Wikimedia | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

Wikimedia and New Collaborations at Third #OpenDataLDN Meetup in London

February 1, 2012 in Events, Meetups, Wikimedia

The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, a London-based Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Most Londoners agree that Monday night is usually the worst time of the week to hold an event. The workday is long, people are tired and public transit seems to be especially unpleasant. This past week, however, we witnessed a welcome deviance from the usual Monday grumpiness at the third #OpenDataLDN meetup – over 70 locals (some coming in from as far as Manchester, Leeds, and Oxford) gathered in a dimly-lit room at the Centre for Creative Collaboration over beers and laughter for a few hours of project-focused lightning talks, new ideas and inspiring discussions.

This time around, the event was co-hosted with the inimitable Oliver Keyes (@quominus) from the Wikimedia movement, who spoke about remixed data, geotagging and the use of Citations and other online apps to verify information and media. Following Oliver were the lighting talk presenters, who despite the massive failure of my computer’s impudent presentation software (apologies!), spoke about their projects with good humour and poise. Talks included Julian Tate (@julianlstar), who spoke about Open Transport in Manchester, Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar) about an upcoming National Archives Hackday, Velichka Dimitrova (@vndimitrova) about the OKFN Open Economics Working Group, Kevin Carter (@KPC_001) about Landscape Portrait, and Keiichi Matsuda (@keiichiban) about an upcoming PRISM data-art exhibit at the V&A.

After pitching their projects, all of which utilise and work with open data in new and interesting ways, the audience broke into groups to discuss each project further. Walking around the space, I was impressed by the diversity of backgrounds and skill-sets represented in each group. With economists talking to artists and government representatives, and public domain enthusiasts discussing transport with open aid advocates and scientists, it seemed everyone present had something interesting to add. By the end of the night there was an infectious feeling of positivity and mutual respect in the air that carried on to the pub afterward as people continued to jam on ideas and schemed about new collaborations.

In ending, local meetups of this kind always remind me how inspiring it is to be engaged in the field of open knowledge – and I have Monday’s crowd to thank for that. On the agenda for the next #OpenDataLDN, based on your much-appreciated Post It Note feedback, we’ll aim to facilitate even more informal conversations, highlight new ways to work with data (including how to use the Open Government License and how to work with cultural data) and perhaps even show a public domain film or two. I already look forward to it.

Click below to browse through all of the night’s conversations, photos, tweets and ideas – and stay tuned for the next #OpenDataLDN event here.

Special thanks to @lucyfedia and @StephenHignell for their photos of the event!

1 Comment »

Monmouth the Wiki Town

January 27, 2012 in Wikimedia

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.