautiful piece of architecture originally built and operated as a brewery. In this blog post Huy Eng shares her experiences at the festival.

OKFestival 2014 was the biggest of the OKFestivals thus far, having brought over a thousand people of the open movement communities from more than 56 countries to meet and connect with each other.

During the festival the attendees shared, listened, learned, debated, hacked, networked as well as brainstormed to create new tools/solutions/ideas. This year, the key attendees were Google, Partnership for Open Data, Omidyar Network, Open Corporates, Science Open, Wikirate as well as Open-Steps. Themed “Open Mind, Open Action”, the OKFestival 2014 featured engaging keynote speakers including Neelie Kroes (Vice President and EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda, European Commission), Patrick Alley (Founder of Global Witness and a member of the WEF Global Agenda Council for Conflict Prevention), Eric Hysen (Head of Politics and Elections, Google), Beatriz Busaniche (Founder of Wikimedia Argentina and key member of Argentina’s Fundacion Via Libre), and Ory Okolloh (Co-founder Ushahidi and Mzanlendo, Director of Investments Omidyar Network). 003004

With the abundance of intriguing topics and hands-on sessions, the limited time was the only constraint. Below, I highlight some of the most interesting sessions I attended, which include: Open Access Button, Deal with large sets of documents or data, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap mapping workshop, and Introduction to Text and Data Mining (TDM). From these sessions, I have learned some new tools and technologies that will enhance ODC’s work. They are:
  • Open Access Button: a browser bookmarklet that improves efficiency in online researching by allowing users to track searches when they are denied access or blocked by a paywall.
  • Tabula is a free and open source PDF-to-spreadsheet extraction tool. It is easy to use and works on Mac, Windows and Linux. This tool has proven to be tremendously helpful in extracting English language based documents. I am hoping to test it with Khmer based and scanned documents.
  • Document Cloud is a web-based software platform that is helpful for journalists in researching, analyzing, annotating and publishing primary source documents.
  • Overview AP is a visualization and analysis tool designed for sets of documents. Overview can be used to analyze the emails, declassified document dumps, material from Wikileaks releases, social media posts, online comments and so much more.

Besides the official sessions, informal and fringe events were highly sought out alternatives providing a space where people could showcase their stories, discuss and exchange ideas with each other. Besides attending sessions, my colleagues and I hosted an informal session in which we showcased the ODC project to developers and data journalists. We discussed technical issues and challenges and received valuable feedback and input from those who attended our session.

ODC Research & Volunteer Coordinator discussed ODC with data journalists

ODC Research & Volunteer Coordinator discussed ODC with data journalists

ODC Design Team Leader and ODC Advisor discussed technical challenges with developers

ODC Design Team Leader and ODC Advisor discussed technical challenges with developers

We closed the OKFestival 2014 with another meeting with the Partnership for Open Data, the OK Foundation ambassadors, and the School of Data fellows. I was happy to see that there were interests and motivations in learning from and sharing with a small project from the global south like ODC. With this experience, I wish to stay connected with the open community outside of Cambodia and hope to see a similar community with the same level of enthusiasm in Cambodia.