Relative newcomer Sarah worked on Temporal Earth, mapping ANZAC troop movements So this was my 2nd OK Melbourne Meetup. First there was a short talk about Melbourne’s open hacking spaces. This was a really interesting insight into making things at the hacker spaces in particular the Connected Community Hackerspace. I was certainly intrigued and am beginning to think of some weird and wonderful gadgets to think about making!

We then parted into separate groups to help on people’s open knowledge projects. I joined in with Matt’s Temporal Earth group. This task was appealing as it was based on the topic of Anzac Day. Matt has spent some time compiling data from war diaries to represent where, when and with which battalion Australia and New Zealand troops participated in the 1st world war. He is making an animation to show where the troops were located on a given date. The data has taken him quite some work to gather together in a data file as it involves manually scanning through the mostly hand written diaries for dates, times and location names.

To coincide with Anzac day and commemorate the 100th anniversary we worked together to help complete his dataset up to the 25/04/1915.

We worked in pairs to decipher the text and enter the data. During the session we managed to get quite a few troops to Gallipoli. Some diaries had been typed but most were handwritten. Some were combined, others had pages missing and those that were available were not always in perfect condition with paper ripped over data entries. Reading these diaries is not easy to do quickly. You instantly get involved in the narrative and start to picture the movements of the troops. Some accounts are very funny, some really detailed and of course many are quite shocking and sad. There is so much information in the texts and mapping the tracks of each battalion is just a start of what is possible. I think this is a very valuable resource and an excellent example of opening up information which is already available to provide future possibilities and gain knowledge.

Anton talks hacker spaces @OKFNau pic.twitter.com/g1PyN5GMv8 — Lachlan Musicman (@datakid23) April 22, 2015

Oh, and we heard about Hackerspaces

Regular Open Knowledge attendee Ros spent some time chatting with the Code for Australia fellows and had the following to report: Tonight, Open Knowledge played host to 3 incoming Fellows for Code for Australia. Charged with working with data owners to identify and define problems in preparation for Govhack 2015, @AlishaRyansT, @CosmoRuth and @RosettaMills will be working with City of Melbourne , Geelong City Council and Ballarat City Council respectively. Fresh from hobnobbing with industry and digital denizens at the Connect Expo earlier in the day, the fellows (I mean, lovely ladies) chatted with @hiya_roz about how they would collaborate to bring a unified approach to uncovering the problems that their clients faced. The excellent selection of crudites and dips lovingly prepared by @MattCen (subbing for the regular guy behind the kitchen bench…hi Lachlan!) spurred further speculation by the Fellows about possible outcomes from GovHack as a result of their efforts. Meanwhile, @FCTweedie crowdsourced this blog entry so future generations shall bear witness to the exploits of a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens and their regular endeavours in open data, hommus scoffing and tea chugging.

Thanks to Ros and Sarah for sharing their experiences at a highly productive evening of open knowledge hacking!

Hanging out, waiting to join the @OKFNau meet up in Melbourne. If the technology behaves… — Tim Sherratt (@wragge) April 8, 2015

Dr Sherratt is a self-described digital historian and web tinkerer, who is the manager of Trove at the National Library of Australia and has recently also become Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at Canberra University.

What is Trove? Apart from being voted GovHack’s highest-rated dataset last year, Trove brings together content from research organisations, libraries, archives and museums. Trove also enables access to full-text digital resources, including over 150 million Australian newspaper articles. These articles have been scanned with OCR and a dedicated community of volunteers have been working to correct errors in the OCR. On any day, over 100,000 corrections are made.

So what can you do with all this content? Tim showed us a few projects that have used Trove’s content, ranging from explorations of the front-page content of Australian newspapers and ABC Radio National’s news coverage to playful projects that pull faces (or just eyes) out of Trove’s repository and Trove’s tweet bots. If you feel like building your own Trove Twitter bot, Tim has kindly made his code available on Github!

