This week I'm in Tbilisi for the #OGPSummit.
I work for Open Data Services, and if you're so inclined, you can talk to me about open data for anti-corruption, beneficial ownership and open contracting, from the data standards and tools perspective.
open data (16 out of 20)
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- weekly or bi-weekly - so stay tuned for more info about that. (And if you want to help or participate, get in touch!)
- Standardising visualisation (headed by Bob Kerr)
- Small scale voluntary organisations (headed by Leah Lockhart)
- Sustainability of data projects (headed by Ewan Klein)
- Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience. Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education... And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better. But that aside.
- Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online.
- Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch. This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants.
- Best for travel
- Best for health and wellbeing
- Best for communities
- Best visualisation or UI
- (First year prize for) Best data mashup
- Tom Armitage and Stuart MacDonald, for handling geolocated resources.
- Philip Roberts, for data visualisation with d3.js.
- Oli Kingshott, for an introduction to version control, and HTML5 for beginners.
- I talked to Andy Hyde about ALISS getting involved with the ILW hack, and Edinburgh OD scene in general.
- And a few other people about supporting the ILW hack in various ways.
- I talked to Felix Gilfedder of Popcorn Horror about novel ways of engaging with creative digital media communities (PhD related!)
- I briefly met Russell, with whom I hope to discuss digital video metadata (PhD related!)
- One other thing which isn't related to Open Data or my PhD but is very exciting nonetheless.
Smart Data Hack
☑ Attending!
I'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
RSVP
Smart Data HackI'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
EdinburghApps
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ScotGovCamp #scotgc13
Writeup imminent...
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Young Rewired State in Edinburgh #yrs2013
Young Rewired State is a week-long hack event for under 19s. There are centres all over the UK, and the week finishes with a giant sleepover in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, presentations and prizes.
I was helping out with running the Edinburgh centre this year, between the 5th and 11th of August. We had 15 young people taking part, and a few parents popping in and out as well. Not to mention several fantastic mentors.
Every day we gathered in one of the University of Edinburgh Informatics computer labs. On the first day we did some brainstorming, introduced the young people to Open Data, and they sorted themselves into teams.
We had a diverse range of projects by the end of the week.
The Weatherproof app was written in Scala with a Web frontend, and as well as telling you the weather forecast, gives you practical advice on what to wear and what to take with you.
_Stuff Index _was a Python Web app that lets people photograph and upload stuff they've left out on the street that they want to get rid of, so anyone browsing the site can opt to take it away if they fancy it. Helping to keep stuff out of landfill, and without the dreaded social interactions that come with Freegle.
Tag is a game by a one-man team, with a Python game server and a JavaScript front end that lets you chase your friends around the real world, and automatically tags them when you're in range.
_PokeGame _is a real-world Pokemon simulator that lets you roam IRL and capture virtual Pokemon.
Great stuff!
On Friday we crammed into a coach along with the participants from Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow, and set off on a seven hour road trip to Birmingham for the finale.
The Edinburgh teams didn't win anything, but the presentations were fantastic and everyone had an amazing time. The young people made new friends, learnt tons of new stuff, and hopefully remain enthused about coding.
Next year we're going to do more to walk through the creation process of some example apps to get them started off, and maybe do a better job of introducing Open Data and the possibilities it holds.
We're also thinking about starting a regular under 19s code club in Edinburgh
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#GovHack (Days four and five, Melbourne)
Hack, hack.
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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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Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh #joinuped
The 23rd of February was International Open Data Day. Since this fell at the end of the ILWhack week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the momentum and engage the stirring Edinburgh Open Data scene.
Many ODD were organised around the world; most of them were hacks. In Edinburgh we went for a different approach, thanks largely to input from local community activists like Freda, Leah, Andy and Ally. Some might call it 'social hacking'. Our aim was to gather together people with little knowledge of Open Data, people with data that may or may not be open, and developers and technical types.
With Open Data stuff exploding worldwide, and developers going nuts creating cool apps and services that make use of data being released, it's important, you see, for {local, small-scale, voluntary, grassroots} groups and individuals to get involved early on. Such parties are arguably likely to benefit the most from empowerment by data, and if they're not part of the discussion early on we might well see a lot of services developed that meet needs imagined by a not-quite-connected but well-meaning tecchie.
