Welcome to Open Source City

In the summer of 2012, Open Source City will be taking place through a diverse range of partnerships and in venues across Liverpool.

The use of the term open source is being extended across society and culture, not just to describe a form of software or hardware. We want to explore this and we think Liverpool is the city to do it.

Open Source City is a ‘permanent festival’ a celebration of an open sharing of creative and disruptive thinking, information and technology use to change the way our world works, artists, technologists, thinkers and makers, both radical and conservative. We say permanent because we want this to be a supportive platform for the amazing stuff that goes on already in the city that has a connection to the idea of open information: so open data, open source software, open hardware, open collaboration, open source swan pedalos. We don't want to be the best festival in the world: we want it to be about sustaining discussion, art and activity in the city and sharing it on a public platform.

Open Source City was originally a weekend micro-festival of open source sound & media practice for the 2008 Liverpool City of Culture Programme organised by SoundNetwork and folly in Lancaster. In the photo you can see Rui Guerra founder of INTK scavenging computer parts with workshop participants for his Tin Can Antenna workshop round the back of Mello Mello for OSC 2008. We hit the mother lode that day; 1000s of metres of multi colour CAT5 cable just thrown out...