Yes, pizza will be available…

On 18th February the mySociety gang will yet again descend on Cardiff for another evening meet-up. We had such a nice time at the Founders Hub last year that we’re heading back!

Our meet-ups are open to everyone. So whether you’re an open source veteran, or just a curious newbie interested in anything you see on mysociety.org, please come along.

At this month’s event we’ll be joined by the following guest speakers:-

Dr. Pete Burnap and Dr. Matt Williams: Pete and Matt are from Cardiff University and co-founded the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory aka the COSMOS project.

This project aims to study the ‘social media ecosystem’ to better understand how user behaviours, global communication networks and flows of information interact to promote hateful and socially disruptive content.

As part of the project they have developed the COSMOS software platform that reduces the technical and methodological barriers to accessing and analysing social media and other forms of open digital data.

This tool allows users to forecast the spread of hateful content over digital networks, providing an opportunity for intervention before such content ‘goes viral’ and potentially causes harm to individuals, minority groups and communities.

Pete and Matt will join us to talk how they’ve used COSMOS to analyse social media for the benefit of society.

Esko Reinikainen: Esko is a co-founder of The Satori Lab, the Cardiff-based culture hackers. They re-boot organisational culture and improve innovation skills with learning programmes & strategic advice.

New technologies with the potential to deliver extraordinary public value are emerging every day, yet the single biggest obstacle to adoption in the public sector is what The Satori Lab describe as ‘cultural immune systems’.

They have spent the past 3 years hacking in this space, and in this talk Esko will explain what they broke, what they fixed, and what they’ve found out in the process…

Our very own Mark Longair: Mark will be speaking about Democracy Club’s project YourNextMP, which is a free, trustworthy, open database of General Election candidates. Mark has been heavily involved in the creation and maintenance of YourNextMP and will talk about how it was made and how you can get involved to help out in the run up to May’s elections. You can find out more about YourNextMP in our recent blog post.

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So, do come along to chat about all things ‘Tech for Good’ and enjoy a slice of pizza or two on us! Hope to see you there.

When: Wednesday 18th February 2015, drop in any time between 6pm and 9pm
Where: The Founders Hub, 119 St Mary Street, Cardiff, CF10 1DY
How: Add your name to the Lanyrd page: http://lanyrd.com/2015/mysociety/, so we know you’re coming.
Who: Anyone who fancies it.

NB: Watch our Twitter stream on @mySociety to check for last minute advice about where we are sitting or if we have moved venues for unforseen reasons.