OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a wide range of areas from governance to science, from culture to technology. Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and reuse; improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing societal welfare.

In addition to high-profile initiatives such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all levels. Moreover, in the last year, many governments across the world began to open up their data.

And it doesn’t stop there. In academia, open access to both publications and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore, this gathering flood of open data and content is the creator and driver of massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how can we interlink it, how can we use it to collaborate and share our work?

• where: London, UK
• when: Saturday 24th April, 2010
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• cfp: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/cfp/ (deadline: Jan 31st 2010)
• hashtag: #okcon2010

This ParticipatoryResearch initiative launched by AKSW aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research. Goals are to (1) develop a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implement a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos.org – a market for open-source software R&D. The Web site of the ParticipatoryResearch initiative is hosted at: http://wiki.Cofundos.org.

This years edition of the renowned German OpenSourceJahrbuch contains an overview article about Cofundos (in German).

The Semantic Web School just published an interview with Cofundos founder Sören Auer on Cofundos and the vision of participatory R&D. Read the interview here.

We released a kiosk modus for Cofundos today, which allows to embed the complete Cofundos.org functionality into your Web site.

This is realized by defining an HTML template which should be used for the kiosk and one (or multiple tags) of projects to be shown in the kiosk. The kiosk will be reachable via its own address (e.g. kioskname.cofundos.org). Once signed in, you can create a kiosk for your website at http://cofundos.org/kiosk.php.

The new Cofundos kiosk mode allows for example open-source projects to seamlessly integrate Cofundos functionality into their Web sites.