Monmouth the Wiki Town

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Sam Leon

The following guest post is a guest post by John Cummings, Wikipedian and founder of the Monmouthpedia project.

Monmouthpedia is the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town. The project aims to cover every single notable place, people, artefacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible. We will use QRpedia codes, a type of bar code a smartphone can read through its camera that takes you to a Wikipedia article in your language. QR codes are extremely useful, as physical signs have no way of displaying the same amount of information and in a potentially huge number of languages. We aim to have 1,000 QRpedia codes in Monmouth by April including in the museums. We are going to have a free wifi network throughout the town and tablets in the museums to lower the cost of access to the information.

So far contributors have created 54 new articles and improved 70 articles, we’ve had 6 articles on the Wikipedia English language main page in “Did you Know?”. Contributors are choosing to learn how to edit Wikipedia and to give their time for the combined knowledge of others, I think this demonstrates how much people value free information and it’s benefits. It’s been amazing to teach people simple tools to give a wider reach to the information they have.

I started Monmouthpedia because I wanted everyone to have free and easily available information about the place in which they live. I grew up in Monmouth, I knew enough about the area to make a start by myself and make a plan that other people could see what I was doing and join in and add to and change. Local groups and the councils (Monmouthshire County Council have recently adopted the Open Government License) have been wonderfully supportive and there is a well connected network of people who are willing to help. Wikimedia UK have been very helpful and have put a lot of time and effort into supporting me. I feel as though for the large part I have been pushing against open doors, I’ve had a steady stream of new people to teach Wikipedia editing to since I started.

The project is still very much a work in progress, we are starting to work with schools and other groups, there is such a wide range of opportunities for so many groups of people to be involved, it feels like we’re trying something new every day.

For more info on the project visit monmouthpedia.org, you can Tweet at it on @Monmouthpedia and to get in touch with John via email it’s john.cummings [at] monmouthpedia.org.

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Linked Open Data and Low Carbon Development

Posted on January 27, 2012 by theodora

The following guest post is by Denise Recheis from reegle, the clean energy info portal.

Offering multiple explanations for a concept increases understanding and using LOD allows both humans and machines to semantically connect related content. This is a huge advantage in our increasingly complex world!

Especially in the field of clean energy, the increasing availability of LOD is really beneficial. To make sense of the often complex factors contributing to climate change and the highly technical solutions thereof, as well as rapid development in national and international policy regarding these factors, access to high quality and timely information is crucial.

The clean energy info portal www.reegle.info and the energy info wiki www.openEI.org see themselves as gateways to a wealth of information regarding renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change issues. They are hosted by REEEP (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership – where I work) and NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) respectively. Both organizations have a strong commitment to the idea of Linked Open Data (LOD) and have been integrating the core principles of LOD into their online portals.

In an effort to increase awareness about the possibilities associated with publishing and consuming LOD, we organized a well-attended workshop in Abu Dhabi in January 2012. Alongside the event, we brought out a publication explaining the basics of LOD, as well as the first steps for any organization considering joining the LOD cloud. “Linked Open Data: The Essentials” (published by Semantic Web Company and REEEP) is available as a downloadable PDF, as well as a booklet which can be ordered.

“Linked Open Data: The Essentials” also highlights some best practice examples, two of them being reegle and OpenEI. Reegle’s country energy profiles are a prime example of mashed up open data. These dossiers present the reader with statistics, maps, general facts and policy and regulatory details in a pleasant design. The information is provided by LOD providers such as DBpedia (Wikipedia), the UN and the World Bank, OpenEI and other highly trusted sources. Reegle has also developed an extensive thesaurus covering clean energy and climate compatible development with full liked data capabilities, which is available for free to re-use as a widget or word press plugin, and which is currently used as the basis for a brand-new API. Of course reegle provides all its datasets as Linked Open Data free for re-use and provides datasets in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format and via a SPARQL endpoint on our data portal.

OpenEI (Open Energy Information) has always seen sharing as one of its key missions. The data is available in RESTful API, RDF and SPARQL, for integration into external websites. But even when browsing the site, users benefit from a variety of LOD sources which enhance and increase the information presented. For example, several definitions offered in the glossary are collected from different LOD sources and OpenEI’s country pages feature information from a variety of sources, including reegle’s country energy profiles. This is easily possible when organizations rely on LOD, because when several websites describe the same things they can all be connected and give users a more rounded picture of sometimes difficult subjects.

