OKFest, the Open Knowledge Festival, will take place in Berlin, July 15th – 17th. The Open Knowledge Festival gathers open movement makers, thinkers, activists and researchers to enable them to work together to tackle local and global challenges, understand our world, expose inefficiency, challenge inequality and hold governments and companies to account.

The OKFest team have designed the festival around three themes: Knowledge, tools and society. This is an attempt to avoid having too many streams that focus on just one area. It will also ‘mix it up’ a little. So the idea is to have open education sessions in every stream. For example, sessions on OERs in Knowledge, open source educational tech in Tools and open education/access to education issues in society. They are hoping that by breaking down the topic silos there will be more cross-domain collaboration – which is a good thing!

We have also been discussing having a separate open education fringe event – though there is still some thinking going on behind this and it may not happen. We will share any new information as soon as possible.

The closing date for proposals is 16th March, which doesn’t leave us too much time!

A small number of us are working on an Open Education Working group proposal, our first official session as a group.

Hopefully lots of you are also working on proposals individually related to your specific activities or areas of interest. If you aren’t then get writing! There is now a new set of tools for sessions planners, including a discussion list for people to connect and team up, a page with tips and tricks and two live hangouts to be held Friday March 7th 21:00 GMT and Monday March 10th, 10:00 GMT. All this information is available from the OKFest website.

It would be great to hear more about ideas on the mailing list, or at the working group call next week – OKFest is down as an agenda item.

See you at OKFest!