There have been a few changes happening over the past two years with the Open Knowledge Melbourne meetup. Some of the founding members have stepped back and stepped away from their roles as organisers; some of our members have stepped into organising roles. And, we have been slack in keeping up with this blog (sorry!).

Open Knowledge Melbourne has had a slower start to this year than others. Last week, we ran a planning session to find out from you, the Open Knowledge Melbourne community,  what we could do this year. A big thank you to those that came along – thank you for participating and being really engaged with the discussion.

Thank you, also to the people who completed the very short survey – if you missed last weeks meetup and would like to provide us with your thoughts and some feedback, the survey will be open for another week.

At the planning session we asked the Open Knowledge Melbourne community what we could learn about, discuss, make, create or do this year. And there were a lot of ideas put forward.

Maps, our perennial favourite, featured across all categories, as did themes of data analysis, data visualisation and science.

Some of the post-it suggestions are can be seen below:

We are working on turning these ideas, suggestions, topics and themes into the schedule of meetup sessions for this year. There are some people to ask come speak, workshops and dojos to put together, and projects to scope. This is shaping to be an interesting year.

— Post written by Sally P.