Notes from board meeting:

Notes from chat window:

Flanders:18:04 Please do ask questions as Nick presents this debate

Flanders:18:05http://www.omidyar.com/insights/open-business

Fiona:18:07 Who do you see taking this work forward, Nick?

Flanders:18:11 We’ll doa quick whip around to get a sentence or two from each board member on this?

Flanders:18:11 please hold up your hand if you want to comment

Flanders:18:11 we’ll do five more minutes on this

Flanders:18:13 going to Steeven next

Flanders:18:13 then Marcus,

Flanders:18:13 then Fiona

Flanders:18:13 then Anne

Flanders:18:14 Ok?

Flanders:18:14 

Steven De Costa:18:14 yep

Fiona:18:20 All the classic reasons then…

Flanders:18:21 Pia Waugh 6:20 PM The data.gov.au team have released a Government Data Toolkit (with Dept of Comms) to assist data custodians to identify, manage and publish data.http://toolkit.data.gov.au with the data.gov.au guide athttps://toolkit.data.gov.au/index.php?title=How_to_use_data.gov.au

Fiona:18:27 No objections to thanks to Ana!

Evan Hill:18:28 Hello All !

Fiona:18:28 Keep in touch,

Flanders:18:28 Welcome Ivan

Flanders:18:28 please watch the youtube stream of teh call

Flanders:18:28 and comment/quesiton here

Flanders:18:28http://youtu.be/C4EEiBl73-U

Steven De Costa:18:29Confirm, agreed. +1

Fiona:18:31 GovHack report available here:http://www.govhack.org/govhack-2014-report-a-nation-of-civic-hackers/

Evan Hill:18:38 Could GovHack partner with CMU in Adelaide?

Fiona:18:39 Would suggest you take it up with the local Unleashed team

Steven De Costa:18:41 no concerns

Evan Hill:18:42 Happy to chat with CMU and get them onside

Fiona:18:42 looks like Antarctica to me

Fiona:18:45 @Evan sounds like a plan!

Flanders:18:46 if people could put a +1 net to the ones they would like to talk about

Flanders:18:47 let’s also go around to each member as a last round robin

Flanders:18:47 Anne first>

Flanders:18:47 then fiona

Flanders:18:47 then markus

Flanders:18:47 then michael

Flanders:18:47 then steven?

Laura:18:53 MMy keyboard is not reaally workiing very weell at the moment ssorryy so II woont take any moore nootes sorrry!

Flanders:18:54 if someone could help take notes for poor Laura keyboard

Steven De Costa:18:55 thanks folks

The next Board Meeting will be on June 25th at 6pm (Melbourne Time), the public broadcast and a public forum chat window will be announced via our twitter: https://twitter.com/OKFNau

Below are some highlight from the Boards call last night:

• Chairman Nicholas Gruen alludes to a forthcoming report on how Australia has fallen behind the economic advantages of Open Data.
• Shadow Chairs Dr. Fiona Tweedie and Dr. Maia Sauren request further “Health Hack” events to take place around the country building on the previous successful #HealthHack which took place at the end of last year.  The pattern which GovHack has established as a national event provides real opportunities to further the open cause beyond the government sector, including Open Health Data for the Health Sector, Open Scholarship for the Academic Sector, etc.
• Secretary to the Board, Ana Belgun updated the Board on the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ which is being setup by NICTA to be signed by the Boards of OKF-Global and OKF-Australia.
• Webmaster for OKF Australia Steven De Costa provided an update on GovHack, and a discussion around the importance of a ‘Red Carpet’ event which the OKF Board would like to see awards given to not only GovHack winners but champions and ambassadors around Australasia who are furthering the Open Knowledge cause.
• Chairman Nicholas Gruen will be attending the Open Knowledge Festival in Germany to meet with other international Open Knowledge Advocates.
• Shadow Chair Dr. Fiona Tweedie will be attending the ‘Open Government Partnership’ Summit.
• Discussion on recruiting more Ambassadors along the lines of what Melbourne has achieved (7 Ambassadors -both local and topic- are now regularly pushing forward Open in Melbourne and abroad).  Melbourne challenges its sister chapters to do the same.
• Chair of the OKF Working Group for the GovHack Community, Pia Waugh will further update the Board on opportunities for recruiting new Ambassadors through GovHack.

The next Board Meeting will be on June 25th at 6pm (Melbourne Time)

Public Broadcast of OKF (Australia) Board Meeting

=====================================================

I’ve no doubt that #HealthHack will go national next year, this kind of opportunity to bring scientists together with developers is just a brilliant insight.

