Open Technology Week will showcase and celebrate open and open source technologies developed across Cambridge and beyond. We’ll be asking why open matters, who benefits and in what contexts does greater openness make sense across a diverse array of established and emerging areas from synthetic biology to additive manufacturing to big data analytics.
We welcome proposals for independently organised events to take place across the city between 8-15 June 2016, culminating in a one-day gathering with talks and open source maker faire at the Cambridge University Engineering Department on 15 June. The following types of events are all welcome:
- Lectures
- Workshops
- Demos
- Hackathons
- Maker evenings
- plus more! We particularly encourage interactive events and innovative formats.
Whether you’re demoing your open source project or questioning the underpinning values of the open movement, if there’s a relevance to open technologies you could join the programme. More information will be provided at the Cafe Synthetique event at the Panton Arms on Mon 18 April, 18:00-20:00, if you would like to join and talk to the organisers.
Please complete this form by 20 April 2016 to join the main programme.
Please note: We will provide a central hub for publicity and booking but currently we are not able to provide additional funding or organisational support. We will do our best to connect you with people who might be able to collaborate and offer advice on venues etc.
What are open technologies and why are they important?
Open technologies are increasingly prevalent in society. From cell phone operating systems to high performance computing, open source software provides some of the most powerful tools to tackle today’s challenges. Large scale projects such as Wikipedia have demonstrated that open standards and practice can be applied to our collective knowledge and deliver invaluable resources to the general public. Advances in scope and availability of Open Hardware systems such as Arduino combined with digital fabrication techniques are boosting global maker communities and disrupting innovation and manufacturing systems. We will feature events on open source software, hardware, biotechnology, other technologies but also events on open data and open knowledge more broadly.
Contacts: Dr Jenny Molloy (jcm80@cam.ac.uk) and Katya Nikitina (kn340@cam.ac.uk), Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge