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Update from the Open Science Working Group

December 13, 2011 in Open Science, WG Open Data in Science

This week’s Working Group update comes from our Open Science group – thanks to Jenny Molloy for the post and for her great work coordinating the group! This follows on the recent updates from the Archaeology and EU Data groups – and next week we’ll have another…

The open data in science working group have had a busy year, with much activity to come in 2012 as open data in science continues to feature on the agendas of governments, funders and scientific organisations.

SWAT4LS Hackathon

In conjunction with the Semantic Web for the Life Sciences conference and the JISC funded project DevCSI, the working group ran a hackathon on 6-7 December looking at applications for the semantic web in the life sciences, with a focus from OKF participants on generating open research reports, single access points to the open literature on individual diseases, with semantic functionality to allow complex searches and the ability to append additional information such as lay summaries, translations and more. You can see the background to ORRs here and watch a introductory video. The outcomes of the hackathon are documented on the event wiki, including the ORR effort to consolidate different literature sources and the work of other teams on exciting applications to view disease outbreak locations and visualise the interaction of drugs and genes, among others.

Peter Murray-Rust at the OSS

Open Science Summit

Several members of the working group attended the Open Science Summit in Mountain View, CA either in person or virtually via live streaming (see blog and OSS 2011 video archive). It was a great opportunity to find out what a wide range of people and orgaisations are up to across the field of open science and forge links with other communities. These will be strengthened by the forthcoming launch of the Open Science Alliance network from the team behind the Open Science Summit which will enable groups from across the broad discipline of open science to update and communicate with each other e.g. open data advocates and bio-hackers.

Panton Fellowships

We are pleased to announce that the OKF has been successsful in obtaining OSI funding for two fellowships in the field of open data in science. More details to follow but needless to say this is a very exciting achievement! Thank you to Jonathan Gray and Peter Murray Rust for making this happen.

Journal coverage

PLoS Biology last week published a profile of the working group in their Community Pages entitled ‘The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science‘. We hope to continue to raise the profile of the working group and projects such as the Panton Principles within the wider scientific community during 2012. Thanks to Grahan Steel and the team at BioMedCentral thousands of people have already seen a web banner advertising the Panton Principles.

Reports

The working group and subsets of it have responded to numerous consultations on scientific communication and open data in science in the last few months, including the Royal Society Science as a Public Enterprise (SAPE) consultation (response), The European Commission Information Hearing on Scientific Information in the Digital Age (blog from working group members Diane Cabell and Cameron Neylon) and the subsequent Consultation (response from OKFN Deutschland).

Open Science Dev

Following a pre-OKCon workshop on Open Science and Social Science, the open-science-dev mailing list was set up to encourage more projects developing tools and applications for open data in science. One outcome of the workshop was the data transcription tool Data Digitiser (demo), for which development is coninuing. More recently Rufus Pollock and others have begun porting BOSSA, the open-source software framework for distributed thinking (i.e. crowd sourcing volunteers to perform tasks that use human cognition and problem solving via the Internet), to python – creating pyBOSSA. If you’d like to contirbute to these projects or have a suggestion for an open science development project please sign up to the mailing list.

SWAT4LS Hackathon

Local groups

The open science group in Stockholm is developing well and fledgling groups are soon to begin in Oxford, New York and Washington DC. Open Science advocates from MIT, Kentucky, India and Brazil have all been in touch with the working group and we’d love to start building more local open science communities. You can check out the current list of groups here.

Plans for 2012

Projects already in the pipeline for 2012 include:

Generating publicity material and increasing the profile of the Panton Principles
Generating adaptable presentations and resource packs for open data talks (at academic conferences, within institutions etc)
Investigating the use of CC-BY-NC licenses or other non-commercial clauses
Developing Open Research Reports (including software development, liaison with the patient community, funders and more)
Increase the number of local open science groups and generate guidance on running a local group.

We’d love to hear your ideas for building communities, tools, apps and datasets for open data in science via the open-science mailing list or the OKFN Ideas Incubator.