Our expected end-users include the educational sector, helping students across the world study laws and regulation, efficient engineering, and the latest ideas in clean energy from many different authoritative sources in a single gateway. Specialists and project developers can quickly gather valuable information about specific regions and areas focusing on energy-relevant issues.

Integrating the principles of LOD has had a pleasant side-effect which has been highlighted in the recent workshop in Abu Dhabi: sharing data is often a starting point for fruitful collaborations between organizations with a similar agenda. Sharing data very often also means sharing the work burden. Each organization can then focus on their specific areas of expertise, while freeing up resources from areas that can be taken over by other organizations. Sharing the results of such targeted efforts generates high-quality content, and makes it available to all stakeholders in renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate adaptation/mitigation.

We are committed to increasing the share of information available as LOD, and will continue to actively support other organizations thinking of joining the LOD cloud.

Posted in External, Guest post, Open Data | Leave a comment

Wikipedians in Residence: Two Years of Open Culture

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Sam Leon

The following guest post is by Lori Byrd Phillips 2012 US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. She was the second person to become a Wikipedian in Residence, and has served in that role at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis for the past year and a half, where she is now also part time staff. It is cross-posted from openglam.org.

Wikipedians in Residence from left to right: Liam Wyatt, British Museum; Lori Phillips, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis; Benoît Evellin, Wikimédien en résidence au Château de Versailles; Sarah Stierch, The Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Andrew Lih (cc-by-sa 3.0).

It was just under two years ago when Liam Wyatt proposed a concept that seemed so bold, it required the British Museum to run a risk assessment before they’d agree to it. Liam suggested that he serve as the “Wikipedian in Residence,” a role that would allow him to put into practice the idea that cultural institutions should share their knowledge with Wikipedia. Thankfully, the British Museum agreed. That basic premise has turned into a global movement known as GLAM-WIKI (Galleries,

Libraries, Archives, and Museums). Today, the GLAM-WIKI community is made up of Wikimedians from around the world who work to establish models and best practices that help cultural institutions share their resources with Wikimedia.

Prior to Liam’s residency in June 2010, cultural institutions had donated images to Wikimedia Commons, but there had not yet been an institution that committed to establishing a relationship with the Wikimedia community. The concept of building a mutually beneficial cooperation is at the heart of the Wikipedian in Residence scheme. The main role of a resident is to serve as a liaison between the museum and Wikipedia. Projects still include image donations, but now more often focus on staff workshops, outreach events (such as “Backstage Passes”) to connect with local Wikipedians, and on-site events (such as “Edit-a-Thons”) that help get cultural content out of the filing cabinets and into Wikipedia.

Following the British Museum, the Wikipedian in Residence trend began to spread. My residency at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis began in August 2010, followed in early 2011 with the Château de Versailles, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and the Museu Picasso. By May 2011, two more major institutions joined in: the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In July 2011, Daniel Mietchen became the Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science. Working with the Open Knowledge Foundation, this was the first residency to adapt the GLAM model to open science — an exciting advancement of the Wikipedian in Residence concept! Even more residencies began in late 2011, including the Israel Museum, and many are in the works for 2012 and beyond.

I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the Wikipedian in Residence concept as it has been implemented in different institutions. Each residency has shown its own strength. At the Derby Museum, Roger Bamkin followed through on an idea to improve the multilingual capabilities of QR codes in exhibits. What resulted was QRpedia, a QR code-generating website that detects the language of the user’s phone and links to the Wikipedia article in that language. QRpedia has now been implemented in museums in the US and Europe and has been nominated for a Smart UK award.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks, the Wikipedian in Residence at the NARA, has broken new ground in facilitating the digitization and transcription of primary source materials through Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons. NARA’s cooperation with Wikipedia has been strongly incorporated into their broad strategy of increasing digital accessibility to their holdings and has proven to be a point of pride for the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero.

The concept of the Wikipedian in Residence has come a long way since the British Museum’s big gamble. Now, those who have served as Wikipedians in Residence travel the world presenting projects to increasingly enthusiastic cultural professionals. In April, four residents will come together from three countries to present at the American Association of Museums, the largest and most significant museum conference in the US. I can’t wait to see what incredible residencies and cooperations are around the next corner.

