April 18th, 2009

OpenCamp: An Open Everything Event

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open.

OpenCamp combines 'Open Everything' with the unconference style of BarCamp. OpenCamp will be the first event of it's kind in the world and will be part of a growing global movement with NYC holding their event the same day. Madison is still the only place in the US to have had an Open Everything event and we are excited to have NYC join us in the Red, White and Blue.

In December 2008, Madison joined with Hong Kong and Berlin to celebrate and discuss openness in the world. With OpenCamp, we will be doing things differently. We'll be opening the doors to more people and participating in an unconference style event. There will be four (4) participation tracks:

Content (Art, Music, Media, Re-Use, Remix, Copyright, Public Domain, Creative Common) Technology (Open Source, Open Standards, Interoperability, Portability, Specific Software (Drupal, Indenti.ca, etc.)) Organizations (Nonprofits, Education, Government, Foundations, Workplaces, User Groups, etc)  Everything Grab Bag (Journalism, Philanthropy, Research, Science, Funding Open, Collaboration, Neighborhoods, Social Networks, Social Media, Everything else)

If you aren't familiar with unconferences, imagine Wikipedia in physical space. There will be four presentations going on at once and if the one you are at no longer interests you, use the 'two feet' rule to go to another presentation. Also, don't feel the need to always be at a 'presentation'. Some times water cooler/coffee discussions are more worthwhile than a formal presentation. We encourage you to make the event yours and learn and participate in ways in which you see fit. There is one rule though.

You must participate, there are no audience members at OpenCamp, only participants.

How to tag the event: We'll be using the #openeverything tag for pictures, dents, tweets and whatever else you might be tagging.  Additionally, we ask that in the spirit of "open" you release everything under a Creative Commons license (or another open license such as the GNU FDL).  To assist in the matter, we ask that, for the day of the event, you use identi.ca to microblog ("to Twitter").  It is *very* easy to have "dents" sent to Twitter and we'd be more than happy to help you make that happen.