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I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.

A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar From the article: 1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term. 2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them. 3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to. Reading time: 15mins

I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.

"To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game's Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools." A great example of Open Access to developer tools and software.

"Not long ago producing multimedia digital content required expensive equipment and deep levels of technical expertise. Now anyone can create, publish, and share compelling works with nothing more complex than a web browser. Open licensed media is easy to find/re-use, and combing that with our own content and a set of free tools, means we have powerful ways to express ideas beyond text and bullet points. "

From the website: "Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics." Inkscape is a very handy drawing tool that can be used for a variety of applications including signs, posters, page layout and other options when a photo editor really isn't the right tool.

"free, off-the-shelf tools that don't require programming knowledge and might be particularly interesting to people who work with a lot of images."

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.

LaTex is a document preparation system programmed in free software. It is also a document markup language. It is a very useful tool to create scientific documents in many fields, but especially appropriate to write mathematical expresions. Among its advantages, it has different dictionaries for many languages, it can be adapted to any style class and gives a professional look to any document you write. In addition, manage of bibliography references is quite simple and flexible. Latex comprises a collection of TeX macros and program to process TeX documents and convert them in PDF documents, but also in HTML, PS, EPS, DVI, etc. The other main advantage is that LaTex document scan be opened with any text editor since they consist of plain text and do not contain hidden formatting codes or binary instructions.

Difícil para personas no versadas en informática, pero seguro muy útil cuando te haces con él :) Gracias por compartirlo. Saludos.

"With the emergence of new publishing tools, public libraries are able to be publishers for themselves. In essence, we can build a Maker culture for local publishing. "

Thanks! I did not know about Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Quite useful!

Two competing views on the future of publishing, and how shifts in consumer behavior to purchasing or consuming electronic content is causing such a shift in the literary world. I found it interesting to read that a number of open source software platforms were identified as the harbingers of today's self-publishing model online. I never knew Wattpad existed - watt an awesome site (pun intended). I agree with the articles viewpoint about the role that public libraries can play in this shifting landscape. A good read.

Cursos Abiertos de universidades IberoAmericanas de la red Universia Está dirigido a manejar una aplicación de software libre (GIMP), gratuita y multiplataforma, dedicada al tratamiento y creación de imágenes. Su dominio y disponer de nociones sobre resolución de imagen, formatos, etc. va a hacer que el uso del curso tenga que depender menos de otras personas y/o programas para disponer de imágenes para presentaciones, trabajos, páginas webs, etc. Fecha de inicio: 2 de septiembre de 2014 INSCRIPCIÓN ABIERTA Duración: 9 semanas (27 horas de estudio estimadas)