Spotlight speeches 5

Bettina van Hoven – RUG

Stories of This Abled City was an interactive exhibition at the House of Connections in Groningen that brought together ten years of collaboration between academic researchers, disabled co-researchers, students, artists, care organisations and public partners. Through maps, film, games, creative installations and workshops, the exhibition invited visitors to experience the city through the perspectives of wheelchair users and to take lived experience seriously as knowledge. 

In this spotlight, I reflect on what open science means in a project where knowledge is produced through public encounters, co-research, visual storytelling, games and educational activities (as well as academic publications). In doing so, I also address our challenge regarding shared authorship: while exhibitions, workshops and games allow multiple people to visibly shape the work, academic publishing still makes it harder to recognise all contributions fairly. The presentation addresses how open science can become more inclusive in process, output and credit.

Renata Ávila – OKFN

The ability to access and transform information in real time, and the capacities around it, have increased exponentially, bringing new challenges beyond binaries of open and closed. As interfaces to access knowledge and conduct research are more unstable than ever, new questions start to emerge, especially for younger researchers who are not familiar with the analogue traditional mechanisms to produce data and access knowledge: Where did an answer come from? Which data produced it? 

Can we inspect the source, understand the path and verify the result? Are hallucinations or biases in the system altering the results? Drawing on a recent experience connecting AI directly to public data infrastructure in Brazil and Uruguay, this keynote explores what it takes to keep knowledge open, traceable and governed in the public interest. It examines provenance, interoperability, and the infrastructure that lets AI systems work with trusted open data sources without making those sources disappear.