The organizers, Maia, Fiona, Craig and Steve are spot on that their generation wants to be involved with science: not afraid of genetics, not afraid of large data, not afraid of health informatics, not afraid of asking, not afraid of offering solutions; they are a generation who views health as a problem that they are perfectly capable of solving.  There is no ivory tower keeping people out here, just open gardens of ideas and willingness!

“Everyone in the e-research sector knows that the only real way to produce useful software for researchers is to get developers and researchers working literally side by side” said Steve Bennett, research technologist at V3 Alliance. “But it’s easier said than done. Hack events like these are magic, both making the researcher part of the development team and developers part of the research team.”

With nothing more than the tools on their laptop (well and perhaps a little computing oomph from the cloud), this group sees no reason why the cure to cancer might spark in this very room (perhaps much like the secrets of our modern universe were discovered by a patent clerk doing physics in his spare time).

In short, keep an eye on #healthhack.  If you are a developer, you’ll be amazed what you can learn from a scientist, if you are a scientist you will be amazed what you will learn from a developer.  Two skill sets perfectly matched, (mark my words) this event is going to be big in the coming years!

A special shout out needs to go to Maia and Georgia  – fantastic effort and brilliant evangelists for how ‘open’ things should be done (dumplings were delicious and no hack should be without a beer fridge!).

It is important to recognise that Ambassadors come and go, there are far too many wonderful causes and reasons in the world to assume that you will only dedicate your volunteer hours to one organisation forever. Naturally, we want you all to stay as long as you like, but for the most part we would hope that you will commit to participating over an 18 month period (naturally we are glad to shorten or lengthen this based on your personal endeavors – we are nothing if not flexible).

Of course, it is very difficult when a valuable volunteer Ambassador leaves because it is the brains of humans where knowledge is stored (not the machines – though they do a great job with the information).

Accordingly, we’ve implemented a “buddy system” recommendation to all volunteers.

The most important part of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Australia is community. A networked community begins with a simple relationship between two people, everyone needs a person whom you can bounce ideas off of and have a friendly and honest conversation. Accordingly, one of the first things we look to do as the Board is to help our volunteers find a like-minded buddy. The buddy system will not only help you work together but also help encourage the sharing of knowledge from one person to the next as the Open Knowledge Foundation grows and matures into a nation-wide community network.

Most of our Ambassadors already have a buddy (if not two or three) who share their Ambassadorship, but we’ll also be looking to buddy-up anyone else who volunteers for the Open Knowledge Foundation including the Board, Advisory Committee and the GovHack Committee.

Naturally, the above is only a recommendation, if you don’t want a buddy and are happy to do things on your own, we think that is great as we’ll do everything we can to support individuals as well. Otherwise, if you are looking for a volunteer buddy to do good things with, put on local events, start projects or participate in global working groups then please let the co-secretaries to the board know (yes the secretary to the board has a buddy now as well: David F. Flanders would like to welcome his buddy Anne Cregan as co-secretary to the board).

Further announcements on the co-chair of the board and it having ‘a buddy’ soon as well.

[1]= If you don’t like the term ‘buddy’ (yes it is a bit American), then please do replace it with whatever word you would prefer: mate, friend, foobar, etc. – the important part is not the word, but rather the idea of watching out for someone else http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_system

Attending: Dr. Rufus Pollock, Pia Waugh, David F. Flanders, Dr Markus Buchhorn, Paul Szymkowiak, Clare Paine, Anna Gerber, Matt Didcoe, John Baxter, Fiona Tweedie, Craig Butt, Mat Todd, Georgina Taylor, Steve Bennett, Maia SSauren, Silvana Fumega, Chris Sakkas, Anna Daniel, Alex Sadleir, Richard Tubb, Steven De Costa, Dr Anne Cregan-Wolfe, etc

Agenda:

Length of meeting: 1 hour

1. Welcome by Open Knowledge Foundation Australia Chair Pia Waugh – 15 mins

   1. Housekeeping – Meeting video will be public, please add your name to the google doc as attending, add questions/comments to chat on right hand side. Minutes will be emailed to okfn-au mailing list and put pertinent info on website with blog.

   2. Overview of the agenda, including for everyone to introduce themselves on chat and mention something cool they are working on

2. Discussion with Dr Rufus Pollock – Open Knowledge Foundation Founder

   1. Hello to/by Rufus, welcome to Australia

   2. The values and principles of the Open Knowledge Foundation

   3. Summary of tour to date by Rufus and observations

   4. #ACTION blog post summarising Rufus tour

      1. videos, audio, pictures ← who has what, where?

      2. video on main Open Knowledge Foundation website.

