Civic Lab Leuven

Civic Lab Leuven are biweekly meetings open to anyone working on or interested in open activities and projects.

Purpose

Civic Lab Leuven is an action-oriented group for those interested in creating solutions for local communities, mainly through technology. During our biweekly open gatherings (all backgrounds welcome) we work on civic projects, get feedback from tech and gov experts and learn about civic innovation and related concepts like open data, civic hacking and open government. Feel free to join!

When spoken about open, it is open as defined on http://opendefinition.org/

Meetings start at about 19:45 and have as program 30 minutes for short presentations, 2 hours for actions on the subjects of the presentations.

This wiki page exists to keep an overview of the project, to document it, and to be both open and transparent (transparency).

History and background

Civic Lab Brussels started in 2017 with a focus on air quality related projects. Since October 2017 also Civic Lab Ghent is organised, with projects related to biotechnology, open data and water quality. With the start of Civic Lab Brussels in 2017, already 27 labs existed in the world (in Germany open knowledge labs). Civic Lab Leuven has been inspired on the Brussels edition and started in March 2018.

Contacts

...
Dries for Open Knowledge Belgium
Romaine for Wikimedia Belgium

Partners

Co-organisers of Civic Lab Ghent are:

...

Supported

Civic Lab Ghent is also supported by:

Open Knowledge Belgium
Wikimedia Belgium

Budget

Wikimedia Belgium (WMBE) funds all kind of activities and projects that have output on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons (Wikipedia's media files repository) and any of the other Wikimedia platforms. Also for projects/activities organised by/at Civic Lab Leuven there is budget available, if three criteria are met:

Output: The activity or project has output on Wikipedia or any of the other Wikimedia platforms. For example: photos of scientific subjects, photos of subjects from Leuven.
Providing us information: Statistics and metrics are kept, like number of participants, number of photos uploaded, number of articles edited, etc, as well as keeping WMBE informed about activities.
Maintain receipts: Receipts for the expenses are kept and submitted with requesting a reimbursement of the costs.

For more information or questions if we can support your activity, contact us at: infowikimedia.be

Location

Civic Lab Leuven kicked off in Romaanse Poort. The location for the biweekly meetup is announced on the event pages.

Timeline

7 March 2018 - Civic Lab Leuven (1st) in Romaanse Poort (Meetup (archived) | photos)
21 March 2018 - Civic Lab Leuven (2nd) in Romaanse Poort (Meetup (archived))
4 April 2018 - Civic Lab Leuven (3rd) in Romaanse Poort (Meetup (archived))

Output

Add here images or links to created Wikipedia articles (etc)

Statistics

The metrics and statistics of this project are:

7 March 2018 - 16 people present, 3 presentations: 1. Civic Labs Belgium (including Open Knowledge Belgium and Wikimedia Belgium), 2. Leuvenair.be, 3. using public displays to engage people with open data.
21 March 2018 - ... people present, 2 subjects