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by Theodora Middleton

Public Domain Day: January 1st 2012

December 13, 2011 in COMMUNIA, Events, External, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, WG Public Domain

The following guest post is by Juan Carlos de Martin, from the the Politecnico of Torino, Italy, one of the organisers of the annual Public Domain Day of which the OKF is a proud supporter.

Every January a growing number of people throughout the world gather to celebrate the new year. But not for the usual reasons. They meet because every January 1st the works of authors who died decades before – typically, seventy years before – enter the public domain, that is, their copyright protection expires.

Why a celebration for such an apparently technical reason? Because as the new year starts, the works of those selected authors have finally reached the state to which all culture is headed since the earliest times. I am talking of the state that automatically allows any human being to sing, play, translate, summarize, adapt what other human beings have thought before them. Wish to produce a big print edition of your favorite poetry? Now you can. Fancy translating into Sicilian dialect a play you love? Now you can. Possessed by the desire to illustrate, manga style, the ideas of your preferred political scientist? Now you can. Longing to publish a more correct version of a score riddled with typos that the publisher never cared to correct? Now you can.

In principle, all the above activities are perfectly possible even before the expiration of copyright. On condition, however, that one asks for permission the copyright owner (assuming that they can be located: let’s ignore here the huge problem of the so-called “orphan works”) and pays whatever is requested. Noting that very often the copyright owner is not the author (or his/her descendants), but a for-profit publishing house.

Consequently, many activities do not take place because either the copyright owner does not like the idea (no manga, for instance), or because the wannabe new author cannot afford to pay what is requested by the copyright owner.

Such restrictions, introduced, in their modern form, about three centuries ago to provide – for the common good – incentives to authors, now last an unprecedented seventy years (in Europe and in many other countries) after the death of the authors.

A shockingly long time, which an increasing number of scholars, NGO’s and citizens are asking to reduce. To know more about the current debate on copyright reform and the role of the public domain, see for instance the Public Domain Manifesto and the brand new, Brussels-based COMMUNIA association for the digital public domain, or check out the OKF’s Working Group on the Public Domain.

But as we work towards copyright reform, every January people who care about the public domain get together and welcome the works of a new batch of authors. In recent years, public domain day celebrations have taken place in cities throughout the world, from Zurich to Warsaw, from Torino to Haifa, from Rome to Berlin. The volunteer-staffed website http://publicdomainday.org provides an information hub for such celebrations.

The celebrations typically take place in libraries, universities or cafés. People read – or sometimes perform – the work of the new authors. It is often a moving experience, as great men and women from the time of our grand (and great-grand) fathers come back to life under our affectionate gaze.

During the month of January 2012 people will gather again. Celebrations have already been announced in, among other places, Warsaw, Zurich, Torino and Rome. We hope that others will follow the example. Welcoming the works of some of our great writers, musicians, painters, poets, journalists, scholars is a most gratifying way to start the new year and also a great way to enhance the knowledge of our common cultural roots.

If you’re interested in organising an event in your area, you can join the pd-discuss list.

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by Theodora Middleton

Corruption-busting data releases in Croatia

December 2, 2011 in Open Data, Releases, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF’s blog editor.

Government transparency has been making the headlines over in Croatia, thanks to the amazing work of Marko Rakar, Croatia’s leading transparency expert. He has secured the release of all the public procurement data for government spending, dating back to July 1st 2009 in a fully searchable format. The database includes about 58,000 individual contracts totally 80 billion Croatian kuna (or about $15-$16 billion) covering more than 13,000 companies, which allows you to see which agency ordered what goods and services, and who received each contract. Marko Rakar has made a name for himself in Croatia and internationally for his corruption-busting data releases, including his release of the country’s fraud-ridden voter files, and the release of a database of war veterans that also demonstrated massive fraud – for which he was arrested (although charges were later dropped).

As reported on the TechPresident website:

A search by contractors shows their overall procurement record (how many contracts, what type of contract, what amount of money is involved and to whom was sold goods and services). The database, which is modeled on FedSpending.gov but in some ways more detailed, also allows a user to see how dependent a company is on government contracts.

This information was theoretically already available on official government websites, but it was essentially useless. Customer names and supplier names aren’t shown on the same page; you can’t search by other criteria; and the data only goes back two months, after which it is removed. Rakar worked with colleagues to collect all the data going back 27 months, and then machine-processed and indexed them. So far, in its first two days, the site has had 56,000 unique visits (for a nation of two million internet users).

