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.

When we started the Open Knowledge group that meets weekly in Melbourne our goal was to make it as accessible as possible. WIFI would be necessary or preferred. Week nights were probably the best option, sometime between 5pm and 9pm. Some people would like or need dinner, vegan and gluten free options would be necessary, a drink always makes these events more convivial. Disability access would be necessary. The venue would need to be queer friendly. Accessibility is hard – there are a lot of factors to take into account, and there seemed to be another accessibility issue to account for every time we talked about it. But, as we discovered, it’s not actually that hard – with a little consideration and some planning it is achievable – as Sarah, one of the Melbourne team, noted:

…it doesn’t come naturally to most people/organisers… but it’s precisely that change of focus in action and planning habits that seems to be baulked at the most. A lot of the time, it’s not impossible to do or to organise…(it) is totally doable, but hey, maybe it’s not something you’re going to remember easily when it’s not a constant factor in your own life/work! Once you re-train yourself/habits, it seems weird not to have done it that way in the first place… accessibility isn’t actually that difficult once you’ve made that initial effort.

The 6-9pm time slot we decided on was never going to be parent friendly and there was little we could do about that. But it was the hardest of the criteria to meet in that meeting it radically reshaped our vision – weekends are unattractive for a regular meet, work hours are too, and in reality, no time is good for all parents, depending on number and age of children. Further, children friendly venues – potentially alcohol free, healthy food, safe play space – are hard to find, expensive to book, or too busy for a semi formal gathering, for exactly those criteria we were after.

So we made a commitment to make GovHack as accessible as possible for parents. If we can’t make our weekly event family friendly, our annual flagship event absolutely would be, whatever the cost.

The How

I have connections to a child care centre, so I went to them and asked what they thought, what I would need, how many carers per child per age group, etc. We all know that getting expert advise is usually the best option, and for something that’s otherwise outside of our skill set, it’s essential.

On their advice, I then rang the relevant Government department to see what the law was with regard to certification. A call to the City of Melbourne, in which I was bumped to three different departments and spoke with 4 different people, discovered that there were no municipal requirements. They eventually advised I speak to the Department of Human Services.

After speaking to only two people at the DHS, the friendly Colin advised me that according to the Children’s Services Act 1996 (pdf), Part 1, section 5(1B)(g) “Non-application of this Act”, we were exempt from any particular regulation with regard to what we were required to provide by law. Because GovHack is an “ad hoc seminar”, it does not fall under the act. For clarity I asked some hypothetical questions and he consistently answered “you don’t fall under the act”. I asked if a dog could be used to mind the children and his response was “you don’t fall under the act”.

As soon as we knew this, we contacted our venue hosts, the very generous ThoughtWorks, and let them know that childcare was go. We had warned them previously that this was something we were committed to and would be chasing – they were absolutely accommodating. I have no idea if they needed to make any arrangements with their building insurance, but they didn’t blink. Having a good relationship with your venue host is a boon.

We made a commitment to paying our childcare staff the award wage – we wanted professional child care workers with accreditation and working with children checks, and we value workers as much as parents. But we also didn’t charge a fee. This was important to me – accessibility is as much about cost of a service as it is providing the service.

I made a personal commitment to fund the childcare regardless of the uptake or sponsorship, to which the rest of organising group immediately agreed to kick into. Thinking it would cost about $1500 in wages, we asked for more to pay for extras like games, toys, and craft stuff. It ended up costing around $2000 in wages for four staff.

We advertised that we were planning on providing this service early, and to the people we knew would help us spread the word to the target audience – Twitter, the Women in Science network, etc.

It’s a pretty easy sell to get people interested, to be honest. The IT sector has taken a well deserved beating over the last four or five years about its prejudices, privileges and inaccessibility. All of which are embarrassing and solvable problems – but only if you try to solve them.

I think that it’s important to show that you are serious for people to believe you, which was why we were committed to providing childcare regardless of interest expressed by the community. I think that next year the uptake on childcare will be even bigger – because people will have seen that we deliver, and the news will have got out further again. And in fact, not only have we fielded questions from other community IT groups (bravo Ruby Conf Au), but the state government informally expressed that anything to get more people involved in the local technology scene was something they could get behind.

We were lucky – the State Government was one of our sponsors, and they fully funded the service (thank you very much DataVic!). It took some wrangling – they didn’t jump on board straight away, but we wouldn’t let them cut it from the budget/sponsorship package. In fact, it took up a large chunk of our budget – around a third.

But we had also approached Microsoft to fund it, and would have kept chasing other potential sponsors had the Vic Government not come through – for the cost, it’s cheap advertising for any brand, and ostensibly good brand management given the issues the industry has faced noted above.

The Result

Before the event we had seven expressions of interest (we got more retweets than that!) via the survey, and three definite, maybe four via the ticketing question within Eventbrite – but that could have been the same group.

