Open Knowledge

Theme: Atomisation and Commercial Opportunity

Discussions of 'Open Knowledge' often end with licensing wars: legal arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open Knowledge 1.0 will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility.

Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian 'apt' packaging system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the opportunities and problems of this approach for forms of knowledge other than Software?

Atomisation also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted access to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates commercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?

Bringing together open threads from Science, Geodata, Civic Information and Media, Open Knowledge 1.0 is an opportunity for people and projects to meet, talk and plan things.