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by Laura Newman

Announcing the School of Data

February 8, 2012 in News, School of Data

The following post is by Rufus Pollock, Director and Co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Philip Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University.

School of Data logo

Today, we’re announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We also welcome other organizations who would like to participate — see below for more on this.

Why?

Data (open or otherwise) needs to be used, and to use data effectively requires certain skills.1

The explosive growth in data, especially open data, in recent years has meant that the demand for data skills — for data “wranglers”2 or “scientists” — has been growing rapidly. Moreover, these skills aren’t just important for banks, supermarkets or the next silicon valley start-up, they are also going to be cruicial in reserach, in journalism, and in civil society organizations (CSOs).

However, there is currently a significant shortfall of data “wranglers” to satisfy this growing demand, especially in civil society organisations — McKinsey expects a skills shortage in data expertise to reach 50-60% by 2018 in the US alone.3

Most formal training for data skills still takes place as part of formal statistics or mathematics programmes. It will be years before data specialist degree paths become broadly available and accepted, and even then, time-intensive degree courses may not be the right option for journalists, activists, or computer programmers who just need to add data skills to their existing expertise.

What is needed are flexible, on-demand, shorter learning options for people who are actively working in areas that benefit from data skills, particularly those who may have already left formal education programmes.

What?

To address this growing demand, the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU are collaborating to create the School of Data.

The School of Data will adopt the successful peer-to-peer learning model established by P2PU and Mozilla in their ‘School of Webcraft’ partnership. Learners will progress by taking part in ‘learning challenges’ – series of structured, achievable tasks, designed to promote collaborative and project-based learning.

As learners gain skills, their achievements will be rewarded through assessments which lead to badges. Community support and on-demand mentoring will also be available for those who need it.

So What Next?

In order to get the School of Data up and running, the next challenges are:

  • To create a series of learning challenges for a Data Wrangling 101 course. Developing Data wranglers will learn to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.

  • To recruit community leaders to act as ‘mentors’, providing community support and on-demand mentoring for those who need it.

  • To curate, update and extend the existing manuals and reference materials, e.g. the Open Data Handbook and the Data Patterns Handbook etc.

  • To design and implement assessments which evaluate achievements. Badges can then be issued which recognize the relevant skills and competencies.

  • To openly license all education content (challenges, manuals, references and materials) so that anyone can use, modify and re-use it, including instructors and learners in formal education.

  • Get the word out! Promote Data Wrangling 101 to potential participants.

Get Involved!

At this stage, we are seeking volunteers to help us develop the project. Whether you would like to design educational materials, construct learning challenges, donate money or mentor on the course, we’d love to hear from you! Equally, if you are part of an organisation which would like to join with the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU to collaborate on the School of Data, please do get in touch.

You can register your interest using the form below:

  1. For more on this topic, see these earlier posts: http://blog.okfn.org/2011/10/31/scaling-the-open-data-ecosystem/ and http://blog.okfn.org/2011/09/15/open-data-a-means-to-an-end-not-an-end-in-itself/ ↩

  2. Because this field is so new, terminology is still evolving. A ‘data wrangler’ is to ‘data’ what a ‘coder’ is to ‘code’. It is someone with the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different data. See http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/11/as-coder-is-for-code-x-is-for-data/ for more on this topic. ↩

  3. McKinsey Global Institute, 2011. Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, p.11. ↩

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Avatar of Kat Braybrooke

by Kat Braybrooke

OGDCamp + OKCon = Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in Helsinki, Finland!

February 7, 2012 in Events, OGDCamp, OKCon, OKF Finland, OKFest

The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, London-based Community Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Regional Chapters and Groups) and a core organiser of OKFest.

OGDcamp 2011

On September 17-22 this year, global communities will be descending on the shores of Helsinki for a week-long celebration called the Open Knowledge Festival – and you’re the first to be invited!

For this festival – the first of its kind in the world – we are bringing Open Government Data Camp (OGDCamp) and Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) to the same place to provide new opportunities for collaboration. We’ll start the week by supporting practitioners working in the fields of open government and municipal data, and end it by exploring the diversity of open knowledge initiatives from a global perspective. The organising team, a talented gathering of Finns and leaders from around the world, are already hard at work planning a busy week of seminars, workshops, lectures, hackathons, keynotes, coding jams and interactive media sessions that will bring together participants from a wide variety of backgrounds in new ways.