3. Overview of Open Knowledge Foundation Australia organisational structure Pia 15 mins

   1. Why Open Knowledge Foundation for Australia? Upside down support umbrella

   2. NICTA opportunity

   3. MoU with Open Knowledge Foundation Central – to ideally sign with NICTA in the first instance. DRAFT at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iCqY6y4R_B_f9pxoUMl9N39kuN1borvqu21oCo6yyJc/edit – Have now updated so you all have public access with link

   4. Roles of Open Knowledge Foundation Australia – proposal for discussion

      1. Community development – support, insurance, funding, encouragement, mailing list, blog

      2. Supporting open knowledge community projects – GovHack, BarCamp, usergroups, etc

      3. Collaboration between existing open knowledge communities

      4. Growth of public awareness of and engagement with open knowledge

      5. Co-developing & collating resources for the community, e.g. summit-retreat weekend with Ambassadors/Board/Advisory, skills development with School of Data

      6. International engagement, reputation building.

   5. Proposed structure for Open Knowledge Foundation Australia

      1. Board – initial Board interim for 12 months, then ½ Board elected each year (2 year terms) by community. Ideally 7-8 people+Chair & Secretary.

         • Introductions

           • Pia Waugh [Fed Govt, data.gov.au, Gov2.0]

           • David F. Flanders

           • Lauren Cochrane [ACT Govt, open gov, open data, Gov 2.0]

           • Dr Markus Buchhorn [Higher-ed Research community]

           • Paul Szymkowiak

           • Steven De Costa [Industry: http://www.linkdigital.com.au/]

           • Clare Paine [Fed Govt]

         • Call for last 2 spots on Board any (data-)journalists?

      2. Local Ambassadors – community development, activities/events in local area supported by Board, communications online, community development. Grows organically, no upper limit of people. This role is being scoped at this document

         • Introductions – introducing each Ambassador – name, location. Please mention at least one cool thing you are planning on the chat channel for others to see

      3. Topic Ambassadors – GLAMbassadors, Makebassadors, etc, Australian community development around a particular topic, engagement in any appropriate International Working Groups

         • Introductions – introducing each Ambassador – name, location. Please mention at least one cool thing you are planning on the chat channel for others to see

      4. Advisory Committee – 3 monthly meetings to give feedback, plus advocacy in own communities. Ideally no more than 15-20 people.

         • Introductions

      5. Projects as sub committees – Eg GovHack, BarCamp – set up specifically for projects with their own committees, support and oversight. Numbers according to project.

         • Overview by Pia

   6. Communications

      1. Monthly meetings – with Board, joined by Ambassadors, minutes published publicly and projects, progress, funding, activities, any necessary voting and any Open Knowledge Foundation Central meeting updates discussed

      2. Advisory Ctte – joins the meeting on a quarterly basis

      3. Formal Open Knowledge Foundation Central communications – A rep from Board plus one super keen Ambassador to represent Australia on the Open Knowledge Foundation International Council mailing list (http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-local-coord) and report back to monthly meetings

         • Identify people

      4. International OKF communities – Ambassadors and Advisory Committee members are encouraged to look at the OKF mailing lists (http://lists.Open Knowledge Foundation.org/mailman/listinfo) and Working Group list (International Working Groups) engage with other international groups that may be useful to their activities and communities.

      5. Community – Ambassadors, the Board and Advisory Ctte should communicate publicly with our community and the public through

         • OKF Australia Blog – the Board and Ambassadors will blog news, activites

         • A monthly newsletter and other thoughts regularly. Advisory Ctte are encouraged to contribute one or two a year.

         • Timeliner for activities / current projects on site so people (inc newcomers) can immediately get involved

         • Announce list – setting mailchimp up, monthly newsletter to include news from all Ambassadors and any relevant international news

         • Discuss listserv – for discussions okfnau@

         • Twitter – @okfnau account.

      6. Support documentation – Feedback on existing documentation please Course of action? a.) scope local Ambassador induction pack above to include Topic Ambassador role/responsibilities? b.) write new induction pack for Topic Ambassadors?, c.) other?

   7. Announcement post on Open Knowledge Foundation Australia website with launch information on Monday nights, with details of all Ambassadors, Board and Advisory Committee inc bio pages and contact details.

      1. Status of Ambassador/Board/Advisory bio pages.

      2. #ACTION publish announcement post of Ambassadors

      3. #ACTION help disseminate this announcement to gov’t and other audiences who should be aware of these communities?

      4. Todo: consolidated roadmap of activities for the year – need ambassador plans for this to be added into a Timeliner GoogleSpreadsheet.