So on that note, we want to spread the word about Open Data to those who might normally be left behind. When these groups know what the possibilities are (we can show them successful projects, locally (eg. ILWhack) and worldwide), what is available, and what could and should be available, we empower them to take action that will benefit them. More specifically, people can find out that the English government has released data about such-and-such-of-interest, and politely demand that the Scottish Parliament or local councils do similarly. They can interface early on with developers who are keen to start making, and make sure their real problems get solved (or at least prioritised over potential imaginary ones). They can get involved with things like ILWhack, and have a better idea of what it's all about.
Between 10am and 2pm, we gathered around 35 people in the Informatics Forum and, fuelled by tea, coffee and biscuits, began the discussion.
We started with an hour of ten minute talks, about a variety of topics:
Sally Kerr told us about Open Data at the City of Edinburgh Council; the progress they've made so far and where they hope to go in the future; NESTA's local government Make It Local programme helped Edinburgh Council to move forward with Open Data. She gave a nod to the ILWhack projects that made use of Council data in the week prior.
Alex Stobart of MyDex talked about big, open data, and the challenges this presents to citizens and politicians.
Iain Henderson explained the Standard Label; an easy to read specification for data holders to present to their users how the user data will be used. Like nutritional advice, but for data.. Other ODD events were centred around hacking with it we spoke!
Bob Kerr talked about OpenStreetMap and GeoRSS. I love the obsessive hyperlocal detail in some places, like where the animals live in Edinburgh Zoo. On a serious note, OSM has really empowered local governments and NGOs in developing countries.
Andy Hyde discussed asset mapping for voluntary groups; how ALISS collate dispersed health and wellbeing information into a central, open repository, ripe for manual and programmatic access.
From Lizzie Brotherston we heard about the Post-16 Learner Journey Project; helping the Scottish Government understand the learning landscape. They're holding a hack in April.
Next it was unconference time!
We had a short while of whole-room discussion, before identifying three key areas:
Everybody picked a group and we broke apart for the next couple of hours.
The final part of the day was a return to the main room, and further room-wide discussion of the breakout debates.
The _s__tandardising visualisations _conversation focussed around bringing people into conversations about data using visuals. Someone pointed out that if news readers used Open Data visualisations, the general public would be a lot more interested in Open Data. It's interesting to imagine a future where data visualisations are embedded into the world, into the landscape. To be able to interact with data meaningfully, you've got to know what it is - to recognise it. A standard - think periodic table - would help people to know exactly what you're talking about straight away. This goes beyond graphs and charts, into a world of layered visualisations that allow layered public contributions of interpretations.
Those interested in small scale voluntary organisations discussed data holding and data access issues, including strategies for persuading big organisations to open data (eg. by showing success stories, and proving a certain return on investment). It was agreed that interfacing with developers is important to get things done that organisations really need; but organisations might not know what they need. It was discovered that there's a lot of crossover between groups represented by people who were in this discussion; common needs but gaps in talent.
Finally, with regards to sustainability of data projects it was agreed that strategies are needed for keeping things going beyond short hack events; how to sustain that burst of energy for a longer term usefulness? How to keep track of everything that's going on, and link communities with events (see OpenTechCalendar!). Some kind of coordination body might be useful, or working groups / task forces.
We wrapped up, collected everyone's details for sharing (to ensure sustainability of the outcomes of the day by making sure everyone can keep in touch!) and people began to drift away.
There was an enormous positive energy throughout the day. Discussions were lively and passionate, and we had an excellent mix of people, exactly as hoped for.
NB. It looks like Joined Up Edinburgh will come under the umbrella of the Scotland branch of the Open Knowledge FoundatioN, so http://scot.okfn.org will be a good place to keep an eye on now. And to keep in the loop, join the Joined Up Edinburgh mailing list.
Other people have blogged about this too. Check out these by Leah Lockhart and Dave Meikle (more links welcome).
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The Smart Data Hack #ilwhack
In reply to: http://smartdatahack.org
I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events. At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time.
The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February.
The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects. This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well.
I knocked up a website with two primary functions.
