open-access-event

A repo for planning an open access event to be held in Sydney, Australia on Saturday October 18th, 2014.

Contribute to the development of this event by joining the discussion.

Planning Committee: Emma Bacon, Luke Bacon, Rosie Williams

Aims

Promote understanding of Citizen Journalism & Open Knowlege/Data

Citizen journalism, open data & FOI are important partners in the future of a modern democracy. Journalists, researchers & bloggers need information to enhance scrutiny of public officials and institutions. Open data and open knowledge principles are the key to providing that information to the public through journalism (whether mainstream, independent or crowd sourced). People need to see these principles at work to undertand their value and need to be given opportunities to engage and contribute.

For their part, citizen journalism and open data projects also need volunteers, supporters and funders to exist and play the important role they must fulfill.

Citizen journalism also has a role to play in improving the quality and engagement with democratic principles through public discourse. Technology and the internet has brought about unprecedented access to public discourse but this debate is characterised by an adverserial culture which inhibits meaningful dialogue between people of different political pursuasions. A tendency to oversimplify and try to out-shout one's political opponents is a major turn off for many people, inhibiting understanding and reducing engagement with the political sphere. This disengagement undermines formulation of representative and responsive public policy.

Take home for participants:

Hear from founders of citizen journalism & open data projects in order to:

• be made aware of existing or potential citizen journalism and open data projects
• understand the ideas and philosophies that drive citizen journalism, independent media and open data/knowlege projects
• understand what such projects can do for them as citizens and how they can contribute to them.
• make personal connections
• learn new skills (eg FOI)
• know what to do next to participate in a project or found their own.

Take home for project founders/editors:

• create awareness of our projects and their needs
• find prospective volunteers
• set up future events
• get feedback from participants

Principles

To be developed, see discussion

Structure

We aim to include three different types of session:

• Two Ideas plenaries
  Why get involved with citizen journalism and civic hacking? What is at stake and what can we achieve?

• Two Practical Skills plenaries
  Introduction to a skill or technique that is useful across a broad range of projects and activites, e.g. What and How of the Freedom of Information system.

• One Project session of parallel workshops
  Attendees are introduced to a range of participating projects and can make contact, learn how to contribute and sign up for further envolvement.

Participating Projects

• InfoAus
• Detention Logs
• Nofibs.com.au
• Independent Media

Core skills to be covered

• FOI
• Volunteering and working with volunteers

To be developed, see discussion

Core ideas to be covered

To be developed, see discussion

Venue

UTS has been discussed. Google premsies are considered too small. Venue needs to be finalised within coming weeks. Aiming for a capacity for the presentations that bookend the day (introduction & wrap up) to cater to a capacity of up to 200 participants.

Other presentations/workshops will be for smaller groups and require smaller rooms.

Resources

To be developed