Open Tech Calendar

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Digital rights hack-day

The Open Rights Group invites designers, documenters, facilitators, engineers, hackers, coders, scientists, data-wranglers and other interested parties to a FREE digital-rights hack-day at Mozilla's community space in Covent Garden, central London.

We are very grateful to Mozilla's Guillaume Marty for sponsoring our use of the space. We promise to look after it!

Places are limited, so if you RSVP and then find you can't attend, please indicate this through meetup so someone else can take your place.

The hacking

You will need to bring your own laptop. Don't forget its power supply! You may also want to bring chargers for your other devices (phones, tablets, sonic screwdrivers, etc.)

Wifi is available throughout and there are plenty of power outlets.

Ideas

There's a page full of them on our wiki. Please add yours and start discussing what you want to do on the day with the community (see the next section)!

Plugging in to ORG's tech-volunteers community

We have a mailing list, a wiki, a Github account and an IRC channel.

Please consider joining these and introducing yourself in advance. They will make it easier to share ideas and resources on the day. We will also be able to make better use of our time together if we've been discussing and preparing our projects before-hand.

Food and drink

Tea, coffee and water will be available free of charge throughout the day.

We're not providing lunch. Please either bring your own or plan to pop out for a sandwich whenever you get hungry. There are plenty of places to eat nearby.

Our budget will stretch to feeding everyone with pizza at around 18:00. We'll collect order preferences during the day.

If you don't eat pizza please contact us before the event and we'll arrange an alternative. You are also welcome to bring your own food, or go out for dinner, if you'd prefer.

A safe and inclusive event

We want to attract people with a wide variety of backgrounds and skills to our hack day. Please spread the word! If you have a way to reach a new audience, or an idea that might help diversify attendance, we'd encourage you to pursue it. Please let us know how we can help.

The Open Rights Group anti-harassment policy applies to this event.

We will do our best to accommodate your accessibility needs. If you can let us know about anything specific in advance it will help us to be prepared.

If you are willing to volunteer as a first-aider, and have received appropriate training, please indicate this when you RSVP.

http://www.meetup.com/ORG-London/events/202557812/

http://www.meetup.com/ORG-London/events/202557812/

Sat 4th Oct 2014 10:00am (Europe/London)

Sat 4th Oct 2014 9:00pm (Europe/London)

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mySociety Meetup: Freedom of Information Night

The next mySociety meet-up, on 3rd September, will focus on Freedom of Information (FOI). We really care about FOI at mySociety, which is why we created the FOI request filer WhatDoTheyKnow for UK citizens back in 2008, and Alaveteli thereafter for international use.

So, we thought, why not host a meet-up to discuss FOI technologies, research and legislation in the UK and beyond?

We’re delighted to be joined at this meet-up by the following guest speakers:-

Maurice Frankel: Maurice is director of the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information. He has worked with them since it was set up in 1984, and has been its director since 1987.

Maurice will talk about the possible government restrictions on the right of access to information in the UK; the problems caused by the Freedom of Information Act’s poor approach to public service contracts and the surprising limitations which the courts have imposed on the ministerial veto.

Marietta Le: Marietta is from the Hungarian investigative journalism NGO Atlatszo.

Atlatzso is a watchdog NGO and online news site for investigative journalism to promote transparency and freedom of information (FOI) in Hungary. They run various websites including KiMitTud, a freedom of information request generator for the general public, which runs using the Alaveteli platform.

They also run the Tor-based anonymous whistleblowing platform Magyarleaks and a crowdsourced platform to anonymously report everyday corruption called Fizettem.

Marietta will join us to speak about setting up an FOI site in Hungary using Alaveteli and the current threats to freedom of information in Hungary, following recent amendments to the FOI law.

Savita Bailur and Tom Longley: Earlier this year mySociety instigated a research project to look at the place that Alaveteli and other FOI online technologies might have in creating cultures of transparency and accountability.

We want to address this top level question: “In what circumstances, if any, can tools like Alaveteli be shown to have measurable impacts on the ability of citizens to exert power over underperforming institutions?”

To address this, researchers Savita and Tom have focused on three areas: a literature review to see what research is already out there, in-depth interviews with people who have installed FOI technologies in many different countries, and the compilation of a list of critical success factors. Read more about their research here: https://www.mysociety.org/2014/08/11/interim-report-researching-the-international-impact-of-foi-technologies/

Savita and Tom are more than halfway through their research, and we’re delighted that they’ll present their preliminary findings at this meet-up.

We’ll also discuss the latest developments on WhatDoTheyKnow, and Alaveteli developers (as well as other mySociety team members) will be around to answer any questions.

There’ll be plenty of pizza and beer to go around too, so what could be better?

Hope to see you there!

When: Wednesday 3rd September, 6pm – 9pm
Where: Mozilla Space London
How: Add your name to the Lanyrd page (http://lanyrd.com/ccbfgx), so we know you’re coming.
Who: Anyone who fancies it.

https://www.mysociety.org/2014/08/20/join-us-for-a-special-freedom-of-information-meet-up/

http://lanyrd.com/ccbfgx

Wed 3rd Sep 2014 6:00pm (Europe/London)

Wed 3rd Sep 2014 9:00pm (Europe/London)

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