I can count at least five occasions where one of the organising collective was in a discussion with potential attendees, data owners, sponsors, mentors, volunteers and other collaborators in which someone has said “but I’ve got kids, so that weekend…” and we have told them that we would have paid, professional childcare.

People would always be surprised, shocked even. They look at you funny and say “Really?” and then you can see their mental cogs turning. All have been impressed.

So that’s how you provide childcare. Finding the money is the hardest challenge, but since we were willing to pay that out of our own pockets, we just went ahead and organised it – build it and they will come. By the time the funders came on board we were already selling it to our community.

Start the conversation early, start the process early, find some money. The community will back you up, have no fear.

The guidelines/framework/rules we had were:

Service available from 9am-4pm on Saturday and 9am-3pm on Sunday – ie not the full days. But we also have venue curfews so that people get out of the building and we don’t need to find a volunteer for the 3am Sunday morning shift.

No care for children 0-2 years old.

Children 3-5/6 years old will have their own space in venue with room for 3-6 children – two carers.

Children 6/7-12 years old will have their own space in venue with room for 5-10 children – two carers.

We will be providing suitable entertainment as recommended by our childcare providers.

We would also ask for your understanding that when all places are taken, we will not ask our childcare workers to stretch themselves. Depending on levels of demand, first in best dressed is probably how we will run it.

Parents are expected to stay on site while their child is in childcare – this is not a drop zone for your shopping expedition.

In the end there was one child in care all weekend, and three other parents took advantage of the service for shorter periods over the weekend. A success. This was Zaya, the biggest and happiest user of the service.

If you think making your event accessible takes too much hard work, you should try parenting some time, or read up on Spoon Theory. This was a relative walk in the park.

Big thanks to the whole Melbourne Open Knowledge team for all their support making the Melbourne GovHack awesome, Thoughtworks for being very cool, and Jordan for always saying yes when I said “what if we did this?”. A large part of this text was written before GovHack in response to a question from Pat Allen – thanks for asking, I would never have written it down to remember if you hadn’t. This also accounts for potential problems with tense in some parts of the text.

Attendees:

• Dr. Fiona Tweedie (Co-Chair)
• Dr. Maia Sauren (Chairing)
• Ana Mihov-Nicotodis (Co-Secretary)
• Steven De Costa (Co-Secretary & Treasurer)
• Michael Phillips (Board Member)
• Markus Buchhorn (Board Member)

 Agenda

• Welcome from the Chair
• Apologies
• Finances
  • Update on Finances
• Updates
  • Actions from last meeting
  • Network and Community
  • Planning Actions
• Other business
  • Rejected other business

Minutes

Welcome from the Chair and apologies

The meeting was opened by Dr. Maia Sauren

Apologies:

• Nicholas Gruen (Chairman)
• Anne Cregan-Wolfe (Board Member)
• James Kliemt (Board Member)

Finances

Update on Finances

• Steven: Looking to provide read-access to a general account with different levels of access for delegates. Ops manager @ Link Digital will do books via Xero to take some pressure off NICTA; NICTA are happy with this arrangement.
• Steven: Creating budget items – e.g. Melb local funding so that cash can be in single account but funds can be tracked. Some cleaning up of account to be done re allocating Vic local funds
• Bank Account + ABN/Tax updates and discussion- Ana & Michael
• Ana: To check if we are tax exempt we need to follow the steps here: https://www.ato.gov.au/non-profit/guides/in-detail/guides—booklets/income-tax/income-tax-guide-for-non-profit-organisations/?page=4#Working_out_if_your_organisation_is_income_tax_exempt.
• From NICTA: Ana contacted CBA, some delay on account b/c no ABN. Form will be registered at CBA with signatories of account. Also need to look at tax exemption (poss ACNC registration)
• Some clarification to be done re OKVic’s local funds

Updates

Actions from last meeting

• Set up basecamp to pool ideas for communications – Steven (done)
• Set up blog post for community to discuss notion of rotating board positions – Steven (done)

Network and Community

• Website & List updates/discussion – Steven: Doing review of comms channels, considering useful blog posts, will review OK list numbers (OK List numbers are at 406 subscribers)
• Feedback on OKAU – Steven: Growing interest around the country, need to re-engage local ambassadors to support them. Try to make sure there is a local support network to seek funding, connect w govt. Board to try to pull together speakers & support a kick-off event in each new region.
• Melbourne meetups – Fiona: weekly meetups (SuAH); Linux con mini conf – will probably get an answer mid-late Sept; VicRoads, Aurin v happy with GovHack, want to do more.
• HealthHack – Maia: HealthHack happening late Oct, Melb, Syd, Brisbane, Perth – local organisers and a national group.
• Brisbane Meetups – Maia: local events on the theme of “how to…” groundswell growing in Brisbane
• How to support an emerging group? Sharing learning re how to run a group, could we support a local event – action item noted to share induction document.
• Steven: Interest in hack days in ACT combining with Code for Australia