Another important element of OKFest is its Nordic location. The host city of Helsinki is in the midst of an urban Finnish renaissance built on inclusive communities. It is home to one of our first incubating Local Chapters, and as the next World Design Capital for 2012, the city will also be hosting an inspiring cohort of open data practitioners who combine design, art, academia and technology to support innovation in new and interesting ways. Helsinki locals organised the city’s first Open Knowledge Meetup this October and have just opened the first FABlab in Finland at the Aalto University Media Factory. We look forward to highlighting even more Finnish projects in the field of open knowledge, and hope to see the participation of many representatives of Nordic nations.

Most importantly of all, we want your ideas to be highlighted at OKFest. We are currently looking for proposals regarding sessions, satellite events, research streams, hackathons, lecture topics and other forms of collaboration. Have a great project or idea that you want to share with the global community? This is the place to do it. Join our public discussion list and say hello here and start finding collaborators on Twitter using the hashtag #okfest.

We hope to see you in Helsinki, Finland this September for a week of new friends, open knowledge and global inspiration with a Nordic twist!

Photo from OGDCamp 2011 thanks to Volker Agüeras Gäng on Flickr.

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Avatar of Lucy Chambers

by Lucy Chambers

The Data Journalism Handbook: Final call for contributions

February 6, 2012 in Uncategorized

This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net

Where can I find data and how can I request access to it? What tools are available to me? How can I find useful stories within datasets? And, most importantly, how can I make a living through the practise of data journalism?

Do these questions sound familiar? They should, because these are all questions that any data journalist who is just getting started should be asking.

Leading data journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, and other top media organisations from around the world, are working together to answer all of these questions (and more) in the Data Journalism Handbook. The handbook is the first comprehensive practical guide to data journalism.

As Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at the New York Times, noted at the beginning of the project:

“A project like this is quite necessary. It’s kind of surprising that someone hasn’t tried to do this until now.”

Interested in contributing? We want YOU!

Work on the handbook was kick-started in November of last year at the Mozilla Festival in London. In just two days, 55 contributors drafted 60 pages (20,000 words) for six chapters. The handbook is a community project; therefore, anyone who has experience in data journalism can help draft the book. The work, in turn, goes back to the community as anyone is allowed to freely use, modify, adapt, and reuse the handbook.

Contributions have been flooding in and since Mozilla we have been editing, updating, filling in gaps, and restructuring. We are very close to a first complete draft of the book and we need your help to get there. We are looking for authors, editors and peer reviewers to draft chapters, review content, style and accuracy of the book.

In the table of contents below you can see the progress that has been made and where input is needed:

  • 0. Preface (in progress)
    • 0.1 The purpose of this book
    • 0.2 Add to this book
    • 0.3 Share this book
  • 1. Introduction (done)
    • 1.1 What is data journalism?
    • 1.2 Why is it important?
  • 2. Introducing data journalism in the newsroom
    • 2.1 Changes in the newsroom (contributors needed)
    • 2.2 How is it done: journo-developers vs. coders for hire (in progress)
  • 3. Types of outcomes/projects and case studies
    • 3.1 Data powered stories (in progress)
    • 3.2 Data served with stories (in progress)
    • 3.3 Data driven applications (contributors needed)
  • 4. Working on the data story
    • 4.1. Step 1: Getting your data
      • 4.1.1 Where does data live? (in progress)
      • 4.1.2 Asking for data (in progress)
      • 4.1.3 Getting your own data (in progress)
      • 4.1.4 Crowdsourcing data (contributors needed)
    • 4.2 Step 2: Understanding your data
      • 4.2.1 Data literacy (done)
      • 4.2.2 Working with data tips (in progress)
      • 4.2.3 Tools and techniques for analysing data (contributors needed)
      • 4.2.4 Harnessing expert opinions: Annotating datasets (contributors needed)
    • 4.3 Step 3: Finding a story in your data (in progress)
      • 4.3.1  From datasets to stories – approaches 
    • 4.4 Step 4: Delivering your data project (contributors needed)
      • 4.4.1 Serving data with stories 
      • 4.4.2 Visualising data 
      • 4.4.3 Data driven applications 
  • 5. Engagement, outreach and community (contributors needed)
  • 6. How to make data journalism sustainable
    • 6.1 Measuring impact (contributors needed)
    • 6.2 Business models (contributors needed)
  • 7. Appendix (in progress)
    • 7.1 Further resources 
    • 7.2 Glossary

Whether you are a budding data journalist putting the manual through its paces or someone with years of experience, we’d love your help to fine-tune the book and get it ready for the press (no pun intended).

