Two days of discussion and working hands on on projects, in the form of drafting, planning and coding will take place in November in London.

Presentations will be kept to a minimum. Each day will begin with a sprinkling of short talks followed by time to talk, plan and work on things.

Four main areas will be addressed:

• Build consensus around key legal, technical and policy issues related to opening up government information.
• Strengthen the community of people working on different aspects of opening up official data around the world — from both inside and outside government. (As many people working on this area will not have met in person)
• Encourage the exchange of experiences, expertise and ideas between those involved in leading open government data initiatives in different countries.
• Make things! We hope there will be plenty of space for developers to hack on things — from refining core bits and pieces of technology to rapid prototyping of new ideas.

With the Open Knowledge Foundation as lead organiser, the event is also supported by

• Cabinet Office, UK
• EU LAPSI project, Turin, Italy
• EU LOD2 project, Leipzig, Germany
• Guardian, UK
• Sunlight Foundation, USA

Projected outputs include:

• First draft of an international ‘open data manual’ (organised as a ‘Book Sprint’ as planned for early October in Berlin)
• A set of key open government data principles
• A timeline of key developments for open government data around the world
• A fairly comprehensive list of official initiatives — including data catalogues and competitions
• A list of key examples of the reuse of open government data
• Launch of RawDataNow.com — illustrating what we mean by ‘raw data’ aimed at those who publish official information
• Brainstorming about projects which would make it easier for citizens to find, analyse and visually represent the data they are looking for

A growing list of participants and proposed sessions is available.

Those interested in seeing the program take shape can follow the discussions on the Open Government mailing list.

We will be reporting at epsiplatform.eu live from the event in November.