Week in review: Pancakes & Project management
19th November - 25th November
I read two papers about ontology development methodologies.
I read two articles by Bennett Haselton about decentralized social networking, which happened to pretty much sum up and beautifully articulate everything about that that has been floating in my subconscious for a couple of weeks. I saw links to them in the latest Circumventor email, which I've been subscribed to since High School for bypassing the internal blacklist, and remain subscribed to because the jokes at the end are always laugh-out-loud funny.
I attended an all day course entitled 'practical project management for research students'.
- It was attended by a diverse bunch of seemingly really lovely people.
- The two ladies running it, from the IT Project Management department in the University, were lovely too.
- The stuff covered was all obvious, common sense stuff (and pleasantly the organisers didn't try to claim otherwise) - but sometimes it's helpful to have it all written down and waved in your face. And structured, in particular. Made me actually focus on thinking about organising my project. The main thing I hadn't much considered, even subconsciously, was formally identifying stakeholders for a project and their relative interest/power in the project.
- There are a bunch of tools at projects.ed.ac.uk to aid in project management.
- It prompted me to do these week-in-review posts, as I realised I haven't been recording properly everything I've been doing (an overview of my time goes on my calendar, but no detail).
- The sandwiches weren't great, but fortunately when I got back to the Forum there were massive slabs of chocolate cake left over from some event. I love the Forum.
I booked a place at the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin, and necessary flights.
- Despite the short notice, it worked out logistically because I need to be in London on the 7th anyway, so I can simply go to London on the 4th, fly to Berlin from there for the 5th and 6th, and back to London for the 7th.
- I'm particularly looking forward to "Open Statecraft: Openness as a Means (not an End)" by Philipp Müller, "The Open Data Movement vs. Business Models - is this a Contradiction?" by Dr. Peter A. Hecker, "Linked Open Data @ W3C-Vocabularies, Working Groups, Usage Scenarios" by Prof. Felix Sasaki, "The potential of Open Data for improving urban sustainability" by Dr. Marianne Linde and "Towards Trustworthiness: Establishing Transparency with Open Information Flows" by Dr. Edzard Höfig.
- I'm also looking forward being in Berlin again, even if it is just for one evening, and I'll probably be too exhausted to appreciate it.
Ontologies with a View took place at a different place and time to usual.
I started preparing for presenting at Digital Methods as a Mainstream Methodology in London in a couple of weeks.
- I scribbled lots of notes.
- I skimmed a few papers by organisers/speakers but didn't read any in detail yet. Mostly stuff about analysing data gathered from comments, tweets etc.
- There will be more about both of those things next week, I imagine.
I made a plan for the two weeks following the 20th.
- It mostly consists of finishing my Digital Methods preparation. I have a lot of non-PhD related things to do as well, plus lots of travelling. Also graduation from my MSc, and subsequent parental visitation will get in the way.
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