If you’re interested to contribute to the first Data Journalism Handbook please fill in this form as soon as possible indicating your level and area of expertise and the chapter that you would like to contribute to. We will get in touch with you as soon as we can once you’ve submitted the form.

Deadline

A first complete draft is planned to be ready by the end of February.

The official launch of the The Data Journalism Handbook will be at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia from 25-29 April. The book will be available online as an e-book. Participants at the festival will have the opportunity to buy a printed copy of the book and enjoy a meet and greet with the authors where they may exchange knowledge and learn helpful tips about how to successfully become data journalists.

Questions?

For questions get in touch with the Data Journalism Handbook coordinators: Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) or Lucy Chambers (lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org).

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Avatar of Laura Newman

by Laura Newman

Join us on Monday 27th February for #OpenDataCBG!

February 6, 2012 in Meetups

The following post is by Laura Newman, a Cambridge based Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Interested in Open Data? Live in the Cambridge area? Join us for #OpenDataCBG!

On Monday 27th February, the open data community will be gathering in the Panton Arms in Cambridge for the second #OpenDataCBG meet-up. The evening is an opportunity for people from around Cambridge to meet and chat in a friendly and informal environment.

Submit a Lightning Talk!

The evening will kick-off with some lightning talks. Lightning talks are informal 2-3 minute presentations on any topic. Been working on an exciting project? Want to ask the community for advice on an idea you have in the pipeline? Lightning talks are a great opportunity to share your achievements and spark discussion. If you would like to give a lightning talk, contact laura.newman [@] okfn.org

Talk about it

  • Sign up on our meet-up page.
  • On Twitter? Talk to other attendees using the #OpenDataCBG hashtag.
  • Questions? Email laura.newman [@] okfn.org

Come along!

The first #OpenDataCBG meet-up in December was a great sucess. Whatever your interests – whether government, science, cultural heritage, hardware, design, transport, or something else entirely! – there are sure to be like-minded people eager to discuss your ideas and share their own.

Join us at 7pm on Monday 27th February in the Panton Arms to meet new friends, share experiences, and catch-up on all the open data news from in and around Cambridge!

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Avatar of Sam Leon

by Sam Leon

JISC to fund development of TEXTUS project

February 3, 2012 in News, OKF Projects, Our Work, TEXTUS

The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme.

TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public domain texts. It will use tools already developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation such as the Annotator and build on the OKFN humanities projects such as Open Shakespeare.

Goldsmiths University will lead the project with technical development and community work to be undertaken by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Open Philosophy

The six-month JISC funded project will focus on developing a first instance of TEXTUS to be deployed as Open Philosophy on openphilosophy.org. Open Philosophy – which will focus on providing access to and encouraging scholarly collaboration around philosophy texts – will be developed in close consultation with the project’s academic advisory board, students from Goldsmiths University and project partners Oxford and Royal Holloway.

It is one of the main goals of the project to develop a tool that can be used by students and scholars to enrich their teaching and research, so user-centric design principles will be followed throughout to ensure that real researcher needs are addressed appropriately. There is a dedicated Open Philosophy mailing list that will focus on discussions about the content to be made available on openphilosophy.org which you can sign up to here.

Get Involved

Those interested in getting involved should contact sam.leon [at] okfn.org or send us a message on twitter @TEXTUSProject check out the TEXTUS Project website.

Quick links

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Avatar of theodora

by theodora

COMMUNIA’s response to the proposed amendments to PSI Directive

February 2, 2012 in Open GLAM, WG EU Open Data

The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policymakers.