The new release is already bearing fruit, as Marko reported to TechPresident:

We have found a number of companies which appear to be founded only to service a single government contract. Journalists have already found a number of companies which have a number of multimillion contracts and are at the same time huge donors to the ruling party. We have found a horse farm which bid on and won a contract to lay underground power cable, we have found a company which is related to the Speaker of the House which reports unusually high profit rates (50% and above) worth millions (both in Croatian and US currency) and which primarily deals with advertising in public spaces (schools, hospitals and similar). We have found one company which belonged to the Minister of Interior which also received multimillion security related contracts with the government (while he is still in the office).

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by Theodora Middleton

Wanted – Open Data practitioners to work with Charities for an ‘Open data-day’

November 30, 2011 in Events, External, Open Data, WG Development, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is by Ed Anderton from the Nominet Trust, who provide support to organisations to increase access to the internet, online safety and education.

The Nominet Trust is providing funding for a set of 10 ‘data-days’ with a range of UK Charities – more details of our offer to Charities can be found here. We’re looking for Open Data experts to match with these Charities: ideally we’re after a combination of experience of building open data applications and working with civil society organisations. So far we’ve had expressions of interest from Charities in the South-West, West Midlands, North-West, East of England and the South-East, so it would be great to find Open Data experts based in different parts of the country. Tim Davies from Practical Participation has kindly put together some helpful guidance for Charities (see below) on how they might best use an ‘open data-day’: this is also intended to give you a good idea of what the role of the open data consultant may involve.

I am managing the project and will be providing support throughout, including setting objectives, drawing up contracts and documenting what happens on each of the 10 days.

If you are interested please drop me an email or find me on Twitter – @ejanderton

Planning an Open Data Exploration Day

How can open data make a difference to the charity sector?

An open data day offers a quick-fire way to find out, and is designed to identify how charities can be both publishers and users of open data, giving you the skills to understand, work with and make the most of open data.

The dataset route:

You identify a dataset created or owned by your organisation that you want to do more with. This could be details of members of your networks; data from a survey you conduct; performance statistics; a research dataset you have put together; or any other dataset used in your day-to-day work.
You work with the ‘open data day’ consultant to identify the potential value of publishing this as open data; to practical steps involved; and the ways it could be used. For some datasets (where there are no personal data or rights issues to deal with), it might be possible to publish them right away, either for a limited pilot just on the day itself, or as a new open data release that you will continue to work with. (For example, the consultant could work with you to release data that was previously published as tables in a written report that were not easy to re-use.)
You work to create some rapid prototypes based on this data, demonstrating the potential of its open release.This could involve the consultant providing hands-on training to a small team of staff in using freely available open data tools like Google Refine and Fusion Tables (for creating maps and bubble charts), or Tableau (for in depth data visualisation). Alternatively, you could challenge your consultant to spend a few hours working on a rapid prototype using more advanced computer programming approaches to present back to you an example of open data possibilities.
At the end of the day you present the results to your colleagues. You might have a new sustainable product, or just a prototype. The learning from the day will be captured in a report which provides a draft roadmap for future explorations of open data in the organisation, and giving a case study of the potential of open data publishing.

The issue route

You identify an issue you are working on where open data from government or civil society could be useful to your work.
The open data day consultant works with you to locate open data sources that relate to this issue.
You work together to create some rapid prototypes showing how this data can be accessed, explored and analysed using open data tools.
You explore ways to build these sources of open data into your day-to-day work and identify a draft strategy for making more use of open data sources.

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by Theodora Middleton

International Open Data Hackathon, Dec 3rd. It’s coming together.

November 30, 2011 in Events, External, Open Government Data, Open Spending, Sprint / Hackday, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca.

So a number of things have started to really come together for this Saturday Dec 3rd. I’ve noticed a number of new cities being tweeted about (hello Kuala Lumpur & Oakland!) and others adding themselves to the wiki. Indeed, we seem to be above 40 cities. It is hard to know how many people will be showing up in each given city, but in Vancouver I know that we already over 20 registered, while in Ottawa they are well above 40. If other cities have similar numbers it’s a great testament to the size of the community out there interested in playing with open government data.

