Open Knowledge Foundation Activity Aggregator

Incarnadine

2010-02-08T21:41:00+00:00

Each week, a member of the Open Shakespeare team will be selecting a word of the week to be displayed on the site’s front page. This could be one of the thousands of words Shakespeare coined, or a pre-existing word he used in a noteworthy way:

This week’s word is INCARNADINE.

When it first appeared in the 1590s, it meant ‘flesh-coloured’. Shakespeare was the first person to use it as a verb rather than an adjective, when Macbeth finds himself unable to wash the murdered Duncan’s blood from his hands:

              No; this hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red (Macbeth, II.ii.77)

The striking juxtaposition of ‘incarnadine’ with ‘red’ was memorable enough to lead to a subtle redefinition from ‘flesh-coloured’ to ‘blood-stained’. When later poets such as Cowper, Longfellow and Byron used the word, they were alluding to this definition – and, indeed, to this very scene.

To see the full play that this week’s word is taken from, click here.

And, if you want to volunteer a future word of the week, or get involved with Open Shakespeare more generally, click here.

Ticket #249 (Drupal6 cron setup) created

2010-02-08T19:28:03+00:00

Ticket #248 (Community map contacts script) created

2010-02-08T19:27:44+00:00

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Batch+Geocoding+Script

Ticket #247 (Check civi settings) created

2010-02-08T19:14:17+00:00

All the email, localisation settings need to be checked.

Ticket #246 (Design supporter signup form) created

2010-02-08T19:13:53+00:00

We need to design which fields we collect on signup to community.okfn.org

SyncingInstances edited

2010-02-08T17:41:42+00:00

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SyncingInstances edited

2010-02-08T17:38:24+00:00

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SyncingInstances created

2010-02-08T17:22:11+00:00

WikiStart edited

2010-02-08T17:14:26+00:00

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WikiStart edited

2010-02-08T17:13:19+00:00

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WikiStart edited

2010-02-08T13:52:40+00:00

fix shkspr repo link

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WikiStart edited

2010-02-08T12:45:30+00:00

link usecases

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WikiStart edited

2010-02-08T12:21:43+00:00

refactor front page and add toc

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Ticket #241 (License doesn't preview correctly) created

2010-02-08T10:39:06+00:00

4 failing tests, including 2 in misc/package_saver and 2 in functional/test_package.

Comments on OKF poster

2010-02-07T14:07:23+00:00

A belated note to say thanks for your comments on the first go at an
OKF poster, Andrew!

I'll link to these from the wiki page:

  http://wiki.okfn.org/Publicity

All the best,

Jonathan

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Andrew Mackenzie
<a.mackenzie-pb+bjW3J0tkqdlJmJB21zg< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

Re: comparison of project hosting includingknowledgeforge

2010-02-07T13:05:34+00:00

It just occurred to me that there are almost as many downloads of the 
last release of KForge from Python Package Index (763) as there are 
registered users on KnowledgeForge (869).

http://www.knowledgeforge.net/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/kforge/0.17

J.

Book Search, Museum View, and Exploitation

2010-02-07T03:00:10+00:00

Read today a Google Books PR piece on the Guardian website. Of out-of-print or hard-to-get books, it says, “Although copies may be available in libraries, they are effectively dead to the wider world.” Also heard today that Google Street View is proposing inside views, museum interiors.

Last week, I and some OKF people heard a Google Books lawyer, Antoine Aubert, speak at the 7th COMMUNIA workshop on the public domain.

Google digitise the holdings of libraries free of cost, returning the library a copy, retaining some exclusivity over further re-use for Google. For example, a library is asked not to allow other search engines to index the digitised full text of the works.

Rufus commented on the Public Domain Calculator cross-European project that “A library who will remain nameless would not provide us with their catalogue metadata because of an exclusive arrangement with Google in rights to re-use the catalogue. Were they mistaken?” Antoine was not able to give a definite answer, to this and other questions.

A library’s raison d’etre is to provide physical access to books. With high-quality digitisations online for free, physical traffic will definitely fall. Space used for storage in prime central locations is inefficient; why not just scan the books and keep them in an air-conditioned warehouse in Swindon?