For additional information about Wikipedians in Residence, see the information page on GLAM Outreach or the GLAM Infographic.

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Open Legislative Data Conference, Paris, July 6th-7th

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Sam Leon

The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French organisation that promotes open data.

As part of  The Law Factory  project we are running an international conference for hacktivists and academics working on parliamentary monitoring and legislative studies. The conference will take place on the the 6th and 7th of July in Paris.

The conference will be held in English to ensure maximum participation from communities all over the world. At the event, a team from the project we have been working on with SciencesPo will unveil the first prototype of our legislative evolution monitoring tool.

Participants are welcome to give a 15 minute presentation or 5 minute lightning talk. Submissions should be made online before 1st April.

More details online on The Law Factory’s website!

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Panton Fellowships – apply now!

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Laura Newman

The Open Knowledge Foundation are delighted to announce the launch of the Panton Fellowships!

Funded by Open Society Foundations, Panton Fellowships will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science.

Further Details

We firmly believe that “open data means better science”. Panton Fellowships have been created in order to support scientists – particularly graduate students and early-stage career scientists – to explore this idea, and to tackle those barriers which currently prevent science data from being made open.

Dr Cameron Neylon, of the Panton Fellowships Advisory Board, commented on the ‘real potential’ of the Fellowships to influence practice surrounding open data in the scientific community. ‘Panton Fellowships will allow those who are still deeply involved in research to think closely about the policy and technical issues surrounding open data’, observed Dr Neylon. By allowing scientists the scope both to explore the ‘big picture’ – gathering evidence to promote discussion throughout the community – and also to work on specific technical solutions to individual problems, the Panton Fellowship scheme has the potential to make a real impact upon the practice of open data in science.

Panton Fellows will have the freedom to undertake a range of activities, and prospective applicants are encouraged to formulate their own work plan. As Fellows will continue to be employed and/or study at their current institution, activities undertaken for the Panton Fellowship should ideally complement and enhance their existing work.

Fellowships will be held for one year, and will have a value of £8k p.a. For more details and information on how to apply, please visit http://pantonprinciples.org/panton-fellowships/.

Posted in News, Open Science, WG Open Data in Science | Leave a comment

A Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Sam Leon

The following is a post by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator for The Public Domain Review and other Open Knowledge Foundation projects. It is cross-posted from the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Working Group Blog.

At The Public Domain Review we’re always scouring the internet for public domain gems. It’s simply incredible how much of our shared cultural heritage is now available for free online. But with so much content out there and with so many different digital collections to choose from it can often be difficult to know where to start looking for interesting and curious works. On top of this, it can often be difficult to understand what you’re allowed to do with a given work and what the license that is applied to it actually means.

It was because of these difficulties that we decided to write a Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. In the guide you’ll find information on how to collect leads, an overview of the main online public domain collections (e.g. Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive & Wikisource) as well as some basic legal information about licensing and the public domain.

Happy exploring! If you come across something that you think could be featured on The Public Domain Review give me a shout at sam.leon [at] publicdomainreview [dot] org.

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Dreams of a Unified Text

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Rufus Pollock

The following is a blog post by Rufus Pollock co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I have a dream, one which I’ve had for a while.

In this dream I’m able to explore, seamlessly, online, every text ever written. With the click of a button I can go from Pynchon to Proust, from Musil to Machiavelli, from Homer to Hugo.

And in this dream not only can I read, but I myself am able to contribute, to write upon these texts — to annotate, to anthologize, to interlink, to translate, to borrow — and to share what I do with others.

I can see what others have shared, what notes they have added, what selections they have made. I can see the interweaving of these texts created by borrowing, by inspiration, by reference, all made concrete by the insight and efforts of myself and others and their ability to layer their insights freely upon those original texts — just as those writers built upon the works that had gone before them.

And while each text still can stand still stand alone — in all its greatness or mediocrity — we have something new, a single unified corpus woven together out of this multitude of separate text — e pluribus unum.

A whole that is a concrete instantiation in an immaterial realm of the cultural achievement of mankind as expressed in the written word.

Dream Meets Reality

Why is this dream not yet a reality? After all don’t we have the tools and technology.

