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OSCEdays is an open and distributed platform event. The goal is to have local events in various cities all over the world working on local challenges, exploring an open source circular economy. All local events will be organized independently by local groups and be plugged together in a global exchange during the OSCEdays from JUNE 11th to 15th to exchange knowledge, find new ideas and build new projects and alliances.
Update:
The Call for Cities for the OSCEdays June 11-15, 2015 is closed. But the OSCEdays will go on! There will be more events like this and our platform is open for others to explore. Want to stay informed about upcoming events and possibilities? Sign up to the newsletter:
Just because you can’t add your city for the June event doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of it! Most work happens in our forums, and you’re invited to contribute or add challenges there any time.
FORUM
OSCEdays on:
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CALL FOR LOCAL ORGANIZERS
OPEN TILL May 12
We invite you to join us and connect: if you would like to organise a local event in your city, please get in touch.
Below you’ll find a short list of FAQ addressing queries you might
have. We are continuously developing how everything comes together. Do
you want to know more about how the OSCEdays work and what the
objectives are? Have a look at our READ ME doc.
This is what is clear so far for the participation of local organizers:
PARTICIPATION FAQ
What kind of event is it?
The OSCEdays is a global hackathon or jam with hands-on action rather than a traditional conference with presentations. Local groups work on local challenges to produce and experiment with new perspectives in workshops, stimulating open questions rather than finished concepts.
Aside from this, you are very free to structure your event in whichever way you choose.
So bring together some social, ecological or economic entrepreneurs with people from companies, universities, waste, recycling or sustainability initiatives. Add some open source, open data and open access experts. Create an interesting mix of people. Find a space for them. Let them work on real challenges exploring paths towards an open source circular economy. Let them share their projects, questions, ideas and expertise. Invite them to rethink and reinvent existing initiatives with open source methodology, to build new alliances and to prototype and document their ideas.
Your local event and activities will be plugged together with all the others during the OSCEdays. We have set up the OSCEdays Platform where you can share challenges, questions, ideas, documentation and skills and for the event itself we will develop a global video conference system for real time collaboration between the cities. You’ll be connected to and communicating with a global network of experts and activists and participating in an open flow of accessible ideas and solutions.
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Challenges?
What do we mean by challenges? Basically challenges are tasks that you choose to work on during OSCEdays. The form a challenge can take is very open! Choosing a challenge is your contribution to the invention of an open source circular economy, an economy with zero waste where the outputs of one process feed into others as inputs.
Take a look at existing projects, ideas, initiatives or just questions about your environment, and make them a challenge. What are people in your environment doing already? Where is there waste? Where is there resources? Where are products manufactured and designed? You might use the OSCEdays to develop existing projects further (openly or with the open source approach) or you could raise and work on entirely new questions. Here are some examples of challenges/tasks discussed in some cities:
- A local fablab is searching for and developing a way to turn plastic waste into filament for 3d printers.
- A research institute collected a lot of data about materials in order to make a database about environmental impact of these materials in products but the project ran out of money before it was finished. Open up the data and discuss the future of this project as open source project – offer it to the community.
- You local waste collection company has a lot of data about waste. Match them with a data hacker. Discuss what could be gained from opening up the data? What apps could be build that would allow to reduce waste and trigger more recycling? (Match data hackers with waste or product data collections.)
- You have functional eco-designs? Open source it! Explore how (and why).
- You have local repair cafés but they are lacking documentation and communication tools? Set them up.
- Design new regenerative/eco products! No idea? Look at the OpenStructures project for example. There is no OpenStructures table, yet. Develop one.
- Web startups think big! Imagine services and platforms to connect local manufacturers, recyclers and consumers in cities to make reusing, refurbishing and recycling easier? Example: WeTurn
- What business models work with open source and circular consumption? Discuss them. Create a new business plan for a local company/local companies. Make ideas for new startups.
- What materials are recyclable? And how? Create an open catalogue.
- Second hand products? Design better networks for reusing.
- Politics? What legal and political framework do we need to build an open source based circular economy? Draft a lobby-paper.