4. Next meetings

   1. Meeting timing:

      1. Board – Monthly

      2. Ambassadors – Monthly, to join in on Board meeting

      3. Advisory Ctte – 3 monthly

      4. Project sub cttes – as required.

   2. Preference for meeting day/time?

      1. Sunday evening, 6pm-ish? [MB-3rd pref] [CS-1st pref] [FT 1st pref][GT – 1][LC-1]

      2. Weekday late, .e.g. Tues 5pm? [MB-1st pref] [CS-2nd pref][GT – 2][LC-2]

      3. Weekday early, e.g. Wed 8am [MB-2nd pref][CS-3rd pref][GT – 3][LC-3]

   3. #ACTION calendar invites for next meeting

5. Other Business

   1. If there is time what else would you like to discuss?  Anything we don’t discuss we’ll put at the top of this document to add to further meetings.

6. Actions – followup from the meeting

   1. Action – person responsible

7. Future agenda items (that should be considered for discussion) in this list:

   • tools for coordinating activities? Eg Basecamp?

   • a page on the blog for a list of chapters

   • national projects

   • GLAMbassadors ← topic ambassadors and their role.

   • Tools for organising local events, e.g. city specific listserv, basecamp, etc?

   • Shirts/Polos for Ambassadors?

We’ve named this tour “The Open Knowledge Down Under” tour and encourage you to talk about this tour openly via the #OKFNau tag.

Free tickets for the events are available via eventbrite – see below. This tour is sponsored by the Mark Shuttleworth Foundation, OKFN Australia local chapter & GovHack via NiCTA. Many thanks to Cloud Earth for sponsoring the Sydney event and many thanks to QUT & Creative Commons Australia for sponsoring the Brisbane events!

http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au

The objectives of this open knowledge tour include:

• Talk to government representatives about the idea of ‘open knowledge’ especially ‘open data’, ‘data journalism’ & other ‘open’ events and efforts.

• Launch the official OKFN Australian chapter.  GovHack+OKFN = #Community!

• Appoint local OKFN volunteer ambassadors in cities across Australia, including an OKFN-au workplan and volunteer drive. #Leadership

• Establish a senior advisory committee for an ‘OKCon Asia Pacific’ (NB – OKCon in the Northern Hemisphere is in its 3rd year and will have over 1500+ people in attendance at the Geneva conference this year). #OKCon #AsiaPacific

Aim of this tour: Open Knowledge Empowers – it empowers people to participate in their society; it empowers citizens to understand research; it empowers people to explore their culture; it empowers communities to be inspired by one another and it empowers people to connect.  Empower your open knowledge community today!

Tour Details

Public events in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne!

Mon 26th August (Sydney)

• 6:00 – 7:30pm – Evening lecture at Sydney University: Dr Pollock public lecture on Open Data at Eastern Avenue Auditorium, will include a short showcase of Sydney GovHack 2013 winners – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

Tue 27th August (Sydney)

• 5:30 – 8:00pm – Evening: OKFN Discussion at the Open Research monthly meeting, including announcement of OKFN Ambassadors for Sydney.  – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

Wed 28th August (Canberra)

• Morning: Various meetings with Federal Government folk
• 12:00 – 2:00pm – A Gov 2.0 lunchtime lecture about open data for government, and announcement of OKFN Ambassadors for Canberra!  – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

Thur 29th August (Adelaide)

• Daytime: Meetings with South Australian Government folk
• 4:30pm: Public Lecture at the University of Adelaide – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

Fri 30th – Sat 31st August (Brisbane)

• Fri evening: A public lecture about open data for government and economic growth – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

• Meetings with South Australian Government and Announcement of OKFN Ambassadors!

• Sat 9:30 – 2:30pm: “Open Data Mixer” public event with Queensland Government – RSVP at http://opendatamixer.eventbrite.com.au/

Mon 2nd September (Melbourne)

• ‘GovHack Showcase Victoria’ – winners and exemplars of the GovHack event from Melbourne (including announcement of OKFN Ambassadors for Victoria!)

• Public Lecture at the University of Melbourne: “Open Data: the Key to Melbourne’s reign as the Most Livable City in the World.”  – RSVP at http://okfnau.eventbrite.com.au/

• Drinks reception and official relaunch of OKFN Australia (http://au.okfn.org) with Dr. Rufus Pollock, Pia Waugh and NICTA

For further information please see the OKF eventbrite RSS calendar feed for further OKFN events in Australia, or to the OKFN-au blog or follow our twitter handle.

** Dr. Rufus Pollock graduated from Cambridge University as a Mead fellow in Economics (after graduating with a distinction in mathematics).  Rufus is a well regarded economist because of his scholarly and advisory work on open data and open knowledge economies.  Rufus co-founded the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004 and personally wrote the first lines of code for the CKAN data system (Rufus is also an accomplished programmer).  Rufus has sat on several government advisory panels including the British Prime Minister’s appointed Public Sector Transparency Board. This involved working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who credited Rufus with starting the ‘Raw Data Now’ meme[1].  Currently, Rufus is a Shuttleworth fellow and is helping to expand the Open Knowledge Foundation expand worldwide, of which over 50+ chapters have formed including our Asia-Pacific neighbors: India, Nepal, Taiwan, China, let alone the many other OKFN local groups worldwide and still growing!