A few thoughts to share with people as we get ready for the big day.

1. Leverage existing projects.

I’ve mentioned a few times that there are some great existing projects out there that can be easily leveraged.

In that vein I’ve noticed the good people at the Open Knowledge Foundation, who are behind OpenSpending (the project that powers WherDoesMyMoneyGo.org) have not only made their software easier to use but have put up some helpful instructions for creating your own instance up on the wiki. One hope I have for Saturday is that a number of different places might be able to visualize local budgets in much easier to understand ways. OpenSpending has the potential of being an enormously helpful tool for communities trying to understand their budget – hopefully we can provide some great examples and feedback for its creators.

In addition, the folks at MySociety have provided some helpful advice on the wiki for those interested in spinning up a version of MapIt for their country.

2. Get Data Now, Not on Saturday!

Here in Vancouver, my friend Luke C. asked if we could get bicycle accident data for the city or province as he wanted to play around with it and maybe visualize it on December 3rd. It just so happened I had a contact at the Insurance Company of British Columbia (ICBC) which insures every vehicle in the province. I reached out and, after going through their request process, now have the data set to share with Luke.

The key piece here: now is the time to check and see if data you are interested in is available, investigate what is out there, and request it from various stakeholders if it is not.

3. Share Your Code, Share your Data

Indeed, one advantage of having the BC bicycle accident data early is that I can start sharing it with people immediately. I’ve already uploaded the data set (all 6400 lines) onto BuzzData’s site so others can download it, clone it, and share their own work on it. That way, even if Luke and I get separated, he’s still got something to hack on!

So please do let people know where they can find data you are hacking on, as well as project you’re hacking on. The Open Data Day Projects 2011 wiki page currently sits empty (as should be expected). But take a swing by the page 2010 project page, notice how it is quite full… I’d love to see us replicate this success. I’m hoping people link to not just their projects, but also Github repos, scraperwiki creations, DataHub datasets or BuzzData accounts and other places.

If you have a project and you think people in open data day hackathons in other cities might be interested, put it in the project page and tweet about it using the #odhd hashtag. You may discover there are people out there who feel as passionately about your project as you do!

4. Let’s Get Connected

Speaking of sharing, my friend Edward O-C, who is organizing the hackathon in Ottawa, did a great job last year setting up some infrastructure so people from different hackathons could video conference with one another. This year I think we’ll try using Google hangouts on google+. However, there is a non-trivial risk that this will not scale super well.

So…

Edward also suggested (brilliantly) that people create YouTube videos of whatever they create during the hackathon or in the days and weeks that follow. Please post those links to the Open Data Day Projects 2011 wiki page as well. There were a few projects last year that had youtube videos and they were very helpful, particularly when a project isn’t quite ready for prime time. It gives us a taste of what will be available. It also becomes something we can point people to.

5. Have Fun, Do What Is Interesting

Remember, Open Data Day is about meeting people, learning about open data, and working on something that you feel passionate about. This is all very decentralized and informal – no one is going to come and save your hackathon… it is up to you! So make sure you find something you think is worth caring about and work on it. Share your idea, and your passion, with others, that’s what makes this fun.

Can’t wait to hear what people are up to. Please feel free to email or tweet at me what you’re working on. I’d love to hear about it and blog about them.

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by Theodora Middleton

Open Knowledge Definition translated into Telugu (తెలుగు)

November 29, 2011 in Open Definition, Open Knowledge Definition

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor.

We are pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Definition has now been translated into Telugu (తెలుగు), thanks to the hard work of Sridhar Gutam. You can find this at:

http://opendefinition.org/okd/telugu/

The definition has now been translated into 27 languages. If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or on info at okfn dot org.

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by Theodora Middleton

Data & Journalism events in Vienna

November 29, 2011 in Data Journalism, Events, WG EU Open Data

The following guest post is by Markus ‘fin’ Hametner, a coder and organizer with a main interest in journalism. He works on an ambitious web journalism project and co-organizes the collide:vienna event series.