- Ask for help for your project. Open source allows others to contribute to your work. Show your project and invite others to contribute to it during OSCEdays, fork it or comment on it.
- Hack the city! What would the city look like if everything in it were open source and recyclable? Have an urban hack/intervention jam and experiment in urban spaces.
- Study the first challenges in the platform
There’s more. What is going on in your area? Almost everything has new possibilities and perspectives if you add the open source perspective.
UPDATE: Take a look at our forums. First challenges might already be there. And take a look at the Tutorial: How To Post A Challenge.
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Time: The full time span?
The OSCEdays will last from JUNE 11th to JUNE 15th. Your local event does not have to. You can do fewer days within this time span or even only one afternoon, jamming with your friends or colleagues. Whatever suits your needs, possibilities and local situation.
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Communicating it
Once you made the final decision to organise a local event, you’ll get access to a sub-page on the OSCEDays webpage: https://oscedays.org/YOURCITY. You can structure the sub-page any way you like. Share the link with your local community and use it to organize and coordinate your local event. But you don’t have to use this page, you can set up other infrastructure externally and link to it from your https://oscedays.org/YOURCITY sub-page.
You can download the OSCEdays design files to use for your local event here and here.
Transparent Organisation
We encourage you to make the organisation of your local event as transparent as you can. A transparent organisation can help greatly with engaging new people, including them in your process and it can shift a lot of unnecessary stuff out of your email accounts.
Take a look at what we’re trying to do in the global core team with a public READ ME, the READ ME describes our shared objectives an shows our organisational structure. Each task is publicly assigned to a group of people, publicly displaying the task’s progress, internal structure and it also presents ways that people can get involved. Take a look at the READ ME created by the Berlin Team to see an example for a local event of such an organization. Team London created something like that too.
This is a strategy we learned from the advice and experience of the Edgeryders community.
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Money & Funding
You have to fund your local event entirely yourself and do your own accounting. OSCEdays is a decentralized event. We encourage you to find sponsors. You can sell these sponsors everything you like and can deliver with your local event – including putting the name and logo of the sponsor on your sub-page https://oscedays.org/YOURCITY.
There is also the possibility that you sell global sponsorship (with logo on the OSCEdays frontpage and some more stuff). We are in the process of finalising this option and will share more information soon. If you are interested in adding this to your sponsorship packages, please get in touch with Lars or Alice.
We will share adaptable sponsorship brochures soon. You can download images and the OSCEdays design files here. If something is missing, just get in touch, we will try to help.
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Code of Ethics and Standards
By participating in the OSCEdays you agree to our code of ethics and standards. This means you commit to the mission and values of Open Source and Circular Economy as well as some basic rules of human politeness (Etiquette).
But the OSCEDays is a really inclusive event – an open opportunity to learn about and explore new paths and leave others. Think and play with new horizons and strategies. We are very welcoming and open at the edges. You don’t have to be open source or ecologically sustainable. If you are willing to learn and to understand the possibilities of an Open Source based Circular Economy, you are welcome.
But we will (might) ban you from this webpage if you act really harsh (like bringing in a company as a sponsor whose main business it is to have little baby kittens drowned by nuclear powered robots, or if you lie about or insult people or companies.) If you are not sure about a certain partner, sponsor or action/strategy, please get in touch with Lars (Berlin), Sharon (London) & Tim (Paris) first.
It is self evident that you are responsible for your own event. The people behind this webpage take no responsibilities and provide no insurance for what happens at the local events.
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Open Source Knowledge or Expert/Activist
Where can I find information or an expert on open source? If you don’t know one, search for local open hardware, open data or open source software activists. Fablabs could be a good place to find the right people. If you can’t find anyone or would like some more suggestions, reach out to Sam and Lars and start reading through some sources (texts, videos, podcasts) or ask people from your local group to do so. Here is a little list of resources. Let us know if you find more great stuff to share here:
Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware Logo
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Language
You can work in your local language. Try to find someone who can present your findings in English in the video conference. We are looking into the possibility to have Spanish as an alternative.
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More questions? Get in touch with Lars.