Schedule – we suggest you RSVP for an event near you as tickets will go quick. We will finalise details by the end of July:

Mon 26th August (Sydney)

[1]= See Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s talk at TED where he cites Rufus’ blog post on ‘Raw Data Now’

Here in Melbourne, Dr. Fiona Tweedie and myself (David F. Flanders) are organising the event in collaboration with the The Age newspaper’s DataPoint team and the Research Tech Services at The University of Melbourne.  Our thanks to Steve Manos & Marc Moncrief for their leadership to make this happen.

Fiona and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you why the Melbourne event will be different from the other GovHack events.  First, the theme of our event:

Not only are we hoping to make the event itself beautiful by inviting a diverse range of people and ideas; in addition, we are are so confident that Melbourne will produce the most beautiful data hacks that we are putting up a prize that anyone can win #FriendlyRivalry.  The challenge is simple: take any open data or knowledge and make it beautiful.  The prize to be announced soon.

What is an example of a winning idea?  Naturally, we don’t really know yet (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”).  However, the team we think would have won at last year’s GovHack (and who did win a prize) was @RuthEllison & @EilvDeece. Ruth & Alaistair took historical temperature data for Australia and turned it into a graph showing the overall rise in temperature. They then designed the graph into a piece of jewelry and had it laser cut into beautiful pieces of art.  We want to see more of this creativity, using data to tell a beautiful story and designing it so that it inspires discussion.

Who should attend? Designers, Journalists, Researchers, Developers, Storytellers, Makers, Cartographers, Artists, Students and anyone else who works with data on a regular basis and has the desire to make it beautiful!

When does this event happen (and can I just check it out):  Perhaps you are not sure about this thing called ‘hacking’?  Why not just come to the launch party and partake in the drinks, nibbles and games we have planned Friday evening May 31st, 2013.  We’ll start at 6pm in Media House (the HQ for The Age newspaper, next to Southern Cross station).  The prizes will be announced from the Nation’s capital, we’ll then have a game called ‘balloon bingo’ where everyone will get to know one another’s skillz through a mix of balloons and bingo (plan on having fun and meetings lots of interesting people!):

balloons + bingo = fun & new friends!

The main event (and ‘beautiful hacking’ space, as provided by The Age) will be open all day on Saturday and Sunday (June 1st & 2nd).  All competition entries will be due on Sunday evening at the close of the event.  Each team will need to submit a video of their entry and upload it to the GovHack website.  See the GovHack website for all the prizes!

Finally, if you are interested in participating make sure you grab a ticket here (tickets will be released in daily rounds):

http://govhack2013.eventbrite.com.au/

If you have further questions or would like to sponsor a prize yourself (so you can see your data be turned into something beautiful or functional), then please contact @DFFlanders or @FCTweedie for Victoria prizes or @PiaWaugh for national prizes.

“After doing this ‘Data Carpentry’ course module, I went back to use Google Maps for getting some directions, and I realized how much more beautiful a map can be; being taught TileMill gave me a whole new easy to use set of tools for building beautiful maps from open data.”  (Participant at #DataHack)

The catalyst for this event was simple: Melbourne has changed a lot this past year and I’d like to know how to best get around it on my bike.  This idea managed to get twenty Melburnians into the the boardroom at MediaHouse[1] – and they stayed?!  Through three intensive ‘Map’ courses (including homework), these Open Knowledge activists not only learned how to build maps from Open Data but then produced some stunning pieces of art – yes, that’s right ART!  The finale of this course was a ‘Data.Hack.Map’ Art Gallery, read on to find out how you can get involved so you too can build beautiful maps.

Warning beautiful maps follow (at the bottom of this post)

For the first class (first Wed evening of the month) twenty+ people showed up, including journalists, cartographers, developers, civil servants, students, geospatial experts and many more – a collection of people which assured that everyone was going to learn something new!  The topics we covered, included:

1. What is TileMill; How does it work and how will I be using it to make my own data map; What is this HTML-like language called CartoCSS (which allows me to changes the look and feel of maps), and 
2. Where can you get open map data? Introduction to OpenStreetMap and pulling in data based on OSM tags: difference between points, lines and polygons (and how to make them have a look & feel on the map)
3. Homework[3]: dig around the TileMill server we have provided for you and create your own map!  Hint: do simple things: change colors, thickness of lines, arrange points on the map; if your feeling brave try importing some data from OSM).  Most importantly everyone was told to borrow from one another maps on the TileMill server we set up: this event is OPEN so sharing is GOOD!