A few days ago, I realized that Vienna’s normally-quiet landscape of events in the open data and journalism spaces will be quite active in the next couple of months.

My main interest in open data comes from a Data/Computational Journalism view point, since this emerging form of reporting may provide some of the most potent use cases for open data, but I am sure there are many other connections between these fields to warrant your interest.

If you’d like to learn more about computational journalism, Jonathan Stray maintains a reading list on that topic. Wikipedia also has a good introduction to its subset, data driven journalism.

Anyways, back to Vienna. These are the events I recommend checking out:

December 2 – Gov2.0 Camp

This event has the goal of creating an “open space for dialogue between the administration and the internet community” to talk about Open Government, Open Data and E-Participation. Over 130 People have signed up already and it promises to be as interesting as last year’s event.

Photo by eSociety - last year's timetable

December 3 – Open Data Hackathon

This is the local chapter of the International Open Data Hackathon – Developers, Statisticians, Journalists, Designers and Citizens working together to create interesting Apps, Visualizations or Products basted on open data.

The organizers are planning another motivating feature: Teleconferences with other events participating in the international hackathon.

January 12 – Collide:Vienna 2 on Data Journalism

Photo by The Hub Vienna

The local Hackers&Journalists meetup (which I co-organize and is heavily inspired by Hacks/Hackers) had its first meetup in early November, bringing together about 40 people from both sides of the aisle.

For the second event, we are planning a main talk on data journalism, but all our events also have an open mic where all participants are encouraged to talk about their own projects for five minutes.

With a little luck, one of these sounds interesting to you and I’ll see you around in Vienna!

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by Theodora Middleton

European Commission to adopt Open Data Strategy

November 24, 2011 in News, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKFN Blog Editor.

News in from the European Commission, which has announced that they will be adopting a new Open Data Strategy from the 29th November. The aims of the strategy are to increase government transparency, and hopefully generate overall economic gains of around €40 billion a year for the EU.

The strategy, first proposed in November 2010, will involve a modification of the existing Directive on the re-use of public sector information, and the deployment of measures such as a creation of open data portals at European level. Currently, the release of public sector information in the EU is governed by the 2003 Directive (2003/98/EC) on the re-use of public sector information. The Directive has undoubtedly helped improve harmonization across Europe, but there is much more work to be done in standardising rules around issues such as licensing and pricing, as well as promoting better practices across the Union. The persistent lack of interoperability, and failure to make information available in machine-readable formats, are preventing the social and economic potential of public sector data from being realised, and according to the Commission fragmenting the markets for data-based products and services across the Union.

According to Euroalert: “A recent study has shown that in 2010 the market for products and services based on public sector information was estimated to be worth around €32 billion across the EU, according to a recent study. The same study indicated that further opening up of public sector information by allowing easier access would generate overall economic gains of around €40 billion a year for the EU.”

What do you want to see from Europe’s Open Data Strategy? Got any worries about how it’s going to work out? How will it affect your projects? Tell us about it below, join the OKF EU Open Data mailing list for more discussion and debate, or get in touch with blog [at] okfn [dot] org if you’d like to write something here!

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by Theodora Middleton

International Open Data Hackathon Updates and Apps

November 16, 2011 in Events, External, Open Government Data, Open Spending, Sprint / Hackday, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog.

With the International Open Data Hackathon getting closer, I’m getting excited. There’s been a real expansion on the wiki of the number of cities where people are sometimes humbly, sometimes grandly, putting together events. I’m seeing Nairobi, Dublin, Sydney, Warsaw and Madrid as some of the cities with newly added information. Exciting!

I’ve been thinking more and more about applications people can hack on that I think would be fun, engage a broad number of people and that would help foster a community around viable, self-sustaining projects.

I’m of course, all in favour of people working on whatever piques their interest, but here are a few projects I’m encouraging people to look at:

1. Openspending.org

What I really like about openspending.org is that there are lots of ways non-coders can contribute. Specifically finding, scraping and categorizing budget data, which (sadly) is often very messy are things almost anyone with a laptop can do and are essential to getting this project off the ground. In addition, the reward for this project can be significant, a nice visualization of whatever budget you have data for – a perfect tool for helping people better understand where their money (or taxes) go. Another big factor in its favour… openspending.org – a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation who’ve been big supporters and sponsors of the international open data hackathon – is also perfect because, if all goes well, it is the type of project that a group can complete in one day.

