An interdisciplinary meeting of designers, developers, planners, activists, journalists and all others interested in the acquisition, processing and analysis of data to create meaningful stories about the city.
Working as part of a municipal institution financed from public funds, we intend to tackle the problem of data management, as we believe this is fundamental to community empowerment at the initial development stages of network society and should not be put entirely in the hands of developers and large Internet businesses with appropriate skills and resources.
Depending on the requirements and particular stages of the project, we place emphasis on different competencies: research and data acquisition, data processing and analysis, searching for topics and stories, as well as data visualisation and creating solutions – prototyping applications or devices.
During the workshops we work in small interdisciplinary groups with an emphasis on collaboration and combining different competencies. We focus on defining specific problems and promptly creating prototype solutions.
In addition, we create task teams to take up issues that require more time and the delivery of which leads to more advanced and complete products and solutions. These teams are given the opportunity of holding regular meetings and receiving support from our experts.
As we understand the need to make a social impact with our activities, the workshops are accompanied by public events designed to promote the idea of openness and the use of data in various areas of social life, science and culture.
Schedule
We are holding three 3-day sessions (in May, June and November), consisting of 3 workshops and meetings of work teams. Each of these is planned to conclude with an open-to-all public summary including 2-3 key lectures and short presentations combined with a discussion of completed projects.
A Special Summary Event
The last, fourth meeting will be held in the first quarter of 2015. In addition to lectures by invited special guests, the event will feature the project’s summary exhibition and “Appetite for Radical Change. Katowice 1865-2015”, an exhibition prepared by Medialab to celebrate the city’s 150th anniversary.
A Summary Publication
The event will also include the launch of a Polish-English publication summing up the project, comprising a series of articles on major trends and concepts in working with data, a detailed discussion of the methodology and the subsequent stages of work on selected projects as well as a presentation of the best projects completed by workshop participants.