The European Commission Public Sector Information Directive, which describes the conditions under which European public sector information (PSI) should be made available for reuse by the public, has been in place since 2003. PSI ranges from digital maps to weather data to traffic statistics, and there’s a lot of potential value in making PSI available for reuse for commercial and non-commercial purposes – up to €140bn. The EC says that increasing the reuse of PSI can generate new businesses and jobs – and to this end is planning to update its nine-year-old Directive. COMMUNIA International Association last week released a short policy document in reaction to the to the European Commission’s (EC) proposals, which the OKF’s Daniel Dietrich presented at the LAPSI conference in Brussells to a positive and interested audience.

To give a bit of background: in December 2011 the EC published a proposal to update the PSI Directive. The Open Knowledge Foundation already covered the basics of the Commission announcement. The COMMUNIA document draws attention to two areas where these proposals still need improvement: firstly regarding the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive; and secondly regarding public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

Conditions for re-use of public sector information

 

From the perspective of COMMUNIA, the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states. The article of the amended Directive dealing with licensing mentions “standard licenses,” but does not sufficiently clarify what should be considered to be a standard license, and encourages the development of open government licenses. Instead of recommending the use and creation of more licenses, COMMUNIA suggests that the Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied across the entire European Union. Such licenses (stewarded by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons) already exist and are widely used by a broad spectrum of data and content providers.

Public Domain Content held by libraries, museums and archives

 

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested change to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of PSI has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. For instance, the EC’s amendments to the Directive are aligned with COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendation #13, which states, “The PSI Directive needs to be broadened, by increasing its scope to include publicly funded memory organisations – such as museums or galleries – and strengthened by mandating that Public Sector Information will be made freely available for all to use and re-use without restriction.”

The South Prospect of the Cathedral of St. Pauls / gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliotheque nationale de France / Public Domain

Including such content under the purview of the Directive will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture and should increase the amount of digitized cultural heritage that is available online. But, while the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights will be re-usable for commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights at all because those works are in the public domain. COMMUNIA thinks that explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives in the re-use obligation of the amended PSI Directive will strengthen the Commission’s position with regard to access and re-use of public domain content.

The full COMMUNIA association reaction to the EC’s proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information can be downloaded here.

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Avatar of Lucy Chambers

by Lucy Chambers

Diving into Data: The School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

February 2, 2012 in Data Journalism

This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net and journalismfestival.com.

In the past investigative reporters would suffer from a scarcity of information relating to questions they were trying to answer. While this is still the case, today journalists are also faced with an overwhelming abundance of data. In an age of information overload, to stay relevant to society journalists need to learn to separate signal from noise in order to provide valuable insights. Journalists need to be equipped with knowledge of the tools, techniques and tactics of working with data in order to derive maximum value from for their readers.

The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation are pleased to invite you to the School of Data Journalism hosted at the sixth edition of Italy’s leading journalism event, the International Journalism Festival. The 2012 edition takes place in the beautiful city of Perugia between 25-29 April. Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free. Each workshop has a limited number of places and therefore registration will be necessary. Please note that not all requests to participate in the workshops will be accepted.

What is the School of Data Journalism and who is it for?

The School consists of three panel discussions and five workshops.

The panels attempt to provide answers to crucial questions for aspiring data journalists, editors and decision-makers in newsrooms:

  • What can aspiring data journalists learn from the successes of the past?
  • How can data journalism save your newsroom?
  • How do you start a data journalism operation?
  • How can you become a data journalist and what do you need to do?

In the workshops journalists who are interested to get started with reporting with data and budding data journalists will learn from experienced data journalists and open data experts essential skills related to how to get the data you need, how to analyse it, how to get stories from data and how to present your stories.

Panels

Panel 1: News and numbers: from CAR to data journalism (Thursday, 26 April)

Journalists have always used data and numbers to produce stories…and win Pulitzers. From Philip Meyer’s coverage of the Detroit riots in 1967 to Steve Doig’s ‘What Went Wrong’ analysis of the damage patterns from Hurricane Andrew, data-driven reporting has brought valuable public service and won journalists recognition and prizes.

Whereas there may be distinguishing aspects about the data journalism of today and the computer-assisted reporting of the past, it is crucial to learn from successful examples, techniques and approaches of the past.