The second class (2nd Wed evening of the month) we had everyone present the maps they created as part of their homework to everyone else (some old school ‘show-n-tell’).  Based on everyone presenting what they learned about mapping (as well as encouraging everyone to declare what aspirations they had for building a map) we encouraged people into like-minded teams.  The exciting development from this class was the creation of teams that wanted to make other kinds of maps (instead of cycling – which is exactly what we were hoping would happen).  We learned some really important things from this class as well, things we would do different next time to make sure everyone was catered for:

1. What are some of the tricky syntax options in TileMill; how do you declare classes…; what if you want to have more than a single CartoCSS file for doing multiple layers and levels of Catographic design on a map
2. Who had a lot of trouble?  We want you to be proud of taking on new learning and do an extra session with the class Sensei this weekend.  Learning something new that is a struggle should be praised!  Don’t give up, fight to know it. You can do it!
3. Homework: In your newly formed teams decide what map you are going to make, declare a ‘map platoon leader’ and have them assign roles to the rest of the team for creating the map (e.g. who is collecting the data that is needed, who is formatting/wrangling the data so that it can be loaded into the map, who is doing the cartographic styling; who is preparing and delivering the final map for printing so it can be displayed at the finale art gallery; who is writing the speech that will be given at the art gallery on behalf of the team while people quaff wine and cheese, who is coordinating outfits for the team at the Art Gallery. etc).

The third class (3rd Thurs of the month) we declared a ‘Study Hall’ where the teams could do more work with one another as teams.  This also allowed the organisers to go around and make sure everyone was up to speed on what to expect for the finale class (and “Art Gallery’).  Again, there are a couple of key lessons we’d utilise next time:

1. For those still having trouble with TileMill, get them together and work through their problems.  Encourage ‘ciritical feedback’ as a course can always be better and engage people’s learning styles in better ways.
2. Get people excited about the finale Art Gallery and presentation of their printed map (if they want to have a digital flat screen version alongside their printed version fine, but don’t underestimate the quality of a high-quality printed map for beauty – let alone likelihood that someone is going to want to hang it over their fireplace!).
3. Have teams give you emails of friends and family that they can invite to the Art Gallery – nothing like an email from the organisers to brag about the students and what they are doing: we all like our families to be proud of us and what we are learning and creating!

For the finale class / art gallery (4th Wed of the month), we hosted an Art Show[2], where there was no agenda, but rather an emphasis that people should socialise, quaff wine, eat cheese (in our case BBQ) and do their utmost to think about what makes a map beautiful.  It was great fun: everyone walking around asking the ‘teams of artists’ how they achieved their beautiful maps.   Some things that worked quite well (as well as ways to improve it) included:

1. Food and wine stations positioned near to each of the different maps (keeps people circulating and congregating around the maps).  
2. Encouraging the designated team ‘cryer’ to give a two minute speech on the art they had produced.
3. The right mood lighting is essential, maybe some fake digital candles and spot lighting for the artful maps.

We’d welcome more feedback from participants, especially here on this blog in the open so that anyone else wanting to reuse this course syllabus can also learn from your experience (we’d recommend leving comments in the form of: a.) one complimentary comment for what we should continue doing, and b.) one critical comment for what we could change to make it even better!

Above all, we’d like to thank everyone (organisers and participants alike[4]) for volunteering their time to do good for the Open Knowledge movement!

And now for the moment you’ve been waiting for…

The unveiling of the maps

DISCLAIMER: the maps shown below are done at different ‘height’ ratios to show their details, e.g. the digital version doesn’t really show how beautiful these maps are when printed (unless perhaps you have a monitor that is A1 in size).

The course Sensei @Stevage1 did an amazing job of both teaching as well working on this own map.  This (for me) is *The-New-Bicycle-Map-for-Melbourne* (something I plan on lamenting and carrying on my bike from now on).

The below map by Darren Yu speaks for itself, as there is something very quirky about the grid layout of Melbourne CBD.  I love the idea of the PacMan video game and making your way around the city via tram, bike, foot and collecting points as you move from intersection to intersection (I guess the only question is how to avoid the ghosts!).

This map, is going to make waves as it is not only a map of cycling routes, but of dangerous cycling routes & spots!  Stay tuned for this map going viral as I think we are going to see news stories about it soon.

And then there is a map that does it all, this map not only provided cycle routes but it also was able to predict what was the best cycle route to take through the city (stay tuned for the mobile map app!).

