In an overnight trip to sunny Brisbane Rufus Pollock delivered an interactive session attended by 30 people at QUT on Friday night and on Saturday morning gave the plenary talk for the Queensland Government Open Data Mixer day to about 150 people (and livestreamed to 3 cities where concurrent Open Data Mixer days were being held). Attendees ranged from the fields of journalism, small tech businesses and startups, government, universities, academia, policymakers, coders, library and archives.
According to tweets he was an inspirational “riveting keynote speaker” who highlighted practical implications of open knowledge. A great Queensland government example is their Police Crime map. Twenty Queensland government open data strategies contain 860 data sets that the government aims to be release within the year so they can be cleaned, analysed and reused in ways that improve services to citizens. One speaker noted it’s not just government and academia – Queensland businesses are also opening their data and working cooperatively on mutually beneficial projects.
See the plenary session by Rufus Pollock for yourself via the Open Data Mixer Plenary Session webcast .
During his time in Brisbane Rufus also met with OKFN volunteers to brainstorm ideas for the year ahead, so watch this space for announcements of upcoming activities and fun.
New Brisbane OKFN Ambassadors (x2) Announced!
| OKFN Brisbane Ambassador: Anna Gerber (@AnnaGerber)
Anna Gerber is a maker from Brisbane, Australia. As a technical project manager at the University of Queensland’s ITEE eResearch Lab, Anna specialises in digital humanities projects. She is currently the senior software engineer developing the NeCTAR-funded open source AustESE workbench supporting electronic scholarly editing, and is a co-principal investigator for the Open Annotation Collaboration, and contributor to the W3C Community Group for Open Annotation. Before working at the eResearch Lab, Anna was a research scientist at DSTC, involved in OMG standardisation activities relating to enterprise modelling and model-driven development, and also developing and delivering technical training and seminars for DSTC and the Australian W3C office. In her spare time, Anna enjoys tinkering with wearables, sewable electronics and Arduinos, and building 3D printers, quad-copters and interactive installations. She can often be found at local tech meetups, unconferences, makerspaces and hackathons, and was an “unorganiser” for the recent Brisbane THATCamp and MakerCamp unconferences, and a mentor at Brisbane’s GovHack 2013 event. Anna is passionate about open access to knowledge, and particularly about open access to tools for producing, processing, analysing and working with open data, in the form of open source software and open hardware. |
| OKFN Brisbane Ambassador: Anna Daniel
Anna Daniel is the Information Policy Officer at Griffith University, and her career has revolved around digital content, including at: Creative Commons USA; QUT Creative Industries; Monash University; PricewaterhouseCoopers; Accenture; Commonwealth Funds Management and the Australian Federal government. She holds a PhD. Business from RMIT that explored how technological innovation created opportunities in the music sector, and degrees in Management, Librarianship and Arts (Psychology, Media and Literature). Her initial interest in open access arose from exploring how musicians can operate outside the dominant industry paradigm, and traditional models of licensing and publishing were complex for musicians without major label support. Then she discovered open licenses and how they enable opportunity and innovation. She was also inspired by John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – he presents complex issues simply to highlight clear workable outcomes. She’s very interested in collaborative consumption and the sharing economy, which is underpinned by openness. She doesn’t consider herself a hacker but loves working with all types of digital content and has no fear of hackathons. Her latest hobby is mapping several years’ worth of global tour dates for a rock’n’roll band. |