OKCon and A Generation of Bold Web Makers

The Open Knowledge Foundation is putting on its annual conference in Berlin at the end of the month. Daniel Dietrich has done a stellar job pulling together some of the most active and inspiring people in the Free/Open space, and I’m really looking forward to geeking out with folks about lsharing, hacking and building a Free Society.

I’ll be holding a pre-workshop on a topic that’s been on my mind since GlobalMelt and joining Mozilla to run event strategy, naming how can we get more out of meeting each other face-to-face?

The workshop is on June 29 from 10:00 – 14:00, and you can sign up here.

Internet-y communities love to meet IRL. Something about online collaboration fuels the need to see each other in person. With years of conferences, meetups, hackdays, barcamps, and all sorts of event formats in between, what have we learned about events as a effective way to embolden contributors, accelerate projects, and make a difference?

I posit that we have to leverage the maker’s mindset, together with some webby wonders, to really grow the community circle and do events right. That means building things together in realtime, physical prototyping, and flexible, participatory agenda. Goodbye, industrial-era conference formats!

How can we do this? What initiatives are in play that we learn from? How can we organize shared action IRL that fits our principles of openness? We’ll examine some of tactics from the maker scene as well as successful (and failed) efforts among open communities to be more effective, more impacting, and more fun when we meet IRL.

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