#opentech2011

Previously, to shine a light in dark corners, you needed to cooperation of a publisher or broadcaster or someone working for them. Now you can do it onyour own, but it is foolish to expect that you can reach the same number(s) of people as these outdated behemoths, or even that you need to. Besides, they lie about their numbers, just as those who copy them do. Keeping an MP honest, for example, starts with an audience of one. This will be an entertaining talk on political impacts. The Commercial version is one you can pay Tim for: http://www.bloggerheads.com/seo-seminar/

Police State UK is a news and opinion website covering UK civil liberties (politics, policing, and the sometimes worrying relationship between them). The website runs on an open source content management system called YAWNS, written in Perl and running on Linux and Apache. We have an open content policy, encouraging readers to contribute articles. Although most of the content is written by us, we have had some excellent contributions from others ? including articles from serving politicians and practising lawyers. We also run a successful Twitter account - probably more successful than the website itself in fact, with over 4,000 followers and counting; it's been growing faster ever since the Tories got in power. Recent events have seen us publishing a lot of articles on the right to protest, but we've also covered subjects such as ID cards, DNA retention, RIPA, CCTV and more ? our areas of interest are broad, and we're particularly interested in how many of these issues seem to come back to similar attitudes on the part of the state. We report what's happening in Parliament, on the streets, and in posh Westminster policy seminars. We're still not sure how we got on that invite list. http://policestate.co.uk

Find out more at Greg Hadfield's blog about the campaign for an Open-data Brighton and Hove http://odbh.wordpress.com/

Bill Thompson discusses whether the Hacker Ethic and Commons-Based Peer Production can make a better world. Are we more like Gutenberg or Genghis Khan? http://www.billt.eu

Naomi McAuliffe discusses the challenges and opportunities with visionOntv's Kayte Fairfax.

Kayte Fairfax talks to Harry Wood about Open Street Map. Can it be better than google maps? http://openstreetmap.org http://visionon.tv/plugandplay

Yes, if the project has an open approach to building the platform and working with the local community throughout, from idea to implementation, says Kristina Glushkova. Interview by Richard Hering. http://makerhood.com http://visionon.tv/plugandplay

The mission of the Mozilla Foundation is to promote openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. Building Firefox is how they saw off the first big threat to the open web, but it's only a part of they're doing to make sure the web is still open, participatory and generative in 50 years time, Gervase Markham tells Hamish Campbell. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation http://visionon.tv/plugandplay