Meanwhile a library’s purchasing power is partly determined by the number of people borrowing books. New books will be indexed and stored by Google directly from publishers. There won’t be much reason to visit a library.

The library will become a museum of books. The museum will become a mausoleum of things.

To survive as institutions, museums, libraries and archives need a sustainability model, one which cannot depend on state funding alone.

One path to explore is commercial services for special purposes - re-use of very large high-resolution scans, printing of images and facsimiles, new or custom images, new interfaces and search functions.

If Google now has the right to restrict the use of the works online, those libraries accepting the “free” digitisation offer are not free to build and maintain the services that, as memory institutions in a digital age, they really should be providing.

Well, there’s always Wikipedia, and particularly the Britain Loves Wikipedia events going on through February 2010, focused on photographing heritage objects.

Matthias Schindler spoke at the same COMMUNIA meeting about a German Wikipedia effort to fix and link metadata from authority files by the German National Library - some background slides. His message went, “Give us your metadata. Really, just give us your metadata right now.”

Fwd: FW: Data Dimensions: Disciplinary Differencesin Research Data Sharing, Reuse and Long term Viability

2010-02-06T13:46:59+00:00

This looks interesting...

J.


---------- Forwarded message ----------

***Apologies for Cross Posting***

Anyone involved in storing and curating research data knows well that
disciplines do things differently. Whether we see research domains as
a thousand blooming flowers or a tower of Babel, that diversity
presents challenges for data curation. Through a series of seven case
studies in different disciplines, the Digital Curation Centre’s SCARP
project aimed to help understand these challenges and build on current
digital data management and preservation practices in each case.

One of this JISC-funded project's final outputs is a synthesis study
and the DCC is pleased to announce the report "Data Dimensions:
Disciplinary Differences in Research Data Sharing, Reuse and Long term
Viability", which has been written by Key Perspectives.

This synthesis report draws on the SCARP case studies plus a number of
others (identified in the Appendix), and identifies factors that help
understand how curation practi

Ticket #240 (Do not allow creation of PackageResource object without a url) created

2010-02-05T19:55:47+00:00

Currently it is possible (v0.11) to have a PackageResource? object without a url. This should be impossible to do (either at creation time or via modification).

Ticket #196 (RDF URI to resolve on CKAN) closed

2010-02-05T17:09:31+00:00

fixed:

In cset:7eadcdc94b3a package URI changed to:

http://ckan.net/package/32000-naples-florida-businesses-kml

This resolves to html or rdf+xml - see ticket:90

Ticket #245 (Produce and distribute newsletter 14) created

2010-02-05T13:33:08+00:00

Draft based on existing newsletters here: http://wiki.okfn.org/newsletters/
Main OKF news items since last newsletter
General open knowledge news
- Put out a call for general news to the list
Publish it
Deadline: End of February

NARS Open Access Survey

2010-02-05T12:38:59+00:00

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss-6A+mB+4cr9F9rwYpqGo9+w< at >public.gmane.org
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

WikiStart edited

2010-02-04T19:49:01+00:00

describe ckan and mention excel importer

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Rethinking Open Data: Lessons learned from the Open Data front lines

2010-02-04T16:28:32+00:00

Nat Torkington recently wrote the following piece on O’Reilly Radar. He kindly gave us permission to republish it on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog…

In the last year I’ve been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I’ve seen some signs recently that other projects might benefit from my experience, so this post is a recap of what I’ve learned. It’s the byproduct of a summer reflection on my last nine months working in open data.

Technologists like to focus on technology, and I’m as guilty of that as the next person. When Open New Zealand started, we rushed straight to the “catalogue”. I was part of a smart group of top-notch web hackers–we know what a catalogue is, it’s a web-based database and let’s figure out the UI flow and which fields do we want and hey I can hack one up in Wordpress and I’ll work on the hosting and so on. We spent more time worrying about CSS than we did worrying about the users.

This is the exact analogue of an open source software failure mode: often companies think they can get all the benefits of open source simply by releasing their source code. The best dinner parties are about the other people. Similarly, the best open source projects have great people, attract great people, and the source is simply what they’re working on: necessary but not sufficient. You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.

