It’s still work in progress but I’m delighted to announce the bones of an agenda for our event on April 22nd in London.

As heavily trailed, our April event builds upon our inaugural event in October last year and probes, in a lot more detail, what’s happening in terms of open data, and open data based applications.  We’ll also touch on the debate re. open source software in government in our afternoon session. 

At our last event apps developers made clear that opening up Ordnance Survey data was critical.  So we’re delighted that the Ordance Survey will be taking part in our April event.  We’ll also have the perspective of the Hansard Society – and Emma Mulqueeny of the transformational government team will be talking about data.gov.uk and the apps that are beginning to emerge.

Having talked about the platforms, the vision and the government agenda – we’ll then have a look at what the app community is developing.  This will feature companies such as Timetric, itoworld, Ocastalabs, and Yahoo Developer Network. Plus we’re delighted, also, to have Mark Birbeck, an Invited Expert on the W3C’s newly formed RDFa Working Group. 

However, we want to go even further.  So we’re having a panel discussion that focuses on how open data based apps might evolve and meld into social apps: Open Data Meets Social Data Meets Generation Y (OK not a very elegant title but it’ll be a fascinating debate).  In a slight change of plan, that session will be moderated by Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Correspondent for the Telegraph – and will feature speakers such as Andrew Walker from Tweetminster and Gemma Cocker from Tweetie and the Brain. 

We’re also looking at the technologies that might drive  future apps and we’ll touch on open source software and how it might fit into the wider transformational agenda.  So William Heath will be chairing an afternoon session that discusses what’s next after open data and we’ll also have a series of presentations focused on open source software – with speakers from Learning Pool, Dextrous Web, BT and Puffbox – among others. 

So it’ll be a challenging day with some of the keenest brains in open data, government, geekdom, social media and open source.  We’ll have provocative discussions, arguments and presentations. 

Please consider treating yourself and attending the event - plus we have kept the cost absolutely miniscule for an event of this nature.  Watching our broadcast online will be free but you must register (if you haven’t already registered for our previous events). 

We can’t fit many people in to attend the broadcast but we’d like an audience that challenges our speakers on the day.  Also if you attend you stand a very good chance of featuring in our broadcast because, as before, we’ll be having vox pop interviews during the breaks.  Plus you’ll get to network and have a great lunch in a wonderful venue.