It’s our favorite time of year at OpenDP: the annual OpenDP Community Meeting! This year, we joined forces with Eyes Off Data Summit to hold the Community Meeting in Dublin, Ireland. Read on to catch up with the highlights of the event and find out how you can get involved with our community!
Presentation Highlights
We began the day with a warm welcome from the OpenDP core team. Michael Shoemate, Sharon (Ayalde) Gibbons, Nina Wattenberg, and Salil Vadhan from OpenDP shared updates on technical features, community strategy, and project priorities for the coming year.
Showcasing OpenDP in Action, Federico Sanson (UNHCR) and Nitin Kohli (University of California, Berkeley) presented how differential privacy – and specifically by using the OpenDP library – was used to develop and release full-size, differentially private synthetic registration datasets across multiple countries which allowed access to foster research and analysis to inform impactful policies and programs, ultimately benefiting displaced populations worldwide.
As announced at the Eyes-Off Data Summit, a new endeavor for a community registry for Differential Privacy deployments was launched! Gary Howarth (NIST) and James Honaker (Mozilla/OpenDP) went into more details on how the registry works, the desire to help foster norms about best practices, and a call to action for feedback on the new paper titled “A Community-Driven Differential Privacy Deployment Registry”.
This year, we hosted a panel around synthetic data with experts talking about challenges and future directions. Moderated by Christine Task (Knexus Research), the panel included a variety of perspectives from Shlomi Hod (German Federal Institute for Employment Research), Ryan McKenna (Google), and Paul Tiwald (MostlyAI) that led to fruitful discussions and where there are opportunities to collaborate.
Breakout Sessions
One of the questions we commonly hear is how to set epsilon. Complementing the new DP Deployment Registry, a working session focusing on practical use cases with setting epsilon was led by Rachel Cummings (Columbia University) and James Honaker (Mozilla/OpenDP) where smaller groups had engaging conversations and shared new ideas on approaches.
New to our field? There’s no better place to learn about differential privacy than the OpenDP Community Meeting. In “Intro to Differential Privacy via OpenDP,” Michael Shoemate led a beginner-friendly session exploring the basics of differential privacy using our signature open-source tools.
Pitch Anything
Our ever-popular Pitch Anything event returned this year in full force! We held two lightning rounds of community pitches, hearing from a broad range of participants. Browse their slides and watch the session videos on our website to learn more.
Thank You and Next Steps
It was a delight to hold the OpenDP Community Meeting in Ireland this year and connect with our European community members. Thank you to Oblivious and the Eyes Off Data Summit for partnering with us to make this possible! In addition, we are grateful to our sponsors for supporting our work: CapitalOne, Oblivious, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, and SAS. And of course, thank you to our speakers, panelists, and participants for facilitating wonderful conversations!
We would love your feedback! Please find the link to our survey as we continue to improve future Community Meetings and better serve the community at large!How can you get involved with OpenDP? We have so many opportunities. Join our Slack and start a conversation. Explore our working groups and meet other members of our community. Try out our software and let us know what you think. And if you have any questions, comments, or ideas, reach out to us at info@opendp.org.