Data catalogues around the world have launched and then realised that they now have to build a community of data users. There’s value locked up in government data, but you only realise that value when the datasets are used. Once you finish the catalogue, you have to market it so that people know it exists. Not just random Internet developers, but everyone who can unlock that value. This category, “people who can use open data in their jobs” includes researchers, startups, established businesses, other government departments, and (yes) random Internet hackers, but the category doesn’t have a name and it doesn’t have a Facebook group, newsletter, AGM, or any other way for you to reach them easily.

This matters because it costs money to make existing data open. That sounds like an excuse, and it’s often used as one, but underneath is a very real problem: existing procedures and datasets aren’t created, managed, or distributed in an open fashion. This means that the data’s probably incomplete, the document’s not great, the systems it lives on are built for internal use only, and there’s no formal process around managing and distributing updates. It costs money and time to figure out the new processes, build or buy the new systems, and train the staff.

In particular, government and science are often funded as projects. When the project ends, the funding stops. Ongoing maintenance and distribution of the data hasn’t been budgeted for almost all the data sets we have today. This attitude has to change, and new projects give us the chance to get it right, but most existing datasets are unfunded for maintenance and release.

So while opening all data might be The Right Thing To Do from a philosophical perspective, it’s going to cost money. Governments would rather identify the high-value datasets, where great public policy comment, intra-government optimisation, citizen information, or commercial value can be unlocked. Even if you don’t buy into the cost argument, there’s definitely an order problem: which datasets should we open first? It should be the ones that will give society the greatest benefit soonest. But without a community of users to poll, a well-known place for would-be data consumers to come to and demand access to the data they need, the policy-making parts of governments are largely blind to what data they have and what people want.

That’s not to say that data catalogues aren’t useful. We were scratching an itch–we wanted easier access to government data, so we built the tool that would provide it. The community of data users can be built around the tool. As Krishna was told by Arjuna, “a man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the Absolute, he must evolve toward it”. I’m just noting that, as with all creative endeavours, we learned about the problem by starting to fix it.

Which brings me to the second big lesson: which problem are we trying to solve? There’s an Open Data movement emerging around governments releasing data. However, there are at least five different types of Open Data groupie: low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data, transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government, citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better, open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people, and wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.

The one thing these groups don’t share is an outcome. I can imagine an honest government where the costs of transparency overweigh the costs of corruption (think of the cost of removing every dirt particle from your house). I can imagine PR wins that don’t come from delivering real benefits to citizens, in fact I see this in a recent tweet by Sunlight Labs’s Ellen Miller:

Most of the raw data released by the OGD most likely isn’t for you to use.

She’s grumbling, as does this Washington Post piece, about the results so far from the Open Government Directive, which has prompted datasets of questionable value to be added to data.gov. If this is the future, where’s my flying car? If this is open data, where’s my damn transparency?

There are some promising signs. The UK government data catalogue had a long beta period where developers were working with the data. The UK team built a community as well as a catalogue. That’s not to say that the UK effort is all gold–I saw plenty of frustration with RDF while I was observing the developers–but it stands out simply for the acknowledgement of users. Similarly, the UK’s MySociety defined what success is to them: they’re all about building useful apps for citizens, and open data is a means not an end to them.

So, after nearly a year in the Open Data trenches, I have some advice for those starting or involved in open data projects. First, figure out what you want the world to look like and why. It might be a lack of corruption, it might be a better society for citizens, it might be economic gain. Whatever your goal, you’ll be better able to decide what to work on and learn from your experiences if you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Second, build your project around users. In my time working with the politicians and civil servants, I’ve realised that success breeds success: the best way to convince them to open data is to show an open data project that’s useful to real people. Not a catalogue or similar tool aimed at insiders, but something that’s making citizens, voters, constituents happy. Then they’ll get it.

My next project with Open New Zealand is to build a community of data users. I want to see users supporting each other, I want to build a tight feedback loop between those who want data and those who can provide it, to create an environment where the data users can support each other, and to make it easier to assess the value created by government-released open data. Henry Kissinger said, “each success only buys admission to a more difficult problem”. I look forward to learning what the next problem is.