  • How can we bring the data journalism community and the CAR community closer together?
  • What can aspiring data journalists learn from the successes of the past?
  • What is the future of data journalism?

Panel 2: How can data journalism save your newsroom? (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is under siege. Traditional models are collapsing. Developing the know-how to use the available data more effectively, to understand it, communicate and generate stories based on it, could be a huge opportunity to breathe new life into journalism.

  • What is the potential of data journalism?
  • How do you start a data journalism operation?
  • How can you start thinking about making money with data journalism?

Panel 3: You Too Can Be A Data Journalist! (Saturday, 28 April)

Where can I find data? How can I request data? What tools can I use? How can I find stories in data? How can I make money with data journalism?

Several leading data journalists, CAR specialists and journalism professors from the Guardian, the New York Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Medill School of Journalism and Cronkite School of Journalism worked together to answer these questions in the Data Journalism Handbook.

The handbook, the first comprehensive practical guide to data journalism, will be officially launched in this session. The session will provide the opportunity to meet and greet authors of the book, exchange knowledge and learn from them what you need to know to be a data journalist, as well as get a printed copy of the book.

Speakers

  • Caelainn Barr, EU data journalist, formerly with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London
  • Sarah Cohen, Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke University (Pulitzer prize winner)
  • Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University (Pulitzer prize winner)
  • Mirko Lorenz, data journalism trainer, Deutsche Welle
  • Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at The New York Times and co-founder ofDocumentCloud.org
  • Dan Nguyen, news application developer, ProPublica
  • Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Data Blog

Workshops

Workshop 1: Scraping data & cracking PDFs (Thursday, 26 April)

Hands up who knows what machine-readable data is? You will soon, and more importantly, how to get it and what you can do with it once you have it!

A workshop targeted at scraping from scratch, including: What PDFs and webpages look like to your computer – An introduction to machine-readable / non-machine readable data The Scraper Cookbook – an overview of the key things you need to know to write a scraper Hands on session – learning to screen-scrape. Main focus: hands on session using tools such as ScraperWiki. If sufficient interest & time, we will also touch on some of the tools & skills needed to extract data from PDFs. Error checking – how to check what you have makes sense, spotting the types of errors sometimes introduced if you don’t get it quite right!

Workshop 2: Information wants to be free – Freedom of information requests and how to use them (Friday, 27 April)

Freedom of information requests are constantly evolving. Law changes and technological advancements make it increasingly easier to file and systematise FOI requests, and importantly track their progress through the system. This workshop includes demonstrations and case studies examining the current state-of-play with FOI requests in Europe and beyond and looking into what’s next for the freedom of information movement.

Workshop 3: Making data pretty (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is no longer just a block of prose on a page. The modern reader often demands maps, infographics and visualisations to make the story jump out at them, particularly in digital environments.

There are a vast array of free tools available on the web to allow data-journalists to quickly and easily digest, process and display the data powering their stories. This workshop aims to give a good overview of what is currently available and delve into depth on one of the most powerful: Google Fusion Tables.

Workshop 4: Getting Stories from Data (Saturday, 28 April)

Enormous datasets can often prove extremely daunting to the unfamiliar. Mistakes and crimes have historically benefited from, and triumphs and good decisions been obscured by, a mask of bewildering numbers and statistics and gone unreported.

Large datasets often hold a wealth of undiscovered stories for those willing to invest the time into exploring them. This workshop is a ‘spotters’-guide’ for things to look out for and where to look for datasets.

Workshop 5: Spending Stories (Sunday, 29 April)

To get to the bottom of a story, you need only to ‘follow the money’. The same is true of government: budgeting is where policies and priorities are broken down into figures. Financial programming has a direct influence on all political areas: while other data on health or social help us understand what challenges society faces, looking at spending data allows us to see how government reacts to all of these.

There are many spending databases available on the web, some impenetrable, some accessible for analysis. We’ll show how we enable journalists and researchers to make sense of the data and what strategies can be used to investigate stories and policies.

