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Andreea Bonea
Sponge Media Lab, Business Strategists
Andreea Bonea PMP is a well versed Project Manager Professional, trained in Silicon Valley, who’s expertise and qualifications were retained and further developed by internet giants such as Google and Yahoo Inc. She managed tactical roll outs of key products and platforms for both companies. In her PM role she proved her ability to architect streamlined operational processes, fostering leadership and accountability, to consistently exceed performance goals and expectations.
As a freelance Project Management Professional, she strives to infuse her Silicon Valley corporate tech expertise into the European Non Profit sector. In this respect she’s already had fruitful collaborations with several notable organizations:
Open Knowledge Foundation (She spearheaded for OKFN the LOD2 initiative; she was instrumental in bringing further technical developments to Publicdata.eu, a Pan European data portal and slowly turning it into a more linked open data initiative, by closely collaborating with the other LOD2 Consortium partners)
Sponge Media Lab (She is one of the main Business Strategists, designing the road map and future initiatives of the Lab).
Mozilla Foundation (She project managed the Bucharest Open Media Challenge – a hack event funded by the Mozilla Foundation under the Knight-Mozilla Open News program and initiated by the Sponge Media Innovation Lab for Eastern Europe)"
Talk Title:
Sponge, a collaborative media innovation lab for Eastern Europe
Talk Abstract:
Problem & solution: a year ago I initiated Sponge, a media innovation lab for eastern Europe located in Bucharest and online. It should become the missing R&D for journalism. But it turned into a collaborative experimentation Lab between independent groups and communities of investigative journalists, coders, designers, activists and legal experts, involving also local universities and students. We are building a hub for innovation occurring at the nexus of transparency and accountability, technology and media. We create an ecosystem fostering relevant and verifiable information and open data.
Study case: with a 3 thousand USD grant from Mozilla Foundation we organized last October the Open Media Challenge in Bucharest, 3 months long contest on open data and collaboration. Using an open process, we had 20 proposals from Bielarus, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Romania. Out of that, during a weekend hackathon, 10 were developed and 8 delivered a working app or tool (see http://thesponge.eu/Entry_list/). As one member of the jury said, “the Open Media Challenge is a posterbook example how to do a hackathon: good organization, highly motivated participants and awesome ideas/projects that actually delivered”.
Strategy: based on an experimental approach (trial and error) we are turning Sponge into a replicable model for smaller or larger interdisciplinary communities working on open data. Our test bed is the post-communist space, with similar background and so many real world problems that can be solved in a collaborative way also using technology. Our strong points are huge IT and activism knowledge, as well as expertise on journalism and opening data and information; our test bed is great also because of so many differences in language, technical and media literacy, religion and types of government.
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