Open Food Facts at the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva

The Open Knowledge Fundation is organizing the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva on September 18th and 19th. The announced theme for this year is Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected :

“How do we broaden open data – not only geographically across countries and regions, but also across domains and institutions? For example, whilst open data is now firmly on the agenda for government, in business its potential is only just starting to be explored. [..]”

It is great that more and more governements are opening more and more public data, but companies around the world also have tons of data that may not be public but is of public interest. How do we open it?

For the food industry, this is something we started to do with crowdsourcing of food products data on Open Food Facts. A few producers also started to send us data about their food products, and hopefully more of them will open more and more data.

There is a call for proposals to give talks and to organize workshops at the OKCon 2013. The deadline is May 24th.

I’m planning to submit two proposals : one for a talk that introduces Open Food Facts and its applications. And one for a workshop on internationalizing Open Food Facts. Here are brief summaries for both:

Open Food Facts: Crowdsourced Open Data for Food Products (talk)

We eat food 3 times a day but we know very little about what we eat. Open Food Facts aims to bring more transparency to the food industry by building a collaborative and open database of food products from around the world. In one year, 500 contributors added 10000 products in 11 languages. The data is open and can be used to decrypt labels (e.g. E-numbers for additives), to compare products, to visualize differences, and for anything that anyone can think about, including maps like C’est fabriqué près de chez vous (made near you) and educational games like Combien de sucres? (How much sugar?).

Internationalizing Open Food Facts Workshop

We need your help to internationalize Open Food Facts! In this workshop you can learn how to translate the interface of the web site and mobile apps, we can brainstorm together and launch initiatives to collect more local products and to start or develop local communities. During the workshop we could even launch Open Food Facts in some new languages, maybe yours?

What do you think? It would be great to get your feedback and ideas, in particular on the internationalization workshop.

I’m thinking we could briefly present where we are in the different languages. Maybe with a table that shows for each language the % of completion of the translation, the number of products and contributors, the strentghs of the local community, the re-uses etc.

Then we could have a list of precise and concrete actions that can be taken. We could also create small teams who could start some of those actions, or brainstorm on how to bootstrap the local products database or community.

What would be very cool would be to see at the beginning of the workshop if we could build and launch Open Food Facts in a new language during the workshop. A few speakers of the language would be enough. Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian, Cezch, Dutch, Korean, Japanese? Or maybe your language? 🙂

In any case, there will be members of Open Food Facts at the OKCon in Geneva, and we would be very happy to meet you there and exchange ideas. Are you planning to attend the conference too?

Open Food Facts at the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva

Open Food Facts at the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva

Open Food Facts at the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva

Open Food Facts

Main links

Open Food Facts blog