attendee (16 out of 31)
- Skyscanner - 2 mil from Scottish Equity Partners 2007.
- Getting funding isn't a goal or validation.
- Best way to get funding is not to need it.
- Scottish Enterprise: match funding.
- Give as much as you get. Confide in investor.
- Don't pitch too early. Build traction first.
- Prove potential marketshare one way or another.
- Preparing business plan is productive. Converting to a vision to a plan when you get funding.
- Subscribe to investment bloggers.
- Networkiiiing. Find someone to champion you to an investor.
- Gareth: As many people are delusional as have a key insight. How to know which you are yourself?
- Do you need employees or contractors? Casual employees in between.
- Consultant / contractors own IP for work they do. Unless contract says otherwise. Employees don't, employer owns it.
In reply to: http://cmsw.mit.edu/event/fox-harrell-reflections-on-advanced-identity-representation/
In reply to: http://www2016.ca
In reply to: http://www.meetup.com/The-Cambridge-Semantic-Web-Meetup-Group/events/227201702/
In reply to: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-03-16
In reply to: https://aaronparecki.com/2016/03/14/1/indiewebcamp
Connecting Images and Natural Language
☑ Attending!
Talk by Andrej Karpathy of Stanford
RSVP
Connecting Images and Natural LanguageTalk by Andrej Karpathy of Stanford
Encryption, Privacy and Partnerships
☑ Attending!
Talk by Hannigan of GCHQ
RSVP
Encryption, Privacy and PartnershipsTalk by Hannigan of GCHQ
In reply to: http://crosscloud.org
In reply to: http://sociam.org/
EdinburghApps
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ScotGovCamp #scotgc13
Writeup imminent...
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OKFN Meetup #6
Thursday 16th of May was the 6th Open Knowledge Foundation meetup in Edinburgh. We had a great room in Techcube, more speakers than usual and loads of attendees. Here's an account.
Bill Roberts
Bill, founder of Swirrl ("the linked data company") talked about tools and user interfaces they are developing to make handling data easier for communities; particularly for the less technical. They've encountered a spectrum of users with different levels of technical abilities and needs, so they have to account for this in the tools they build. Technical complexity for accessing data ranges from SPARQL endpoints, JSON APIs, downloadable spreadsheets to visualisations, maps and charts.
They're focussing on providing the data in accessible ways rather than building visualisations though. They'd struggle to meet or even understand everyone's needs; instead, it's important to concentrate in empowering the communities to use the data themselves.
Kim Taylor
An undergraduate Informatics student and participant of the Smart Data Hack, Kim showed us placED, the project her team had worked on, and are continuing to develop.
This is a place finder for people who are looking to maintain or improve their personal wellbeing. They used datasets from the City of Edinburgh Council (and presumably ALISS?) to create an Android app. They stored their data in a Google AppEngine datastore, but I'm not sure if it has a web frontend as well.
Some of the problems they encountered include copyright issues with ordnance survey place data, and royal mail postcode data, which made up part of the Council's data but wasn't available for anyone to use due to licensing restrictions. They worked around this by recomputing location data from the parts of addresses the did have access to with Google's geocoding API.
When they open their database up for user input, which they inevitably will if they want their app to stay current and useful, they'll have to think about how to maintain the content.
Gavin Crosby
Gavin works for the Council, with a title I've forgotten, but it's to do with youth work. Youth work has a very specific definition to do with people aged between 11 and 25, meeting in organised groups with a volunteering adult present. There's loads of this going on in Edinburgh, organised by Scouts/Guides, schools, churches or maybe even self-organised. There's no central database about what is going on where, which is one of the Council's biggest issues in this area. Word of mouth is usually how this kind of information is spread amongst young people, and Gavin suggested that a lot of youths may be unwilling to attend something they'd heard about without a direct invitation from someone they know.
In an attempt to reign some of this information in, they've created the Youth Work Map.
It's not an ideal system, as they have to update it manually when a youth group or activity organiser decide to inform the Council that they exist. Not everybody opts in, so there is data missing. Manual updating also means the map is not 'live'; things might go out of date and not be removed straight away.
Gavin said it is the constraints of the Council's web system that has caused a lot of the problems, and points out that they haven't considered accessibility issues (for example, access for people with vision problems), and it's not interactive. He'd love to see the ability for kids to chat to each other through the map, or leave reviews for particular events. There are issues with child protection here, of course.
He would also like to see better tagging and organisation of the content on the map, links to other data repositories (there are parallel similar projects), and the ability to connect events to areas or routes rather than single points.
