Image used with permission of Open Knowledge Foundation under CC licence

Open Government Data Camp 2010 might sound like a distant event, but I decided to post about simply because some of our friends have attended it (and also because earlier I did not have the opportunity to do it properly;)). As it happened exactly on the same day as the Transparency Camp in Warsaw, I personally could not attend it, but I am really happy to hear that Central and Eastern Europe was represented in London on the 18th and 19th of November 2010. The event is nicely documented on-line, so you can find the programme here, and all the materials (including recorded sessions) on this site. There is also a good wiki collection of all involved people and projects.

Today however I would like to post the short conversation I had with one the attendees from our region, Štefan Urbánek from Slovakia (mentioned earlier on this blog):

Syl: What is your general feedback on Open Government Data Camp?

Štefan: It was a really great event. The most interesting was to put together people from government, journalists and geeks, and create dialogue between them. People from various groups were invited.

Syl: Why did you go to the event?

Štefan: It was very interesting, I wanted to learn more, I wanted to meet people and learn about what is currently happening. I also wanted to get feedback on what we are doing here.

Syl: Did you present your work?

Štefan: I was presenting something a little bit different based on the project. I was using project as a basis of talk about data quality.

Stefan Urbanek from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

Syl: What was the feedback on the presentation?

Štefan: I was really surprised that the presentation did what I wanted – it raised awareness around data quality. People who work with data do not consider its quality.

Syl: Did you meet people involved in projects similar to yours?

Štefan: I did meet with people from ckan and “where does my money go” projects. There will be a post about data quality on their blog shortly.

Syl: What inspired you:

Štefan: Many little specialties, each project had a specialty or a problem, that people can learn from. So it was a really good to share practice. However what I liked more than the presentations were the discussions beaten those – people sharing solutions between the official sessions. I also found  the topic of linking open data very interesting.

Syl: What about our region?

Štefan: I was introduced to few people from our region by Tony Bowden.  I think people I met are the people who were contacted by MySociety – the rest is rather unclear, so it looks like MySociety is driving those types of projects in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s great but my impression is that it is not enough yet when compared to the Western countries.

Syl: Do you think it is down to the lack of events in our region?

Štefan: Yes, and I missed even more stories from Eastern Europe, because sometimes we are solving different issues than the Western countries. For example I was at TransparencyCamp in Washington in March too, where some of the problems presented originated from various regions and I found it all was very useful.

Let us know your thoughts on some of the points made by Štefan. If you attended the Open Government Data Camp, we would love to hear your feedback too.  Do leave us a comment!