  • Overview: What datasets are out there? Where can you look for more?
  • Interrogating databases, how to extract the maximum amount of data out of tricky databases
  • Tools for spending analysis, how to slice and dice once you have your data

Workshop leaders

  • Caelainn Barr, formerly with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, working on the award-winning Structural Funds investigation
  • Heather Brooke, journalist and FOI campaigner, uncovered the UK MP expenses scandal
  • Lucy Chambers, Open Knowledge Foundation, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending and the ‘Spending Stories’ project.
  • Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University (Pulitzer prize winner)
  • Friedrich Lindenberg, Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, Developer on OpenSpending
  • Dan Nguyen, news application developer, ProPublica
  • Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Data Blog

When and where?

The Data Journalism School takes place at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia between 25 and 29 April 2012. The schedule of the Data Journalism School, with confirmed speakers for each panel and workshop, will be posted on the festival website in early February.

How to register?

Entry to the festival and the School are free. There is no registration process to attend the festival. For the workshops there is a limited number of available seats. To secure a seat in the workshops please register via this form. The deadline for workshop registration is 20 March 2012. You will be notified by email by 25 March at the latest if we were able to confirm you a seat. The workshops are entry-level. Consideration will be given to your experience, skills and motivation to attend the workshop when making the selection.

What do you need to bring?

A lot of enthusiasm and a laptop for the workshop sessions are required. Please note for hands-on workshops tablet PC’s will not be appropriate.

Questions?

If you have questions about the School of Data Journalism get in touch with the coordinators: Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) or Lucy Chambers (lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org).

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Avatar of Sam Leon

by Sam Leon

Annotators of the World Unite!

February 2, 2012 in Annotator

The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator javascript library and the AnnotateIt service.

Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations.  We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others.  Together we can create a comprehensive repository of commentary on the best that has been thought and said.

Embracing a common mission of openness, our source code will always be libre, our standards compliant, and our knowledge free.  Organizations from Cambridge, US & UK, California, and Vienna are working together to combine our technologies and innovation to provide you with the ability to annotate and share any text, image, PDF, map, or video online.

We are also on the verge of rereleasing 273 public domain texts with 9000+ annotations from top young scholars at Harvard, Columbia, UChicago and other top institutions.  In addition to the web, we also aspire to make our best content available on mobile reading devices, so curious minds everywhere can share a common discourse anytime, anywhere.  Because we believe you should always control access to your knowledge, we will ensure your data has simple permissions and measures for portability.

If you are a developer, designer, or scholar, we could use your help to create, curate, and map our global knowledge graph.  Together we can transform 21st century scholarship within and without the ivory tower.  If you want to get involved, please join the conversation about our software and our scholarship.

Screenshot of annotateit.org

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Avatar of Kat Braybrooke

by Kat Braybrooke

Wikimedia and New Collaborations at Third #OpenDataLDN Meetup in London

February 1, 2012 in Events, Meetups, Wikimedia

OpenDataLDN

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.

OpenDataLDN Storify

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

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Avatar of Velichka Dimitrova

by Velichka Dimitrova

Open Economics Hackday

February 1, 2012 in Events, Hackday / Code Sprint, WG Economics

Open Economics Hackday

Open Economics Hackday at the Barbican, London. Photo by Ilias Bartolini.

The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group.

It is great to see people coming together and doing something cool on a Saturday. The Open Economics Hackday gathered more than thirty people at the Barbican and online, crafting fancy visualisations, wrangling data and being creative together.

The day was devoted to ideas in open economics, as a transparent and collaborative academic discipline, which presents research outputs in a comprehensible way to the general public.

We aimed at building Yourtopia 2, an interactive application showing the development of Italy on several key social progress indicators over time. Building on preceding experience with alternative non-GDP measures of human development (Yourtopia), the new project’s objective is to show how different progress can be in the separate Italian regions, as Italy is traditionally a country with stark regional inequalities.

Although originally used as a term for the gatherings of computer programmers, the Open Economics Hackday was open to people with different backgrounds and various skills. Programmers were creating bits of code, data journalists were gathering and processing data, economists were making sure the project concept addresses key problems in this field of research.

Would you like to help finish the Yourtopia 2 application? Please join the follow-up online meeting this Saturday at 2pm GMT. Confirm your participation by typing in your name on the Etherpad: http://econ.okfnpad.org/hackathon-jan-2011.

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