It’s getting closer to that time of Year… ride my bike more, go on a crazy shake diet, stop smoking, etc – Welcome to the New Year’s resolution countdown. Just mentioning these things makes me want to procrastinate… But why do we so often break our resolutions? Perhaps because we don’t really believe in them, or we don’t find them meaningful enough, maybe our resolutions are not FUN enough? Is it possible to find a resolution that is both FUN and MEANINGFUL?

Sign up today: http://www.meetup.com/OpenKnowledgeFoundation/Melbourne-AU/

Well in if live in Melbourne you are in luck, as a group of us have started to talk about just this very idea – “Let’s make our resolutions count”, and we’d like you to join us: what can we as Melburnian citizens do to make our city a better place? Most of us don’t have a desire to pick up litter or randomly bother people on the street; rather, we are taking a modern Web view of what Melbourne needs to be even better: in short, Melbourne needs more ‘Open Knowledge’.

What is Open Knowledge and why would it make Melbourne a better place? – In short, Open Knowledge is any set of data, info or ideas that if set free and made available to the wider community could better our lives. In short, Open Knowledge is whatever YOU think would make Melbourne a better place.

For example our first event will be on Saturday January 5th, where we’ll all get together to make a new Cycle Map of Melbourne that anyone can use. We’ll be using all kinds of Open Knowledge to do this, read more here.

Our next event will be on February 5th, but we’ve not yet decided what we’ll be doing (yet).  Each month we’ll decide what activity we are doing next.   Here is our top ten list of brilliant ‘Open Knowledge’ moments that happened last year (the types of things we’d like to be apart of this year[1]):

• No.10: Launch of the Australian Chapter of OKF at the OKFestival in Helsinki, joining NN other countries in the pursuit of Open Knowledge!
• No.9: Government grant funding agencies (ARC & NHMRC) recognise that the taxpayer money they give to fund research “should be widely available so that the maximum benefit can be gained from the knowledge created”, instead of the current model where Academic publishers get to resell research papers for exorbitant prices.
• No. 8: Experimental dataset published by the Bureau of Metereology that can (some say, ‘magically’) interlink itself with other datasets making it easier to know how meteorologist data can help our lives and businesses be more prosperous on a day to day basis.
• No.7: Launch of the first Australian government sponsored website that publishes the data that taxpayers are paying our government officials to produce (“democracy is transparency). #dataACT
• No.6: ABC releasing 22 files of archival news footage to Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licences.
• No.5: The State Library of New South Wales encouraging 22 of their staff to be trained by Wikimedia Australia to edit Wikipedia about Australian newspapers and NSW history.
• No. 4: Greater recognition by Government organisations that hackers are brilliant at making good things happen with their code/data skillz, e.g. through events such as #GovHack. NSW Bus Tables Data & #eRes2012.
• No.3:
• No.2: The launch of data journalism publications like Crunch Blog & The Age’s Data Point where the journalism is *data driven* instead of opinion pieces based on un-cited evidence. #ddj
• No.1: 30th anniversary of FOI in Australia, and launch of the ‘Right to Know’ website which make it easier to make a request as well as helps you track it in the public so other can benefit as well.

The way we will decide what ‘Open Knowledge’ activity we are going to do next is simple: we’ll decide as a group the month before the event.  So on January 5th while we are making our new cycle map of Melbourne we’ll naturally think of new Open Knowledge things to do, and so we’ll decide on January 5th what we are going to do on February 5th.  Accordingly, our next event will be on March 5th 9and be decide on Feb 5th), and then April 5th, and then May 5th… and so forth and so on.  In short: REMEMBER, REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF <the month>!).

Why not try committing yourself to attending one dozen Open Knowledge activities (one per month), sign up for the first event of 2013 today: http://www.meetup.com/OpenKnowledgeFoundation/Melbourne-AU/

 

[1]= Disclaimer: This is Flanders own personal top ten list (please add more or your order in the comments :).