I'm at the OKFestival this week. Tons of inspiring talks. I'm writing this post incrementally cause I've got lots of notes floating around.. so sorry for the mess!

I tried to build a panorama of the beautiful lecture hall (not that successfully.. but it'll give you an idea):

Day 1, keynote by Martin Tisne

Martin Tisne is director of policy at Omidyar Network, he recently worked on the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a collaborative of leading funders committed to strengthening democracy by empowering citizens to hold their governing institutions to account.

Day 1, keynote by Farida Vis

Farida Vis led the social media analysis on an academic team that examined 2.6 million riot tweets, analysing the role Twitter played in the 2011 UK riots, as part of The Guardian newspaper’s groundbreaking Reading the Riots project.

Day 2, keynote by Philip Thigo

Philip Thigo is part of a dynamic team at the Social Development Network (SODNET) that works on developing mobile and web-based technologies aimed at strengthening the role of citizens and civil society in the strategic use of technology, especially in developing countries. Philip is a Co-founder of INFONET, an initiative rooted in SODNET that is credited with empowering African civil society, governments and citizen’s to better engage in enforcing budget transparency, service delivery demands and election monitoring.

Day 2, keynote by Ville Peltola

Ville Peltola looks into the horizon at IBM as a Director of Innovation in the Chief Technology Officer’s team in IBM Europe. During the past few years Peltola has been focusing on smart cities and emerging civic innovation with open public data. En passant, Peltola mentioned a nice finnish experiment: Restaurant day

Day 2, open democracy session, Yannick Assogba

Yannick Assogba talked about IBM many bills, a bills visualizer. Other intersting links: http://www.research.ibm.com/social/ http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=3419 http://historio.researchlabs.ibm.com/histories/98

Day 2, open democracy session, Miriam Reitenbach and Ivonne Jansen-Ding

Miriam Reitenbach and Ivonne Jansen-Dings from Waag Society in Amsterdam. Waag Society, institute for art, science and technology, develops creative technology for social innovation. The foundation researches, develops concepts, pilots and prototypes and acts as an intermediate between the arts, science and the media. Waag Society cooperates with cultural, public and private parties. Keywords: “technology and citizen engagement”, ‘tapping into citizenship’

Day 2, open democracy session, Tangui Morlier

“Let’s reverse Lessig’s metaphor and pretend that Law is Code! Do we make the law more understandable if we use developper’s tools? […] Our project, realized with people from Sciences po university, aims to transform all these steps to open legislative data, in order to track the evolution of a law through a version-control system (such as Git) where each amendment will be an individual commit.” Keywords: "lawrence lessig: code is law", "towards a ‘gitlaw’"

Day 2, commons for Europe launch

http://commonsforeurope.net/, based on http://codeforamerica.org/ The actual site: check codeforeurope.net and the call for fellows

Day 3, plenary with James Cameron

James Cameron, very inspiring talk (video anywhere?) “build more cooperative enterprises” “human beings are not good at dealing with risks that come slowly from afar” “break things up into manageable bits” links: http://grist.org/climate-change/on-titanic-anniversary-james-cameron-says-climate-change-is-our-menacing-iceberg/ http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/115433-report-director-james-cameron-calls-climate-change-skeptics-swine http://www.theccc.org.uk/news/features/1107-profile-on-james-cameron-vice-chairman-of-climate-change-capital https://twitter.com/Jamesogradycam

Day 3, plenary with Tiago Peixoto

‘mobilisation of citizens’ ‘participatory budgeting projects’ ‘reduce participation costs’ - high participation costs => low participations http://www.worldbank.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank http://theconnectedrepublic.org/users/Tiago%20Peixoto https://twitter.com/participatory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_1nNJJR8Mk http://www.allourideas.org/

Day 3, Open democracy panel, Finnur Magnusson

Finnur Magnusson was the CTO for two large scale crowdsourcing events in Iceland as well as the Icelandic Constitution Council. - http://www.gommit.com/ - http://chamber.com/finnur-magnusson - http://sociable.co/social-media/how-iceland-crowdsourced-the-creation-of-its-new-constitution/

“Using Twitter (@Stjornlagarad), Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, the group asked for opinions and suggestions about what should be included in the document and how they would like their country run. In total, over 16,000 user-submitted comments and proposals were sent to the Council through their website. ”

in iceland parliament computers are banned

- lessons learned: open participation => ++ quality in democracy - written a new constitution in 4 months / no problems with online mobs etc..

Day 3, Open democracy panel, Tanja Aitamurto

Tanja Aitamurto http://cci.mit.edu/ MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Seeclickfix: http://seeclickfix.com/ http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/blogs/agahran/2012/09/seeclickfix-crowdsourced-local-problem-reporting-community-news

Day 3, the European citizens initiative

http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens'_Initiative

Carsten Berg, General Coordinator of the ECI Campaign; Democracy International http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/?attachment_id=257

Day 4, Open Fablab session, Tomas Diez

Tomas Diez: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MIT/863.08/people/Tomas/

Barcelona: http://www.smartcitizen.me/en/ http://fablabbcn.org/

‘distribuite personal manufacturing’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Industrial_Revolution http://www.thethirdindustrialrevolution.com/ http://www.economist.com/node/21552901

Day 4, Open Fablab session, Peter Troxler

Peter Troxler http://petertroxler.org/ http://opendesignnow.org/

Day 4, gran finale with Hans Gosling

Gapminder.org Keywords: "People have a completely wrong idea about the world" "First we used the most stupid argument we had: rational argument" "Companies are more serious than the public sector: companies go down" "The old west has a to ic combination of ignorance and arrogance about the world" "Don’t talk about what you want to do, just prototype fast" "Climate is too serious for letting environmental activists deal with it" "don’t do only small apps x your garden or bicycle … Its the big thing"

Rosling presented the television documentary The Joy of Stats, which was broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Four in December 2010.[6] http://blogs.elpais.com/periodismo-con-futuro/2011/05/hansrosling.html