On Saturday was the Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information (which we blogged about last week). We had very positive feedback from participants, and we’ll certainly consider doing something similar again in the future.
There was representation from across the board – from local government to European policy analysts, from civic society to commercial re-users. The day started out with introductions and planning – and jumped into fruitful and interesting discussions about technical, legal and social aspects of public information discovery and re-use. Rufus Pollock spoke about CKAN and other things, and John Sheridan spoke about Information Asset Registers (IARs).
After lunch we had a brainstorm about what kinds of particular documents and datasets people wanted to get stuck into. We took notes on the wiki and on flip charts and entered some new packages into CKAN (though there were so many ideas that some of this was done retrospectively!).
If you would like to catch up on what happened, you can see:
- http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation – the original wiki page
- http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation/Notes – live notes from the event on the wiki
- 36 new packages tagged with workshop-20081101 tag on CKAN.net (we’ve just passed the 300 mark!)
- Photos on Flickr, including:
- okfn-pubinfo tag on Twitter
- okfn-pubinfo tag on Del.icio.us
Moving forward, we’d like to continue to improve and add to the UK government and public information packages on CKAN (cf. uk tag). We strongly encourage you to edit existing packages to fill in gaps or additional information, or to register new ones you may know about!
Also, where relevant and appopriate, we’d like to add some new requests to OPSI’s excellent beta for a Public Sector Information Unlocking Service! We’d particularly like to do this for material for which the terms of re-use are not clear, or where its clear that material must exist, but not obvious how to get it or re-use it.
The event was organised by The Open Knowledge Foundation and supported by the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI) Taskforce and mySociety. It was kindly hosted by the London Knowledge Lab.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
None of the 36 new packages tagged with workshop-20081101 tag on CKAN.net can be found by anyone who is not familiar with the organisation of the UK public sector.
The missing package was the top of the list on flipchart 1 referred to above: IAR. Every public sector information asset in Europe should be registered in a central union catalogue which can be accessed by everyone: PSIKEY – the key to reusable PSI.
The details of PSIKEY as submitted are at:
http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/2008/10/psikey.html
I’ve shown you a better way to making PSI re-usable. Can you help me bring it about?