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okfest2014-brasil Session title:
Open Knowledge organizations and projects in the Global South: how to make it happen?


Session description:
This session will provide a thought-provoking debate to stimulate the audience to help to answer the question: how to make open knowledge projects in the global south happen in a sustainable way? Firstly we will give a concrete example on how we have created an open knowledge organization in Brazil, the first chapter from the OKF outside Europe, showing the main challenges, success and mistakes after three yeasr of hard work doing projects, fundraising and creating a community. We will mention the main ongoing and forthcoming projects, a short overview of our strategic plan for 2014, the key actors in our local network and what impact we are having and expect to have in Brazil.

We want invite some people from other regions from the global south to share their experiences, mainly those where we have an active local groups willing to become a fulll chapter, and open for debate to brainstorm practical solutions on our main task proposed here. 


Session motivation:
It's evident the lack of organized and sustainable initiatives in the global south when we compare it to the global north related to open knowledge. It's very common that here we generally have an imitation of what is hapenning in the United States or Europe, with projects usually not that adapted to the local context, becoming even mere translations (when they are good translations, because sometimes not even this ;).

Since the OKFest wants to bring diversity and the Open Knowledge Networking needs strength its communities in the less privilaged regions of the planet (the majority of people), our main motivation is how to increase the diversity of our network.

Session outcomes:
- a set of goals for those attending this section will commit themselve to achieve (this can be adapted whilst we execute them)
- stablish a way for people from everywhere to work together remotely more effectively (this can be useful for the actual ambassadors committee work, for instance)
- a timeline for some practical actions/projects that will appear during the brainstorm
- to form working groups that can work together per region on common projects (for instance, one group in Latin America, one in Middle East, another in African etc.)
- move forward with an agenda in the global south (for instance, Open Knowledge Conferences in our countries)

How will the session be strutured?
There will 3 talks of 7 to 10 minutes each from people from the global south about their activities. After these shor talks, we will separate the attendees in groups (the number will depend on the number of people attending this session) to work on the proposed question and our desired outcomes. I've been proposing regular google hangouts between OKF local coordinators (we had two so far) and I want to do at least 3 more to have more inputs for this session beyond the examples we have in Brazil. I'm sure we can find at least two more people from the global south to give a 7 to 10 minutes talk. The groups will work for 40 minutes and we'll organize their ideas in 20 minutes, thus the total time will be about 1h30. 


If it's not possible to have more time for the groups to work together, I can diminish the number of talks (like 2 of 7 minutes each), but the ideal is to have time to have some thought-provoking questions and to the groups work together.

How does your session contribute to OKFestival's narrative and aims?
We want support people from everywhere, mainly those regions with bigger challenges, to work together to open up knowledge and foster development. Our goals will help to improve the OKF network community to improve its diversity and find ways to make our projects more sustainble, mainly when resources are more scarse. I think we all agree on the importance of open knowledge impact to improve societies, right? Thus to have the civil society more organized in the global south, be it through communities or organizations when necessary, will be important important to foster development.


School of Data in Brazil

Session title:
Massive presence: how to use MOOCs to power up your local community

Session description:
There are many  high quality MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that talk about Open  Knowledge and School of Data related topics available on the internet.  In this session, School of Data Brazil will show how it is using MIT's  Introduction to Computer Science and Programing using Python to engage  the local community (journalists, biologists, economists, advertisers,  historians etc) in a two-fold experience: to be introduced to the world  of computation and learn how to use it to solve data problems. We will  promote a discussion on how to use this low cost resource to strengthen  your local community. 

Session motivation:
In the process  of launching Escola de Dados in Brazil, we have thought of different  approaches of getting our mission out there. We know a lot of people  face the same problem elsewhere in the globe: where to start? do I need a  lot of money? what tools are there to facilitate the process? We're  very excited to share that you don't need a lot of resources to do high  quality community building.

Session outcomes:
- setup a study group in a relevant topic to get your community going or to strengthen it
- get and use venues for free or very cheaply for the study group meetings
- organize yourself online and offline for the meetings
- a small HOWTO guide for study groups

How will the session be structured?
In  this fireside chat we will need about ~50 minutes to complete the whole  session. This will be a thoughtful and informal presentation  (illustrated by pictures and videos) led by Marco, followed by  discussion with the audience, led by Marco and Everton.

How does your session contribute to OKFestival's narrative and aims?
This  session has attributes that can be related to all three OKFestival  2014's narrative streams. Knowledge: using a MOOC to facilitate the  learning of citizens in data-related topics is all about literacy and  open educational resources. For some, it can be about data-journalism or  even data visualization. Tools: this session also talks about  leveraging a platform, a tool (such as coursera and edX) — in edX's  case, a non-profit technology — to facilitate the access to open  knowledge. Society: this activity has a strong community building  through open education factor, using high quality content.