Open Knowledge Melbourne has had a slower start to this year than others. Last week, we ran a planning session to find out from you, the Open Knowledge Melbourne community,  what we could do this year. A big thank you to those that came along – thank you for participating and being really engaged with the discussion.

Thank you, also to the people who completed the very short survey – if you missed last weeks meetup and would like to provide us with your thoughts and some feedback, the survey will be open for another week.

At the planning session we asked the Open Knowledge Melbourne community what we could learn about, discuss, make, create or do this year. And there were a lot of ideas put forward.

Maps, our perennial favourite, featured across all categories, as did themes of data analysis, data visualisation and science.

Some of the post-it suggestions are can be seen below:

PostIt note planning collage

We are working on turning these ideas, suggestions, topics and themes into the schedule of meetup sessions for this year. There are some people to ask come speak, workshops and dojos to put together, and projects to scope. This is shaping to be an interesting year.

— Post written by Sally P.

These minutes are UNAPPROVED currently.

Open Knowledge Australia board meeting

7 December 2016 7:30 pm EDST

Present: Matthew Cengia, Fiona Tweedie, Rosie Williams, Helen Ensikat, Ann-Marie Elias, Nicholas Gruen, Markus Buchhorn

1. Welcome
2. Report on Open Knowledge Melbourne (Matt Cengia)
   1. Going well; weekly meetups etc. only support necessary is release of funds for weekly meetups.
3. Report on Health Hack 2016 (TBC)
   1. Follow up with Mike Imelfort about HH financials, especially Sydney expenses
4. Financial status
   1. Markus has asked Steven for a ‘full year’ version of the reports
5. Grant Application process
6. Tax concession charity registration
   1. Yes investigate further, FT to look at the forms
7. Board composition
   1. FT resigning, nominates Matt Cengia
   2. Rosie Williams replacing Alysha Thomas
8. Any other business
   1. Zoe Piper at Data 61 to offer advice and support
9. Close

Ginny, Markus and Nic are all in a hangout – on our own???

Original link to agenda/minutes is here.

The YouTube recording is below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GED_n05ifI0

Matt and Ling made an enthusiastic start on collecting attributes of current http://data.vic.gov.au/ datasets to gauge machine-readability and bulk accessibility as a resource for the community.  The plan is to extend this to get an idea of what if any issues exist for access to and processing of available datasets, with a view to providing feedback to data owners.

The GovHack organisers made good progress deciding on their judging criteria and put together a tech panel.

Steve found himself 34 thousand new trees in Burnside South Australia and went through the process of adding them to http://www.opentrees.org/, showing newcomer Riza exactly what needs to be done when new datasets are released. He is the map guy after all!

Sarah and Nic took on the OK website to see whether it can be updated and improved! We look forward to seeing their suggestions.

Meanwhile, Bozo and The Clown (Lachlan and Fiona, I asked who was who, but they refused to tell me!) hacked on some funding applications for OpenGLAM initiatives.

Thanks to post author, Ben Lyall, one of Open Knowledge Melbourne’s new attendees.

This goal became a larger deal for me when I tried to download some geospatial data from DELWP on the GovHack weekend, only to find that I had to download it via the Spatial Datamart, which was sporadically inaccessible, and which had a delay on delivering the link to the downloadable data to my email inbox (Apparently the Data Vic custodians made this clear via Twitter several days in advance, but I guess I missed the memo). This would have been a fine platform when the data was being used almost exclusively by internal government departments who were happy to wait a couple of days for the data to appear, but for somebody starting a hackathon and needing access to the data right now to start his project, this is somewhat of a pain. To be clear, I don’t blame the data owners for not providing a better access to the data; they’ve got limited resources, and anything they can give us is better than nothing, but I think it’s important to make clear to the community that they’ll have to deal with these hurdles so they know ahead of time, and also highlight which data owners it’s most worthwhile offering help to in order to make their data more accessible.

Anyway, with all the amazing speakers we’ve had at our meetups, as well as the preparation for GovHack, this plan kind of fell by the way site. Now though, we’ve got some time, and I suggested that in future we could perhaps allocate just 10 or 15 minutes of most nights to each picking a data set or two, trying to download it and having a quick look to decide on its integrity. So in an attempt to just get the ball rolling, I’ve created a Google Docs Spreadsheet to start listing some of the slightly more tricky data sets. Ideally the findings from this spreadsheet can, and should, be added as comments to each data set, but I figured a central location for us to contribute to to begin with was a good start. Currently the document requires specific permission for users to edit it; I’m not sure whether it’s worth allowing the entire world to make edits to it. In any case, if you want access, you can click the Share button in the top-right corner and press the Request Access link in the bottom-right of the pop-up to request edit access from me.

This is a best-effort work in progress, and I’ve no idea how it’ll go, but let’s give it a shot!

The Greens funded the tool’s development several years back as a proof of concept, but it hasn’t received much love since then, and in Scott’s own words, is boring and clunky. Scott’s purpose for showing us this tool was to get our advice, and hopefully some people-power to actually improve or rework the software to make it a viable tool with which to make compelling arguments that can’t be easily portrayed through tabular data. Currently if Scott wants to present information about the budget or similar, he has to spend days assembling something in Photoshop or After Effects, and he’s convinced there must be a better, quicker way, to generate pretty visualisations with any financial data.

After Scott’s presentation, Paul Valla, one of the ThoughtWorkers, presented the beginnings of an API he’s been working on for about a week, which aims to take the machine-unfriendly spreadsheets from http://data.gov.au/dataset/budget-2014-15-tables-and-data, and present them in a machine-readable form for use by people in their own sites. This would lower the bar for entry to others interested in visualising this data, and will hopefully result in many people creating their own finance visualisation websites.

Following Paul’s presentation there was time for questions, and the general consensus was that having a standardised data format and/or API is the first step, especially if we can find a format that has been standardised on elsewhere (somebody mentioned the UK open budget, I believe?), since then tools that already exist for that format can be used by us. Many said that attempting to shoehorn all conceivable functionality into a single app is a recipe for clutter and confusion, and that it would be much better to have the API, and design many smaller apps for different purposes.

The discussion was really valuable and in-depth, and impossible to fully cover here, but it sounds like lots of people have lots of ideas for how to make this work, and we hope to see a small and flexible team at upcoming Open Knowledge meetups keen to work on this problem. In the coming weeks the Open Knowledge organisers will be focussing on preparing potential participants for GovHack, and running various presentations and tutorials on potentially useful tools, but anybody interested in working on the Open Economy project is welcome to join us at ThoughtWorks and form a focus group to play around with this concept and see what they can come up with.

I and the rest of the Open Knowledge ambassadors want to thank Scott Ludlam and all the other participants for coming and making the night a great success; we had a fantastic number of attendees, and are really pleased with how everything went!

If anybody has comments or ideas about this project, feel free to tweet @okfnau or @senatorludlam, join our mailing list, or attend one of our meetups!