We anticipated about 50 students, and invited them to form teams of up to 5.
In parallel with gathering sponsorship, we came up with five prize categories of equal merit:
We hoped to encourage students to make whatever they wanted, using whatever technologies they wanted, with use of open (or specially provided) data being favourably looked upon.
Skyscanner were the first main sponsor on board, pledging prizes for two categories and some massive datasets that aren't usually public and access to internal APIs, as well as engineers to mentor.
We partnered with ALISS to encourage use of their local health and wellbeing data API; ALISS also sponsored in part a prize category.
The City of Edinburgh Council were on board with some never-before-seen downloadable datasets (still online!), a bunch of pre-approved API keys and refreshingly open minds and supportive attitudes.
CompSoc heroically sponsored an entire prize category and promoted the event to its members.
Open Innovation sponsored a prize category too, and the School of Informatics contributed towards prizes and catering.
Greener Leith proposed a challenge and sponsored a special Mosque Kitchen lunch for everyone after the mid-point presentations on Wednesday.
We were able to hold some terrific practical workshops, thanks to:
We also recruited mentors from UG4 and PhD students, as well as industry professionals, who were consistently present in the hacking space all week or available by Twitter, email and IRC.
We marketed the event in the couple of weeks prior (though we were organising up to the very last minute) through shout outs in lectures, posters around the Informatics department, emails to many university mailing lists and word of mouth.
As a result, we overshot our expected numbers, with well over 100 sign-ups by the start of the week. This was good news and bad news at the time, as we had to scramble around to make sure we had enough sponsorship to feed everyone and whatnot.
By the end of the week, there were around 80 students still actively participating, across about 25 teams. Pretty good! Most of them were Informatics undergraduates as expected, but we had a handful of postgraduates and students from the ECA as well.
And the outcome?
Some amazing projects and really positive feedback from participants and supporters alike.
Naturally only a couple of days passed before somebody noticed that I hadn't sanitized input fields on the website for HTML and CSS input, so they made the projects page spin and play the Harlem Shake before I sorted that out, having been alerted at around midnight. /grumble. Should have seen that coming, of course.
In the end we gave away £1500 in Amazon vouchers, five Nexus 7s and ten Kindle Fires. Skyscanner even upped their sponsorship to three prizes because they were so spoilt for choice.
You can read about the projects, teams and see some demos here.
It was a really exciting and inspiring week for everyone involved. Many of the students are taking their projects further (which is probably the most important outcome) and are in discussions with relevant parties to do so.
You can see photos and see other peoples' write-ups about the event here.
Will we do it again next year? From the feedback gathered, the response has been a resounding yes!
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Scotland Public Notices experiments
Tell Me Scotland publish public notices for things like traffic, planning permissions... And they have a SPARQL endpoint!
I'm hacking around with the ultimate goal of creating an interface that allows people to generate a GeoRSS feed for a particular area. Ally of GreenerLeith suggested this, so that they can use this to feed into their own apps. A stage beyond that is to smoosh the whole lot into a Wordpress plugin, to make it accessible to anyone (who uses WP).
So far I've got the notices on an OpenStreetMap. I haven't had a whole lot of time, but will make more soon.
I'm using the PHP library ARC2 to deal with the linked data.
NB. the TMS endpoint is, at the moment, flaky at best. I think they're working on this.
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Week(s) in review: ILWhack and JoinUpEd
11th to 24th February
I went to the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop; read about it.
I helped organise and run the Innovative Learning Week Smart Data Hack (18th - 22nd), and Edinburgh's version of International Open Data Day (23rd). Both were successful.
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Co-organiser, Open Data Day Edinburgh
Helped organise the Edinburgh branch of International Open Data Day unconference.
OKFN Meetup #4
Which was hosted by the National Library of Scotland. (Information).
I reported on the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin that I'd been to in December, but then had to immediately leave, so I don't have any notes on the rest of the talks..
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Week in review: Networking
7th January - 13th January
I was subject of Paolo's procedural task labelling pilot experiment. It was quite complicated. I don't know if I did a very good job.
I went to TechMeetup and networked like crazy.
I went to a Design Informatics talk about the Internet of Things.
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