2013-11-03 at 12:39:52
Mid of September I attended the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva. To be honest, I had never heard of the Open Knowledge Foundation before (or I just don't recall), so I was quite happy to see that this year's conference was in Geneva. I just found out about it, because Kaitlin Thaney, Director Mozilla Science Lab had a talk there.
I had heard of Open Data and seen some examples before, but I didn't know, that there was a whole conference about it. Open Data, Open Government, Open Science, you name it. I tried to go to an OpenData.ch event last spring, but unfortunately I couldn't make it. Otherwise I would have been involved with OpenData before, since it's a great cause. At the Open Knowledge Conference the Swiss government announced their Open Data Portal, which (in my opinion) needs a lot of improvement and more different datasets.
Since OpenData has a strong correlation with the Open Web Mozilla wants to build, I was there talking to people about the Open Web and Mozilla's Mission. Also I talked with people about Mozilla Webmaker to show them how easy it can be to publish their data with the Webmaker tools. One problem I was faced with was that the event registration was sponsored and so everybody had the same (sponsored) lanyard. Since I had Firefox lanyards with me, I couldn't just go there and tell everyone to switch them. Or could I have? In my opinion that would have been quite unpolite. Nevertheless I handed out the lanyards, but didn't ask them to switch them instantly (but some of them did on their own).
I met a lot of inspiring persons with whom I will get in contact shortly to create more events to get the general public more aware about Open Data and the Web.