7th Communia Workshop, Luxembourg

2010-02-04T02:39:24+00:00

We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!).

Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks and discussions that we thought might be of particular interest to readers here:

We had a meeting to review where we are up to with the Public Domain Calculators. So far it looks like we have 10 EU countries covered, 8 maybe covered and 6 that we are still looking for help with (namely: Cyprus, Denmark, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Slovenia). If you’d like to help out - please drop us a line!
Jill Cousins from the European Digital Library Foundation spoke about the latest state of play with respect to licensing the content of Europeana, a collection of over 6 million images, texts, sound recordings and videos. In particular she spoke about the possibility of libraries and cultural heritage organisations releasing digital content into the public domain or under an open license. There has been some opposition - but we very much hope that institutions contributing to Europeana have the foresight to give this serious consideration!
Paul Keller and Lucie Guibault presented their work on the recently released public domain manifesto - discussing the rationale behind it, its genesis and various versions, and an overview of its main principles and recommendations. At the time of writing it has been signed by over 50 organisations and 1800 individuals.
Francesco Fusaro of the European Commission DG Research spoke about the EU initiatives to support open access to scientific publications and data - from background research in this area to piloting open access to approximately 20% of FP7 funded projects.
Patrick Peiffer gave an excellent presentation on licensing options for bibliographic metadata. In particular he suggested that non-commercial restrictions could cause substantial transaction costs and technical complications. On the other hand using an ‘attribution, sharealike’ type license that allowed commercial reuse which would cause no transaction costs, create a level playing field, allow interoperability with projects like Wikimedia and Wikimedia Commons, avoid exclusive deals and open up new channels of discovery. It would be a big step if Europeana libraries and institutions follow the lead of CERN Library, who last week announced that they were opening up their metadata!
Mathias Schindler spoke about tools developed by the Wikipedians using open bibliographic metadata. He also described what the Wikipedia community had done to add value to collections of cultural works - such as improving the quality of metadata, adding descriptions to images and so on.
Rufus Pollock spoke about his work at the University of Cambridge to estimate the size and value of the public domain in Europe.

Re: comparison of project hosting includingknowledgeforge

2010-02-03T15:21:20+00:00


Reading through the comments I wondered also whether we might approach 
(and potentially partner knowledgeforge.net with) librelist.com.

http://dalkescientific.blogspot.com/2010/01/project-hosting-options.html

Best wishes,
John

Ticket #101 (The system shall provide access to Subversion services with the native ...) created

2010-02-03T14:51:30+00:00

We could run svnserve -r on some directory, and make KForge write symlinks to the KForge subversion repositories and configure the repositories' svnserve.conf file (or suggest users do that via their project's DAV service).

NASA GISS interested in Clearer Climate Code

2010-02-03T14:11:50+00:00

Some of you may have seen the following guest post from Clearer
Climate Code on OKF blog:

  http://blog.okfn.org/2010/01/28/clear-climate-code-and-data/

Very pleased to learn that NASA GISS are thinking about using their code!

  http://clearclimatecode.org/nasa-giss-wants-to-use-our-code/

What a nice story. ;-)

Re: Community.okfn.org

2010-02-03T13:13:48+00:00

To follow this up. Major problems as identified in those vision discussions:

It is unclear to the average observer (and often even to those more
involved with our work!):

  A) What we're up to
  B) Who's doing it
  C) How you get involved
  D) [maybe not so important] What the decision making structure is

community.okfn.org is an attempt to address this by:

  1. Integrate project and working group info in a single place
  2. Centralized "recent changes" to give an overview of what we are up to
  3. Create a dedicated space for OKFN "members" and others involved
in what we're doing so the community becomes visible. (This will also
be the concrete implementation of the governance structure discussed
last November [1])

We want both:

  * Input on the technology (wordpress versus drupal versus plone versus ...)
  * How to do 1+2+3 with given technology (e.g. anyone out there
familiar with drupal profile pages?)
  * What else we should be doing (see
http://wiki.okfn.org/WebsiteRedesign for current discussion

Re: comparison of project hosting includingknowledgeforge

2010-02-03T12:21:25+00:00

I think it would definitely be worth trying to contact Andrew Dalke
directly and talk to him more.