Gavin pointed out that a lot of the audience for this map is likely to be adults looking for youth projects, rather than young people themselves.
Leah Lockhart
Leah made a quick announcement about the new Local Government Open Data Working Group. They're organising open data surgeries (similar to her social media surgeries that you've definitely heard of by now if you're floating around the OD scene in Edinburgh). They're also hoping to fill in the OKFN Open Data Census for Scotland, and meet regularly in the pub.
Tweet Leah if you're interested!
Fiona McNeill
Fiona works in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and she told us about Open Data in climate change science, or the lack thereof. A team she has put together have got some funding to carry out a small investigation about Open Data use in climate change science, and to try to build a network around this. They'll be looking at trends and patterns of the past decade to see if research has been any more successful when existing datasets were used, or if papers are more well-cited when they make their data open at the end of it (for example).
She thinks the lack of Open Data in this area could be due to the expensive nature of making data good enough quality to share, and of course the fact that when people have worked hard to gather data they feel that they own it; why should they share?
They're hoping that their report might go some way to persuading funding bodies to have sharing of data as a criteria for applications.
Contact Fiona if you're interested in this kind of thing.
John Kellas
John said, brilliantly, that talking about information visualisation usually means graphs. But normal people "don't think in graphs".
He works in community education, and a couple of years ago he started working in "volumetric and comparative" visualisations, which can be much more useful and empowering to people. He showed us a visualisation of one trillion dollars (which I can't find a link to, so let me know if anyone has one).
He's not had much support with creating tools and visualisations, because he's not interested in making money from it, so it's hard to attract funding. What he's doing looks really useful though, so hopefully we'll see more!
Ben Jeffery
Ben is another undergraduate Informatics student who took part in the Smart Data Hack and whose team is still working on the project they started at the hack. They're re-imagining the University's student information portal by pulling in lots of different data sources, and presenting the information more sensibly. They've been doing a fantastic job, but of course are all busy with exams and general learning, so the haven't been able to spend as much time on this as they'd like.
They're also struggling to get raw data out of the University, and point to (my alma mater) the University of Lincoln's open data portal as an example of what could and should be done about this. So they're turning their project into a pilot to demonstrate what they could do if they had the data they wanted. They're also conscious of similar-but-different projects, like projects.ed.ac.uk, and don't want to duplicate effort.
Ben said they've found that a lot of the University of Edinburgh's data is held by middleware vendors, so it's particularly hard to access. But this is information that is funded by students, so it should be available to them! He said the "University should be a breeding ground for knowledge" so data shouldn't be silo'd up.
He also said that there are a lot of politics in the way with this sort of thing. They, as any level-headed software developer, just want to build stuff. They're still in various talks though, so this is a space to watch...
Susan Pettie and Marc Horne
These guys are from So Say Scotland and aim to change culture to make Scotland better. Open Data is important for democratic movements, so they told us about some of their events. They're building a network of activists and campaigners, and hold large scale assemblies themed around 'thinking together', which is a kind of en masse guided brainstorming. They're trying to spark a movement, and are aiming for 25,000 people. They're investigating ways to make their assemblies more efficient, as currently collating all of the ideas that are generated is a manual process. This would be nigh on impossible when they reach their participation goal.
There will be a report about their progress on the 27th of May.
Devon Walshe
Devon was our Techcube host, and he told us about Sync Geeks, Geeks in Residence. This is a program funded by Creative Scotland that puts the technologically minded into arts organisations. Previous efforts by arts organisations to employ 'geeks' to solve a technical problem or produce a digital solution for something have been problematic due to the 'black box' approach. The developers produce an outcome, get paid and leave, often aiming to do the minimum amount of work. Geeks in Residence promotes developers and the organisations working together more closely, to allow for sustainable solutions.
Part of the project is to analyse the relationships of people who know about technology, and those who don't, with each other.
In my notes I've scribbled "convert fear into technology", and I can't remember what that originated from, but it sounds awesome.
Devon did some work with Stills photography centre. Nobody knew what they needed, so after some collaboration they developed an interactive floor plan (because the Stills building is way confusing) and some kind of interactive timeline because Stills has an interesting history.
He also plugged the Culture Hack Scotland in Glasgow in July (12th- 14th), which I'm terribly disappointed I won't be in the country for.
Next OKFN meetup
Will be on the 22nd of August, in Informatics. Here's a link to the Meetup so you can RSVP. I'll sure be there, if I'm not somewhere else.. (depends if/when/where my Mum books an obligatory family holiday).