For me, the most exciting map was the team which created a map of where you can find Melbourne street art:

I like this map so much I’ve had it framed so I can hang it in my house as they main ‘fire-mantle’ piece as part of my personal collection.  I love the meta question that this map invokes: Q: “Ah what is that map of that looks like someone has spray-painted on it?”.  A: “Well, it is a map of where Melbourne Street art is, the size of the ‘spray paint’ explains how much art there is there”.  For me this map is beyond beauty, it is a statement about the love of Melbourne and how street art is a part of its DNA, what makes it unique and special out of any other city I have lived in…

On that note, I’ll leave off with a little reflection:  this event was beautiful (it was horribly organised by yours truly), but the talented Melburnians who came to it and made it their own and produced things of beauty are why labouring for Open Knowledge is worth it.  This event was free, open and enabled everyone to learn more – it proved that Open Knowledge can do magical things when you commit to it.  Best of all, I love this city more than ever before and want to make it even better.  That’s what Open Knowledge is about.

 FOOTNOTES:

[1]= Many thanks to The Age’s DataPoint news team for hosting the event in their beautiful HQ at MediaHouse, next to SouthernCross train station.

[2]= Thanks to The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) for supporting this event, Directors Ross Wilkinson and Cythia Love were able to take time out to come and talk with the participants about this new data-mapping tool.

[3]= “Here’s a written version of my speedy presentation of the homework on Wednesday night. Sort of a walk-through, if you will: 1. Connect to the tilemill server, as per David’s instructions. 2. Create a new project. 3. Add a layer with all the ways (aka ‘lines’) from OpenStreetMap for Melbourne: a.) click the layers button on the bottom left, then add, b.) Click PostGIS (remember?), c.) Click data source, select the favourite (ubuntu/ubuntu…), d.) Give it an id. You’ll use this to style it with; e.) Leave the other properties default; 4. Click “Save and style”. This creates a basic style for it. 5. Now, feel free to go digging in the other projects to copy some more styles, layers etc across. In the process, you should learn a lot about how TileMill works. These links will be helpful: a.) http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/crashcourse/introduction/ b.) http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/manual/carto/ c.) http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/manual/adding-layers/

[4]= Additional Notes:

• Participants twitter handles include: @annielouey @awise22 @Brynushka @cartdeco1 @DFFlanders @marcmoncrief @mechamoth @om_henners @simokeefe @SirRustyroo @stevage1 @woowoowoo @ZedJS

When people ask me what the OKFN community in Australia does, I often refer to the mission of those aboard the Stark Trek Enterprise (being a geek myself), the idea of ‘undiscovered frontiers’ for ‘Open Knowledge’ is an important one.

Just like the TV show, we never know what the next OKFN event is going to bring about! What we do know is that by the end of the episode, the things we have done will have pushed forward the ‘open knowledge’ frontier. My point is that there are very definitive things that come out of ‘Open Knowledge’ activities (even when you are not always sure at the start what those things are going to be).  In short, the one thing you need to know when participating in ‘open knowledge’ activities: get good people together and good things will manifest.

Accordingly, in this post I want to highlight the very real things that do come out of events and help push forward new ‘open knowledge frontiers’.  Below is a quick A-Z list of the types of ‘open knowledge’ that come out of doing OKF-like activities.   Many of the below listed activities are not directly influenced from OKFN, but all of them had an ‘open knowledge’ patriot involved in some shape or form:

The frontier of Open Access further discovered when David Willets (UK Senior Science Minister) announced that taxpayers would have access to the research for which they are paying.

The frontier of Open Bibliography further discovered on the 17th of November 2011 when the British Library announced that the British National Bibliography would be made available to UK organisations wanting to build new services, apps, tools and businesses.

The frontier of Open Citation further discovered on the 22nd of June 2012 as Oxford University Press (OUP) announces it will be the first University press to support an open scholarly record whereby anyone (not just a single publisher) can mathematically declare impact.

The frontier of Open Data further discovered on the 30th of November 2011 as the Open Data Institute (ODI) is announced to make sure government research is made available for use by everyone, especially our researchers in Academia.

The frontier of Open Educational Resources (OERs) further discovered on the 30th of September 2011 as California governor signed two bills making several core textbooks Open Access.

The frontier of Open Further Education further discovered on the 29th of July 2012 when “For-Profit” universities were called-out by Senator Tom Harkin’s two year investigative report for “exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars on marketing, regulatory evasion and manipulation.”

The frontier of the Open Genome further discovered on the 26th of September 2012 demonstrating as a community its commitment to share the science about the stuff we are made of over registering patent is an exemplar discipline that all other subjects should clone.

