The cool cats over at http://opendatabcn.org/ are putting together the Open Data Day Barcelona as part of the International Open Data Hackathon 2011. Their first contribution has been to translate the open call by event founder David Eaves to Catalan and Spanish. Last year they got the event together in no time at all and even though (like this year) it clashed with one of the many extended bank holidays in Spain, some of the most dedicated #opendata peeps in Barcelona showed up. Hopefully this year, with the call being far earlier, there'll be a bigger turnout and hopefully some "official" particpation from all these spanking new Open Data projects of Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat – it will be great if these peeps take the opportunity to get down & dirty with some citizen hackers for a change.
The folks over at Kfé Innovación asked me to do some interviews for them with movers, shakers & innovators, so here's the first one with Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs and founder of Apps For Democracy. The post over on the Kfé Innovación site has a transcript in English and links to a Spanish translation – check it out here.
Ana was in Seville last week to take part in the first Kfé Innovación . Over coffee Ana facilitated the 3 hour session on the concept of innovation and how the internet can be the perfect stage for social & business development.
Here's a video shot before the session by www.memevisual.com (in Spanish):
Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation was in Barcelona again last week to speak at the Universidad Nomada in the Sala Conservas and I went along with Ricard Espelt & Gemma Urgell to film this interview with him for their #talkingabout series. #talkingabout is a paltform which aims to create participation around things, people & ideas worth, well, talking about through a system of videos, votes, comments etc which is open to anyone. I previously wrote about #talkingabout here and will be recording an interview with Ricard & Gemma soon.
Here’s a video which presents #talkingabout :
I also recorded an interview with Michel for the Citilab blog:
Here’s Michel’s presentation from the Universidad Nomada:
Talkingabout is an interestering series of video interviews carried out by Ricard Espelt & Gemma Urgell (two of the most active & creative people around in Catalonia and Spain) in the language of the interviewee. They post the videos on their respective blogs and then "talk about" them, each from their own viewpoint. Right now they are working on building a platform around their idea so that anybody can post their own videos, talk about their own or others vids, or leave comments – the idea is to make the interviews a starting point for conversations so that everybody can Talkabout the ideas in the interviews. Below are some examples of their recent English language videos – you can find all the videos hereTalkingabout: Joe Rospars from redall on Vimeo. Talkingabout: mySociety from redall on Vimeo.
When it was announced that Birmingham City University was going to be offering the first MA in Social Media anywhere, the blog & twittersphere went crazy here in Spain. One of the many reasons for this is the power of validation that events from elsewhere have here, something I will explore later in another post as part of a wider analysis of cultural differences & social media. I like this video of course leader Jon Hickman presenting the MA because it’s the antithesis of academic presentation in Spain. It’s in what I’m becoming to think of as “the Birmingham School” – in a pub and with an appearance by Andy Mabbett!
The video by Kasper Sorensen was recorded ”At WxWM Jon Hickman from Birmingham City University gave a presentation about the Uni’s plans to launch an MA in Social Media.WxWM is the West Midlands’ answer to Texas’ SxSW if you hadn’t figured that out already ”
“Inexpensive digital cameras, laptop editing, and network distribution have detonated an explosion of vernacular video, from YouTube to Open Courseware. This is a broad look at the ways video vernaculars are changing pop culture — and a hint of changes to come in education.”
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