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Starting up in IT panel discussion
I had an amazing evening at the Starting up in IT panel discussion, followed by Innis & Gunn beer tasting on Thursday evening. It was held in the shiny MMS Quartermile One offices. (When I'm rich, I want a flat on Quartermile. A turret-y one, not a glass one. Or maybe both).
I felt chronically under-dressed when I arrived - a majority were suited - but everyone was really friendly and forthcoming with advice.
Anyway, speaking of being rich. There were lots of interesting business-wise
people to talk to at this event, including CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams,
and Craig Anderson of Pentech Ventures. Plus lawyers specialising in things
like IP, employment, company formation, from MMS. The panel discussion was
enlightening; I'll go through some highlights raw notes...
Funding
Getting wise
Employees
I heard about some really interesting ventures, too, like Identity Artworks which looks like they're making a _huge _difference to young people, and have really inspiring stories to tell. Plus ShareIn, soon launching an equity crowdfunding platform. Veeerrry interesting...
The panel was followed by beer tasting hosted by Innis & Gunn. I don't drink, but I would have sipped along to be sociable. However, it turned out the beer wasn't vegetarian (filtered through isinglass). This, at least, meant more for everyone else on my table. MMS had come up with a written seating plan, by the way, that separated people who had arrived together. Forced networking! Excellent.
This served as great chance for Steve and I to independently practice our GeoLit elevator pitching, and I think we'd got it down to perfection by the end of the evening. Extremely encouragingly, we were consistently met with enthusiasm and responses like "that's an amazing idea!". We left pretty buzzing.
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[Notes] How to write a literature review workshop
Just notes!
Workshop by Dr Mimo Caenepeel on Monday 22nd April.
'Critical' does not mean you have to pass judgement, or say why it's good or
bad.
Not taking things at face value.
Started with freewriting about what has particularly influenced / inspired our own research. Five minutes, not allowed to stop or edit, don't worry about quality of writing, not for anyone else to read. A good way to get ideas out of your head and start to organise your thoughts without censoring or constraining yourself.
How many pages will a review usually take up in a thesis? My policy is to write what needs to be written and stop when you're done. But apparently 20 to 30, sometimes more, is normal in sciences.
There's no consistent / right answer to 'how many publications to review'. For some people it's in the tens, for some the hundreds.
Think about how to integrate literature review into the thesis. You're unlikely to have a chapter that is just 'literature review' and no mention of the background reading elsewhere.
Good qualities for a lit review?
\\\\- Coherence (avoid fragmentation)
\\\\- Structure, clarity.
\\\\- Proof of novelty - purposeful.
A review can often be considered as an indicator of the quality of the rest of the research - demonstrating scholarship.
A good place to start:
1\\\\. Write your research question, formulated as a question.
2\\\\. Write up to five research areas that are relevant to your research
question.
3\\\\. Note some related issues/areas that will not be considered in your review.
Think about balance of content.
1\\\\. Three studies influential in your field (I couldn't answer this, I clearly
need to read more).
2\\\\. Two significan older contributions.
3\\\\. Five recent sources.
4\\\\. Two sources that have strongly influenced your thinking.
You don't need to consider all papers in the same level of detail. Decide which papers are more important / useful than others.
For some papers (important ones) you should work through these questions in
the same way every time you read something (this is 'SQ3R'):
1\\\\. Survey: What is the gist of the article? Skim the title, abstract,
introduction, conclusion and section headings. What stands out?
2\\\\. Question: Which aspects of the research are particularly relevant for your
review? Articulate some relevant questions the article might address.
3\\\\. Read: Read through the text more slowly and in more detail and highlight
key points / key words. Identify connections with other material you have
read.
4\\\\. Recall: Divide the text into manageable chunks and summarise each chunk in
a sentence.
5\\\\. Review: To what extent has the text answered the questions you formulated
earlier?
Critical reading (these seem like really useful questions to work through
whilst reading papers):
1\\\\. What is the author's central argument or main point, ie. what does the
author want you, the reader, to accept?
2\\\\. What conclusions does the author reach?
3\\\\. What evidence does the author put foward in support of his or her
conclusions?
4\\\\. Do you think the evidence is strong enough to support the arguments and
conclusions, ie. is the evidence relevant and far-reaching enough?
5\\\\. Does the author make any unstated assumptions about shared beliefs with
readers?
6\\\\. Can these assumptions be challenged?
7\\\\. Could the text's scientific, cultural or historical context have an effect
on the author's assumptions, the content and the way it has been presented?
See Ridley, D. The Literature Review: A step-by-step guide for students. Sage Study Skills Series. Sage Publications, 2011 (2008).
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