One answer is legal, one answer is technological, and one answer is social. The legal issue is copyright, at least in its current exclusive rights form 1. Copyright means this vision is only really possible for works in the public domain, works therefore that are, in most countries, a hundred years or more old. This isn’t necessarily that big a problem, at least for texts: the public domain though old is already incredibly rich and so we therefore already have more than enough material to be getting on with.

On the technology front we have the cost of digitization, processing and storage. Digitization costs are significant. This has meant either that digitization activities have either been limited or the material created has not been released openly (for example, the material produced by Google’s efforts with its Books project, which is probably largest effort to date, is not open). That said, efforts like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive have already made available tens of thousands of texts, and there are now several digitization projects underway that will result in even larger amounts of material freely and openly available.

Then third we have the social issue, or rather it a question of how technology can support the social activities required for this dream of a unified text to become real. Specifically, to realize our dream we need to bring material — texts and the writing upon them — together in a single coherent experience. Yet the centralization (and ownership) that implies may be a significant obstacle to mass participation.2 Similarly, we need it to be possible for anyone with ‘net access to be able to contribute to the weaving of the unified inter-text but, at the same time, to be able to select which contributions we want to see (if we are not to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of material, much of it possibly of dubious quality).

Conclusion

We have then within our grasp, the realization of th dream of a unified text. Combining of text of technology we can create something truly extraordinary.

Interested in making this happen, come join us at the Textus Project.

  1. Let me be clear, I’m not saying that copyright is per se is bad or that everything should be ‘free’. Time, energy and capital are required to create books, music and films and that expenditure often needs to be recompensed. However, the current system of copyright is by no means the best way to achieve this. This is not something I wish to explore in detail here. More can be found on my personal website and in papers such as Forever Minus a Day: Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright ↩

  2. This tension between distributed collaboration and centralizing tendencies of coordination and scale is a common theme in many ‘net projects. ↩

Posted in Ideas, Musings, Open Knowledge, Public Domain | Leave a comment

Open Economics Hack Day Saturday January 28th 2012

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Velichka Dimitrova

This post is by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator for the Economics Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

On Saturday 28th January we’re getting together for an Open Economics Hackday where we’ll be be wrangling data and building apps related to economics — all are welcome!

As with all hackdays, exactly what gets work on gets decided on the day (you can add suggestions to the etherpad). However, one particular idea, which we could become a submission to Apps4Italy, is set out below.

One Idea for What We’ll Work On: ProgressVote

One of the most fundamental questions in economic research is: how do we measure social progress? Policy makers have come up with alternative measures accounting for environmental impacts, inequality, happiness and other indicators of human development.

However, the multiplicity of factors has caused another problem – how do we decide on the importance of each individual factor in a composite index? They could be either equally important (such as in the HDI) or they could be given different weights.

In our last project YourTopia – which was one of the winners of last year’s World Bank Apps4Development Prize – we offered one possible solution by letting you decide on which dimensions and aspects of economic development to prioritize.

However there are limitations to such an approach: faced with a myriad of technical indicators people are often overwhelmed by the complexity: Does life expectancy at birth matter more than the inflation rate or the M2 money supply? And what does M2 money supply even mean?

In ProgressVote, we’d like to improve on YourTopia in a variety of ways:

First, by combining proxy voting with the crowd-based Yourtopia approach: Instead of voting for indicators, people vote for expert statements that interpret the dashboard of variables. By doing so, it is hoped to strike a balance between expert judgements and the interpretation of the general public: Experts may be more able to interpret technical data, but in the end it is the citizens who decide which expert statement to endorse.

Second, we’d like to add support time series — so you can see how progress (or lack of it) has evolved over time — as well as better geo support — for example, so it is possible to look at regions as well as countries have performed (consider Italy for instance).

Interested? Then come join us on Saturday 28th January!

Posted in Events, Hackday / Code Sprint, Open Data, WG Economics, Working Groups | Leave a comment

Civil Society and Spending Data: Who is mapping the money?

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Lucy Chambers

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on the OpenSpending project at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

We’re excited to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the Open Society Foundations, OKFN’s activities around financial transparency will expand to include a second pillar: next to the OpenSpending platform, we have just started a 6 month project to map the technology needs of Civil Society Organisations in relation to public spending and budget information.