One thing to emphasize is that unlike many of the other products
considered, a lot of effort goes into making KForge good software in
its own right (rather than being heavily tied to the one specific
install such as knowledgeforge.net). In particular its easy to install
KForge yourself so that you don't have to use our particular KForge
service (http://knowledgeforge.net). As such the number of users
Knowledgeforge.net is likely to be lower because people can run their
own autonomous instance!

I also think it would be worth trying to start getting better stats on
exactly how many deployed instances are out there :)

Regards,

Rufus

On 2 February 2010 16:16, John Bywater
<john.bywater-LwEOWZtPm35dg67dNh4eQuKnY7ZGds9/< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

Fwd: FOSS4G 2010 Call for Abstract

2010-02-03T10:45:40+00:00

Would be great to put in something to this on CKAN for geospatial
data! Anyone interested in co-drafting/attending?

J.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

LinkedIn Groups

Group: Open Source Geospatial Foundation
Subject: FOSS4G 2010 Call for Abstract

We are pleased to announce the Call for Abstract for the FOSS4G (Free
and Open Source Software for Geospatial) 2010 conference, being held
September 6-9, in beautiful Barcelona, Spain.
Held annually, FOSS4G is the premier conference for the open source
geospatial community, providing a full-immersion experience in
established and leading edge geospatial technologies for developers,
users, and people new to open source geospatial.

http://2010.foss4g.org

FOSS4G 2010 presentations are 25 minute talks, with 5 minute question
and answer sessions at the end. Presentations cover the use or
development of open source geospatial software. Anyone can can submit
a presentation proposal and take part in the conference as a
presenter.

Read full information at: ht

Coverage in France for OKFN study on Open Data inFrance

2010-02-03T10:18:38+00:00

http://www.agoravox.fr/tribune-libre/article/etat-des-lieux-de-l-opendata-
en-69266

Best,

Jorum Update news

2010-02-02T16:18:58+00:00

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Re: comparison of project hosting includingknowledgeforge

2010-02-02T16:16:09+00:00

Exciting!


They're getting worn down. :-)

http://knowledgeforge.net/kforge/trac/timeline
http://knowledgeforge.net/domainmodel/trac/timeline

J.

Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

2010-02-02T16:04:22+00:00

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
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http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

comparison of project hosting includingknowledgeforge

2010-02-02T15:50:27+00:00

Here is Andrew Dalke's take on project hosting:
http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2010/01/30/project_hosting_options.html

You will notice that knowledgeforge makes it to the last 2, but 'I
looked at KnowledgeForge and while it seems to fit my requirements,
there aren't many people using it, although others may be using the
underlying KForge application to host their own system. My concern is
that the rough edges wouldn't have been worn down by other users.'

James

Ticket #81 (Fix broken HTML (3 errors in validator)) closed

2010-02-02T13:39:58+00:00

fixed

Changeset [1429]: Fixed loads of HTML validation errors. Added option to installer, to ...

2010-02-02T12:55:45+00:00

Fixed loads of HTML validation errors. Added option to installer, to pre-install specific Python package.

Community.okfn.org

2010-02-02T12:32:59+00:00

Dear all,

As you know the Open Knowledge Foundation is a community-driven
organisation. For a while we've been thinking about how we can
re-design the OKF site to better reflect this community [1]. In
particular we would like to make it easier for people to see who is
out there, what they are interested in, what they are working on, and
so on.

To this end we've been started working on community.okfn.org:

  http://community.okfn.org/

This currently uses Drupal + CiviCRM. Any thoughts, suggestions or
help would be most welcome!

[1] http://wiki.okfn.org/Vision and http://wiki.okfn.org/WebsiteRedesign/

Ticket #93 (Setup dedicated website uptime monitoring for main okfn sites) closed

2010-02-01T19:15:24+00:00

fixed:

Resolving as fixed since someone has set up wasitup: http://wasitup.com