Trove is designed to be friendly to users from all levels of technical expertise. API keys are available from the help centre, but you can get started straight away using the API console. Tim shared a few tips and tricks, such as the importance of Trove’s zones, which divide up the collections, and ‘works’, which collapse multiple editions of the same printed work. After Tim signed off, Steve Bennett, who has previously blogged about Tove, helped University of Melbourne archivist Katie Wood to use the API to identify content from the university’s archives that is discoverable via Trove.

Working on the #trove data, with added secret plans for a new cultural hackathon. @OKFNau pic.twitter.com/a3bXcNvGuF — Lachlan Musicman (@datakid23) April 8, 2015

Open Knowledge Melbourne would like to say a huge thank-you to Tim for persisting through the technical difficulties to talk with us! We’re looking forward to getting to know Trove better.

The year began with a data journalism day hosted by The Age prior to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Melbourne lecture. The day brought together storytellers with data wranglers to coax the news out of a number of large datasets with the help of The Age’s data journalists including ambassador Craig Butt.

In Melbourne, we love maps and map-making has been a theme this year. Following the success of the data newsroom, we held the first of a series of TileMill workshops. Assisted by Steve Bennett, teams made custom maps of Melbourne, exploring everything from cycle paths to the city’s famous street art. One of the maps, featuring black spots for bike accidents, was featured on The Age’s data blog. We’ve since gone on to run map-making for researchers at Melbourne University, where maps presenting everything from Aboriginal Australian rock art to Tibetan language groups have been lovingly constructed.

The middle of the year saw over twenty Melbourne teams compete in GovHack, where our theme was Beautiful Data. Over a packed weekend, teams explored data ranging from immigration statistics, population growth, and water quality in the Yarra to distribution of whale species in Australian waters. You can read some of co-organiser David Flanders’ reflections on the outcomes of GovHack 2013 on his blog. Planning is already underway for GovHack 2014, which promises to be bigger than ever.

The weekend of hacking (and presentation of prizes) wasn’t the end of the GovHack story. At the beginning of September, we brought together some of our GovHackers with representatives of the Victorian and Australian government and OKFN co-founder Dr Rufus Pollock. We discussed the lessons and challenges for the open data community and heard again and again that pdfs are not what’s needed! By the end of the afternoon’s discussions, we’d agreed that we need to build the relationships between the producers and consumers of government data to drive reuse.

The Melbourne team with Dr Rufus Pollock and Pia Waugh (L-R Dr Maia Sauren, Steve Bennett, Dr Fiona Tweedie, Dr Rufus Pollock, David Flanders, Craig Butt, Front – Pia Waugh)

Inspired by Rufus’ exhortations to build cathedrals of knowledge, next stop was HealthHack. Curated by Maia Sauren, this weekend brought together health researchers with developers and data experts to address some of the challenges faced by researchers in their daily work. You can read more about HealthHack here. At the subsequent showcase of outcomes, one of the researchers said she had become a ‘born-again HealthHacker’, which suggests we achieved our mission of showing researchers what’s possible with some custom-built tools. We’re planning another HealthHack for next May.

We hadn’t forgotten about the comments from the GovHack showcase, and in December Steve led the first of what we hope will be a series of ‘meet the data-owner’ events. We brought together over 50 data enthusiasts to meet some of the team from VicRoads to talk about what data the community would most like to see released and how VicRoads can work more closely with data consumers. We’re excited to be working with the team from data.vic and are planning more similar meet ups.

As well as events, the OKFN Melbourne team have been spreading the word about our work and building links with similar communities across Melbourne. Members of the team have spoken at events such as NerdNite Melbourne, the Australian Computer Society and Link Festival.

We’ve benefited hugely from the support of The Age and the University of Melbourne this year, as well as our event sponsors and many supporters along the way. After a short break, we’re looking forward to another exciting year of open knowledge, along with plenty of dumplings and Campari, in 2014.