The frontier of Open Hardware further discovered on the 24th of October 2012 the RaspberryPi is sold out in less than a day making computing an affordable learning and research opportunity once again for everyone from children to senior citizens.

The frontier Open Innovation further discovered on the 26th of September 2012 Mozilla & NSF teamed up to demonstrate the power of universities and companies working together so that both can achieve greater innovation than they could otherwise do on their own.

The frontier of Open Journals further discovered on the 11th of June 2011 as three major research funders announce an Open Access Journal to rival Nature called eLife, an opportunity for world class research to recognised by more than a single publisher.

The frontier of Open Kinect discovered on the 19th of November 2010 as Microsoft does a 180 on their xBox 360 to embrace open hardware hackers and encourage further experimental uses.

The frontier of Open Licensing further discovered on the 2nd of April 2012 as Creative Commons release draft version no.4 of their licenses of which the top priority is the internationalisation of the licenses so more countries worldwide can benefit.

The frontier of Open Metrics further discovered on the 13th of January 2012 as academics started to declare that the current citation impact measures were not accurate representations of the so-called impact factor.

The frontier of the Open Net further discovered on the 19th of January 2012 the largest internet protest in all of history occurred to stop the SOPA and PIPA bills and organisations such as the internet defense league are formed to put a stop to the lobbyists who would destroy the open net.

The frontier of Open Ontologies further discovered on the 28th of August 2012 as data.ac.uk is announced as a common place to share domain vocabularies and similar organising structures for scholarship.

The frontier of Open Patient records further discovered on 11th of October 2012 when GlaxoSmithKline (the 5th largest Pharma company in the world) declared their patient study records would be made open for more open research opportunities.

The frontier of Quality Open Education Resources further discovered on the 11th of May 2012 as the learning community begins to raise the bar for all content providers so that their content is free, open, quality checked and approved.

The frontier of Open Review by Peers further discovered on the 1st of January 2011 as BioMedCentral declares that it will use an Open Peer Review process whereby the reviewers will need to publish their signed reviews openly alongside the paper that is being reviewed.

The frontier of Open Stack further discovered on the 12th of June 2012 as it declares its board members and governing principles thereby ensuring a ‘linux for the Cloud’ where independent Clouds can offer the features and cost savings of the Cloud without being subject to the Patriot Act.

The frontier of Open Text-mining further discovered on the 14th of March 2012 when the Wellcome Trust declares it is absurd to restrict researchers from analysing their own research through text mining tools.

The frontier of Open Ubuntu Unity further discovered on the 7th of July 2012 reaches a critical mass of User support for an Open Operating system that is easy to use and increasingly becoming a competition to vendor based OS systems like Apple and Microsoft.

The frontier of Open Vs Closed Standards further discovered on the 2nd of June 2012 when Oracle is told that it can’t copyright the structure of its APIs assuring that as systems grow the API will remain an open method by which data can be passed between systems.

The frontier of Open courseWare further discovered on the 18th of August 2011 when Stanford’s online Artificial Intelligence course had over 100k people sign-up.

The frontier of Open XML further discovered on the 1st of October 2012 as Google declares proprietary non-Open document formats like .doc as redundant on the modern Web.

The frontier of Open diY (yes a stretch, but Flanders loves 3D Printers) further discovered on the 1st of November 2011 the ‘Model T’ of DIY 3D printers is released by the RepRap project called the Prusa Mendel, perhaps “T” for Terminator as it prints itself!

The frontier of Open Zooniverse / citiZen science further discovered on the 19th of December Zooniverse announced that it has reached over half a million citizen scientists, the largest open science community of its kind in the world!

I’d love to further classify the different types of ‘Open Knowledge’ so please leave further thoughts in the comments

Original Page: http://cottagelabs.com/news/open-access-week-celebration

(1) Political party funding data, which lists what companies donate money to which political parties.

(2) A database that includes the archives of all Age articles along with key words and relationships between those keywords.

(3) Weather data for Australia going back one-hundred years.

The challenge: hackers entered a beehive of activity called the ‘Data Newsroom’ where they were presented with the data and asked to form teams made up of journalists, developers and citizens so as to produce a story for TheAge.com.au

Fourteen teams were formed who then spent the day formulating a two minute ‘pitch’ to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ of data journalism experts.

Four teams were then shortlisted and participants were sent to the Public Lecture at Melbourne University by the Inventor of the Web (Sir Tim Berners Lee), where the winner would be announced and be congratulated by Sir Tim. See other posts on this blog for winner announcements and pictures.

Hacker = by ‘hacker‘ we are referring to anyone who likes to ‘playfully experiment with doing things quicker and more efficiently’, including the likes of our participants which included: developers, graphic design artists, journalists, students, lecturers, visualisation coders, programmers and citizens who care about