So I hope that some people try playing with the website using your own local data. It would be wonderful to see the openspending.org community grow.

2. Adopt a Hydrant

Some of you have already seen me blog about this app – a project that comes out of Code for America. If you know of a government agency, or non profit, that has lat/long information for a resource that it wants people to help take care of… then adopt a hydrant could be for you. Essentially adopt a hydrant – which can be changed to adopt an anything – allows people to sign up and “adopt” what ever the application tracks. Could be trees, hydrants, playgrounds… you name it.

Some of you may be wondering… why adopt a hydrant? Well because in colder places, like Boston, MA, adopt a hydrant was created in the hopes that citizens might adopt a hydrant and so agree that when it snows they would keep the hydrant clear of snow. That way, in case there is a fire, the emergency response teams don’t end up wasting valuable minutes locating and then digging out the hydrant. Cool eh?

I think adopt a hydrant has the potential of become a significant open source project, one widely used by cities and non-profits. Would be great to see some people turned on to it!

3. Mapit

What I love about mapit is that it is the kind of application that can help foster other open data applications. Created by the wonderful people over at Mysociety.org this open source software essentially serves as a mapping layer so that you can find out what jurisdictions a given address or postal code or GPS device currently sits in (e.g. what riding, ward, city, province, county, state, etc… am I in?). This is insanely useful for lots of developers trying to build websites and apps that tell their users useful information about a given address or where they are standing. Indeed, I’m told that most of Mysociety.org’s projects use their instance of MapIt to function.

This project is for those seeking a more ambitious challenge, but I love the idea that this service might exist in multiple countries and that a community might emerge around another one of mysociety.org’s projects.

No matter what you intend to work on, drop me a line! Post it to the open data day mailing list and let me know about it. I’d love to share it with the world.

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by Theodora Middleton

Open Data Day – a project I’d like to be doing

November 14, 2011 in Events, External, Open Government Data, Sprint / Hackday, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog.

As some readers and International Open Data Hackathon participants know, I’m really keen on developers reusing each others code. All too often, in hackathons, we like to build something from scratch (which can be fun) but I’ve always liked the idea of hackathons either spurring genuine projects that others can reuse, or using a hackathon as an excuse to find a project they’d like support and contribute to.

That’s why I’ve been really encouraging people to find open source projects out there that they’d find interesting and that will support others’ efforts. This is a big reason I’ve been thinking about MapIt and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go project.

In Vancouver, one project I’m eventually hoping we can contribute to is Adopt-a-Hydrant. A project out of Code for America, the great thing about Adopt-a-Hydrant is that it can be adapted to become an adopt an anything app. It’s the end goal of a project I’m hoping to plan out and start on during the Hackathon.

Here in Vancouver, I’ve been talking with the Parks Board around getting a database of all the cities trees opened up. Interestingly this dataset does not include location data (Lat/Long) for each tree… So what would initially be great is to build a mobile phone app that will show you a list of trees near the address the user is currently at, and then allow the user to use their phone’s GPS to add the lat/long data to the database. That way we can help augment the city’s database. Once you begin to add lat long data then you could map trees in Adopt-a-Hydrant and create an Adopt-a-Tree app. Citizens could then sign up to adopt a tree, offer to take care of it, maybe notify the parks board if something is wrong.

I consider this a fairly ambitious project, but it could end up engaging a number of stakeholders – students, arborists, retirees, and others – that don’t normally engage in open data.

I know that the crew organizing a hackathon in Hamilton, Ontario are also looking to create an instance of Adopt-a-Hydrant, which is awesome. We need to both track what worked and what didn’t work so that the kinks in Adopt-a-hydrant can be worked out. More users and developers like us will help refine it further.

If you are planning a hackathon for the Dec 3rd International Open Data Hackathon, please be sure to update the wiki, join the mailing list, and if you have a project your are planning on working on, please email the list, or me directly, I’d love to blog about it!

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