Three things I learned at the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival | Open Data

"I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There’s really too much to distill into a short post - from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for 'Embracing the open opportunity' to Patrick Alley’s breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world. A few things really stuck with me though from the dozens of great sessions throughout the week, here they are: 1) Open data needs users and long-term commitment from governments ... 2) Spreadsheets are code, and you can unit test data ... 3) The future of civic tech (probably) lies in re-usable software components ..."