Open Development Camp

= Open Development Camp 2010 =

Brief blurb
Open Development Camp 2010 (ODC10) follows on the previous camp held at the World Bank in DC, in July of 2009. It builds on the ground swell of support for transparency of governments in their development activities. The Obama administration's data.gov and the UK's recent decision to appoint Sir Tim Berners Lee to help build data.gov.uk show that governments and organizations are serious about sharing official information. The International Aid Transparency Initiative, signed at the Accra Agenda for Action (2008) goes beyond national boundaries, demonstrating an international effort committed to opening up public data. !ODC10's goal is to build on these efforts and provide tangible, practical demonstrations of, "if the information is available, how will people make use of it".

The Camps will be open, but we will ensure broad categories of participants are invited - the data producers (World Bank, OECD, donors), data visualizers (Mapping Worlds, Many Eyes, MIT Media lab), media (eg. Guardian, NYT, the Telegraph), representatives of partner countries as well as social entrepeneurs and technologists. In advance, we'll provide the data sets, seed demonstrations of ideas, and solicit groups to use the information/brainstorm and present at Camps. We anticipate a few will actually do this, but the majority of activity will happen at the Barcamps.

We will organize at least 2 ODC locations (DC and London - if anyone is interested in organizing another location please get in touch!) armed with a subset of real data ready to go with a goal of coming up with tangible ideas. The Camps would happen on roughly the same day as a friendly competition of who can come up with the best ideas, with some kind of voting and potentially a monetary prize to the winner. We are soliciting interest from various foundations who may be interested in future funding of promising participants.