"SAGE Open is a peer-reviewed, "Gold" open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities."

A keynote presentation from Tim Berners-Lee, advocating openness of the Web. He notes that some people argue the only way to protect the web is to make a walled garden of safe content, but Berners-Lee disagreed. "The world I see is predicated on an open neutral network," he said. 

Useful for school start and saves you a lot of money. Download and print many kind of papers for free like "Dot Paper with 2.5mm spacing on A4-sized paper" or "Columnar Paper with six columns on A4-sized paper in landscape orientation" and hundreds more.

"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.

There's a lot to digest here, particularly if you want to read the whole report as well as the edited summary. I particularly liked the responses from JP Rangaswami: "The quality of real-time information that becomes available will take the guesswork out of much of capacity planning and decision-making......The net effect will be to reduce waste everywhere: in physical flows and logistics, in the movement of people and goods; in logical flows and logistics, in the movement of ideas and information; decisions will be made faster and better, based on more accurate information; prior errors in assumption and planning will be winkled out more effectively." And from Howard Rheingold: "We will live in a world where many things won't work, and nobody will know how to fix them." On a personal note, I can see there might be benefits with the IoT, particularly the use of sensors and actuators for monitoring and improving health, but will it put the final nail in 'privacy' and enable marketers to push their products and control my thoughts 24 x 7 through the pervasive use of wearable devices and biological interfaces with technology? Reading time: 60 mins

Google has revealed a project underway at the called The Physical Web to provide "interaction on demand" so that people can walk up and use any smart devices without the need for intervening mobile apps. This would make it possible for users to simply walk up to a bus stop and receive the time until the next arriving bus, without any additional software needed. An accepted open standard is probably some years away, but the promise of an Internet of Things that doesn't require a centralised software hub is appealing, since it democratises control over the system.

A great example of how to introduce open knowledge to the wider populace. This initiative provides facilities for the people of Exeter (a town in Devon, England) to experience and use open fabrication technology, using a variety of equipment, including 3D printers. Fablab also provide various workshops and Taster Courses to help people learn and understand how to use these new technologies. A great example of bringing new ideas to communities.

I've saved this because it identifies a facet of open knowledge that is becoming increasingly important - the concept of "open manufacturing". Additive manufacturing - or 3D printing as it is more commonly known - is being used in more industry sectors than ever before. New materials and use cases have led to 3D manufacturing in Health, Entertainment, Automobiles, Fashion, Construction etc. I particularly liked this quote from David Rowan at Wired: "The democratisation of manufacturing will empower anyone with a compelling idea to prototype, make and launch a physical product ay speed and low cost".

Often there will be a big push for public bodies to publish open data and then they will stop publishing that data once the magic eye of government has moved onto something else. If companies are trying to provide an up to date service there's a real risk for them that when that data goes away they can no longer provide that service.

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