Planning Actions

• Assisting with GovHack 2016 – Steven: To seek ongoing alignment with GovHack
• Rotation of Board members – Steven: Maia leaving Aus for 12 months so will step down; Anne Cregan also stepping down due to maternity leave Steven suggests rotation process as per blog post. – Markus: noted loss of knowledge with rotating the board members too quickly; with quarterly Board meetings members should attend more than one or two. – Steven: Lacking an effective mechanism for Board member rotation is a fail. – Michael: suggests 12 month (min) terms with a nomination process – draw local ambassadors onto board?
• Post GovHack Red Carpet catchup – Steven: Would love to see local organisers (Mitch et al) to be there
• Idea: OKAU support for crossing data hurdles – Markus: Bottom-up question, what do people in OKau do? “I’m an ambassador, now what?” “I’m keen on OpenData to achieve X, who do I talk to?” Define some more specific roles for data ambassadors as appropriate? – Steven: creating an published data cookbook “Who’s who and with what”
• Idea: Strategic OpenData/OpenMethod project(s) – Markus: Crystallising many threads of community efforts needs something more specific as a target. Wants to do some targeted (spectacular) activities with open data & tools and supporting a range of communities e.g. an open and live intergenerational report. It’s a top-down approach for demonstrating the benefit of OKau as a community. – Steven: Suggested starting with council data to tie together GovPond, Open Council Data and the local Open Data Index
• OK Fest 2016 – City of Melbourne is keen to support, FT meeting with Lorraine Tighe on Thursday – Steve B meeting Lorraine as well – @ Steve B can you comment on City of Melb’s plans? Something around a bid process? – bit late now, but they seem to think there is a bid to host OKfest, but it needs to be led by local OK people. Nicholas Gruen’s instigation, apparently.

Other business

Rejected other business:

• Steve B: any opportunity to discuss the actual structure of GovHack? We keep hearing some of the same feedback about how it doesn’t meet certain needs, can we talk about changing some of the basic parameters of the competition? – Not really our call to make here, Steve – Maxious: Govhack is arms-length from OKAu, would be a question for govhack team. – OK (I realise that was ambiguous, I didn’t mean to have the discussion here and now, I meant to schedule a discussion for a future date, but point taken) – Be the change – Govhack 2016 will need new committee, new committee could have new paradigm.

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.

A collection of session recordings are provided below.

• Above – Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia

• Above- Pia Waugh: Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office

• Above – Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

All Speakers:

• Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia
• Jed Sundwall: Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services
• Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
• Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
• Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital
• Brendan Bouffler: Scientific Computing, Amazon Web Services
• Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

Thanks to everyone who came along for this event!

Special thanks to Amazon Web Services and Link Digital for covering costs associated with the room hire, catering and social drinks.

@piawaugh and @NGruen1 Will Work For Data #WeAreCKAN at the @okfnau #CBR drinks. MOAR #opendata pic.twitter.com/wFikWO83SH

— Steven De Costa (@starl3n) May 13, 2015

Ruth presents the data from the City of Greater Geelong

Alisha presents her work from the City of Melbourne

Rosie present the City of Ballarat data

This week’s OK Melbourne saw Ruth, Alisha and Rosie spoke to us about the data sets that are coming out of the Cities of Melbourne, Greater Geelong and Ballarat for the upcoming GovHack. There looks to be some very rich data coming out of each of the sites, with both interesting cultural and geographical data, some lighter census data as well as the usual tough stuff – fines, roads, parking. Each of the cities will be presenting a range of prizes, the City of Melbourne will hopefully also be hosting a 3D printing micro site – raising the question “how would you use City of Melbourne data in 3D printed form?”.

Jordan also gave greater context to GovHack – what our aims and goals were with the project, what other data sets would be available, what project we expected and wanted to see come out of the weekend. Next week is the Mapping workshop with our own Steve Bennett and we have confirmed Andrew Phillips from Splunk as a speaker at the June 10th workshop.

Finally, a short reminder that the Melbourne GovHack team are very keen to provide child care at this year’s GovHack, and if that’s of interest to you they ask if you could take their four question survey about what type of child care service you would want.

Learn about the foundation elements of a new information economy that is already connecting public and private sectors throughout Australia and the world.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite

Confirmed Speakers:

• Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia
• Jed Sundwall: Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services
• Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
• Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
• Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital
• Brendan Bouffler: Scientific Computing, Amazon Web Services
• Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

Formal agenda will run from 2:30pm to 4:30pm.

Networking and drinks to close from 4:30 to 5:30pm

Taking place at NICTA Canberra Research Laboratory, 7 London Circuit, Canberra, ACT 2601

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!

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.