Joint Mozfest session

This is a space to collaboratively work on a session proposal for MozFest. The basic idea is to bring together various organisations working in the open space to discuss ideas and possibilities for collaboration. There's so much that can be done, but how shall we do it? What do we want to achieve? Please either edit the below directly or comment on the talk page. But be quick! The closing date for applications is 31 August.

MozFest takes place at Ravensbourne, London from 25-27 October. Details, and proposal form, here.

If you're interested in taking part please sign below and include the name of the organisation / community you're involved with and include an email address or Twitter handle for follow-up :)

Thank you! Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 09:40, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Interested parties

• Christian Villum, Open Knowledge Foundation - christian.villum@okfn.org / @villum
• Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK - stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk / @steviebenton
• Alison Wheeler, MozillaWiki - wikimedia@alisonw.com / @AlisonW
• Jane Park, School of Open, Creative Commons - janepark@creativecommons.org / @janedaily
• Harry Wood, OpenStreetMap - @harry_wood
• John Cummings Wikimedian in residence, Natural History Museum and Science Museum

Inspiration

Materials forwarded to us from Michelle Thorne, Festival Director, who lead similar workshops back in 2011:

• http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Global_Melt
• https://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/GlobalMelt

Questions from the proposal form

What will your session allow people to make, learn or do?

The idea of the session is to bring together people and organisations that work in the space of open - whether open maps, open data, open source, open knowledge and so on - to explore ways that we can share our information with each other, and how we can support each other's communities. So far the communities approached for this include Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap, Open Knowledge Foundation, Mozilla, Creative Commons and Open Data Initiative. All groups working in this area are welcome to participate and encouraged to do so! A key expected outcome of the session is an increased level of collaboration across different organisations and communities. It should be emphasised that this session is very much a beginning. Rather than being an end in itself it will act as a catalyst for ongoing collaboration and participation.

This session is also a powerful opportunity to share lessons learned. The sharing of good practice is a really good way of strengthening relationships between organisations and individuals. If possible, we would like each participant (or organisation) to bring along at least one example of something they learned recently that may be of use to all of the participants.

How do you see that working?

The idea is to try to map activities, resources and information that all these communities are producing, and see how they overlap and complement each other. This would naturally be followed by a conversation about identifying shared goals, shared practices, shared communities - and figure out how we can help each other better. The session would be a combination of larger shared discussions and brainstorms combined with breakout group work - depending on the number of participants. This will help to seed collaborative projects between participants and lead to benefits to those involved and the open movement in general.

How will you deal with 5, 15 or 50 participants?

The session can be run with pretty much any number of participants and is easily scalable. With members from Wikimedia UK, Open Knowledge Foundation, Creative Commons, Mozilla and any other interested parties, we would be fully staffed to facilitate even a large number of participants. In many ways the session will deliver itself although there will be people on hand to provide some structure and support. The greater the number of participants, the better.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

The outcome of the session will be a set of ideas and suggested best practices that can be used (and taught) immediately by anyone. The lessons learned by participants can easily be shared with their communities too, so there are great opportunities of scale and swiftness.

What outcomes would you like to see after the session?

A better understanding among communities of how to better converge and take advantage of shared goals and practices. This will be a discussion that will hopefully fuel many more conversations in and between communities following the festival. It is also expected that the session will lead to closer collaboration between our communities, leading to new projects and a shared understanding.

What organisations or companies might be interested to participate in this session?

Wikimedia UK, Open Knowledge Foundation, Mozilla, Creative Commons and OpenStreetMap are confirmed participants. All other groups are welcome. If the session proposal is accepted then further outreach efforts will happen leading up to the festival to encourage as many organisations and individuals to get involved.