We’re going to be working on…

  • Identifying CSOs around the world who are interested in working with spending data – building on the existing network of contacts from the OpenSpending.org project.

  • Connecting these CSOs with each other, with open data communities and with other key stakeholders to exchange knowledge, experiences and best practices in relation to spending data

  • Establishing how CSOs currently work with spending data, how they would like to use it, and what they would like to achieve – including:

  1. what existing tools are being used
  2. what current technical needs are unmet
  3. what would be required to meet these needs and how feasible is it to tackle them
  • Creating a registry of spending datasets, from official and unofficial sources in theDataHub.org
  • A Spending Data Manual – A wiki-like, community driven manual on acquiring, working with, publishing and archiving spending data, based on input and exchanges with CSOs we talk to.This will augment and reference existing publications from numerous organisations as well as channelling the results of our research into two areas:
    • A section to help CSO’s clarify their demands towards governments: e.g. guidance on open licensing and structured data formats, applicable for spending data.
    • A section focused on best practice for CSOs when using and reusing spending data: for example collaborative processes such as data-sharing.  

  • Running Spending Analysis Sessions with CSOs, both in person and virtually. We’re interested in learning from about what data people are trying to acquire / having difficulty in doing so, how they plan to use the data to further their mission and learning what barriers, legal, technical and otherwise could be removed to make their jobs easier.

  • Getting Spending Data from numerous countries loaded into OpenSpending.org – with the support of CSOs, OKFN developers, and volunteers from the open data community. We we’re interested in are using the OpenSpending.org tools, and collect input from them on how these could be improved to meet their needs.

Vision: Improved Spending Data Literacy, Sharing and Re-use amongst CSOs around the world

We are very keen to help more groups and individuals around the world to use and work with spending data more effectively to do the things they care about – whether this is investigative journalism, evidence based policy-making, political campaigning, budgeting or creating new useful applications and services.

In particular, we would like to document and spread best practices in the legal and technical aspects of reusing public information, and enabling re-use and better collaboration around this material.

Ultimately we would like to:

  • Build stronger, broader communities of groups and individuals who work together to acquire, use, and openly share spending data
  • Increase ‘literacy’ around spending data – enabling more CSOs to understand and work with large and complex spending datasets to help them to pursue their objectives
  • Encourage more CSOs to publish datasets which they acquire, use or create in machine readable formats, under open licenses, to avoid duplication of effort and enable CSOs to build on each others’ work, to harness external expertise more effectively and to facilitate stronger collaboration between different organisations who are interested in spending information

How can I get involved?

  • Join the Working Group on Spending Data. The working group will bring together data experts and CSOs who will help to weave a community of best practice around spending data, collect and provide feedback on material for the manual and help to develop the network of those collaborating around and sharing spending data. More details about the working group can be found on this wiki page.

  • Write for the Spending Data Blog – we’re interested in posts by and about CSOs who work with spending data, observations on the current status quo on releasing data in your area. Anything from short comment pieces to full proposals for what could be done, legal, technical or otherwise, to improve the situation in the sphere where you work. Contact details as above.

If you would like to get started, or know of organisations we should extend the invitation to: drop us an email via the mailing list or contact me directly via info [at] openspending.org.

Posted in Open Spending | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Public Domain Review Posters

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Sam Leon

The following guest post is by Adam Green, editor of The Public Domain Review.

It’s been a year since the launch of The Public Domain Review and we’ve now featured over 30 articles from prominent artists and scholars and displayed hundreds of curious, freely downloadable public domain delights. We’ve had contributions from the historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsely, the writer Andrew McConnel Stott, and, lined up for later this month, a piece from the novelist and 2011 Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes.

It was always our mission to demonstrate the value of the public domain to as large an audience as possible, and in 2012 we want even more people to enjoy what The Public Domain Review has to offer, and join in the process of sourcing and publishing interesting public domain material for the world to enjoy.

So, in celebration of our first birthday, and to help spread the good word we’ve created a set of Public Domain Review posters that are available in both US letter and A4. Please do post these up wherever you think there might be interest and do let us know where you’ve put them up, so we can track the interest they generate. Posters have already started to go up in libraries, departments and student unions around the University of London, but we want to see them up in universities and libraries in many other cities for the public domain is of value to society the world over!

Download a Public Domain Review poster

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