Minutes will be available once approved.

There are a few easy ways for people to publish a simple profile that can be found for others and therefore help to answer these questions and join the dots between people, organisations, topics of interest and projects.

Join the online discussion board

Open Knowledge central have been working through a number of improvements to an online discussion space. You can connect with people around the world on topics of interest or start a new thread on something you are particularly interested in. Importantly, once you sign up you can share some details via your profile and this will help others find and connect with you. Take a look now and setup a profile at https://discuss.okfn.org/

Create  an entry in the open-steps Directory

Help people find you via your organisation, location or skills. The open steps directory doesn’t yet have a large number of entries, but that doesn’t stop you from jumping in and creating an open profile.

Ask for help via the mailing list or twitter

You can sign up to the Australian chapter mail list at: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-au

And, you’ll always find a range of things shared over our twitter account at @okfnau. A number of people manage the account so mention it and you’ll likely get a response pretty soon.

Where to start…

The first step in finding help is always to seek it out. Simply asking a question to the email list for Open Knowledge Australia is a great way to share something in a not-entirely-public manner. However, if you are sharing things that are useful to the whole Open Knowledge network both now and into the future then the public discussion forum would be the place to be. The forum helps us organically develop both our shared ideas, knowledge and network of interests. With the content there indexed via search engines the more we share the more we’ll attract great people into our network over time.

Where else are people discussing Open Knowledge?

Depending on how you organise your digital life you will likely have a strong preference for one or more methods of communication and team collaboration. Let us know in the comments how you’d like to connect with people more within the Open Knowledge network. What about Slack, GitHub, Hangouts and meetup groups? Where would you like to find more people?

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

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.

My suggestion was that two people each 3 month period would be obliged to vacate their their position. At this time any other nominations would be received for the positions. Those who previously held the position would also be available for nomination. As such, reelection of the previous Board members could happen if no other nominations were received, assuming they had put themselves up for nomination.

There are around 8 board members at this point so this sort of process would allow for a complete renewal/reinstatement of the Board each 12 month period.

Views were expressed from others on the existing Board that such a rapid or recurring rotation of Board members may be disruptive. Other suggestions included four, six or 12 month rotations for facilitating a similar process.

This blog post intends to collect comments from the OKAU community on what processes could be considered. If a number of processes are nominated then a public upvote process can be used to determine the approach that will be taken (at least in a trial format).

Sound ok? Please leave your comments!

Hoots! Steven

The answer for 2015 will come to light on the weekend of 3 July and the National GovHack team have recently put a call out for volunteers and sponsors. They are looking for people who might like to organise their own local event, corporate sponsors and Government partners.

This is a great event for anyone wanting to get involved in open data, open Government and civic hacking initiatives. All are welcome and encouraged to get involved.

Read more about the Big Call Out to Australia and New Zealand at GovHack.org.

There is now a detailed post up on the Code for Australia website but the seven principles discussed on the day are also highlighted below.

The principles & how we can make them happen

1. Design for people’s needs – Making things personalised, especially web services

2. Make it easy for everyone to participate – Open events for everyone to participate

3. Focus on what government can do – Government as a platform that allows other to help solve problems

4. Make data easy to find and use – duuh

5. Use data to make and improve decisions – Industry have been leveraging data for a while to improve services and programs. Let’s make it happen for government.

6. Choose the right technology for the job – It’s not a cookie cutter approach to everything

7. Organise for results – Let’s not be reactive, but plan for the future

The census is run annually and is designed to encourage friendly competition and inspire everyone to improve the way open government data is shared to help create value.

The census team is continuing to collaborate with the leaders of Australia’s state and territory open data initiatives to add more datasets to be assessed by the census – Properties, Education and the Environment are hot contenders.

You’re invited to add an assessment to the census to help paint a picture of how well open data is being published.

You can help by spreading the word or contributing to the census:

• Follow us on Twitter @AuOpenDataIndex.
• Share a census page for your favourite place (ACT, NSW, NT, Qld, SA, Tas, Vic, WA) on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.
• Submit an assessment about open data you’re familiar with.
• Join editorial team or help administer the census.

Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

The quote above is taken from http://opendataday.org. As you can see there are a range of activities related to the day and if you’d like to know more about Open Data Day activities worldwide then please head over to http://opendataday.org to take a look.

After collecting ideas from the Open Knowledge community in Australia, the following options are provided as an initial list of things people can get involved in. We’re sure there will be lots of other things going on so please feel free to add your own activities via comments on this post.

Help to update the Australian Open Data Census

Stephen Gates has been working on the establishment of a regional open data census that follows the same guidelines as the international census. By helping with the newly established regional census you’ll be contributing to the establishment of an open data index for Australian States and Territories. For an picture of what this looks like you can see the global index.

On 21 February you should be able to start providing assessments via http://australia.census.okfn.org. As the census is designed to measure the openness of key data published by Australia’s state and territory governments all you need to do to complete an assessment is to first identify a relevant open dataset and then answer a few questions about it. Assessments go through a review process by editors before the completed open data index is published.

Code for Australia Open Data Day in Sydney

Code for Australia is holding an event to commemorate International Open Data Day (register here). This will coincide with Code for America’s CodeAcross, a global event to activate cities and make stuff happen.

They’ve picked a theme: Principles of a 21st Century Government. What are they, how do they look in practice and how will we make them a reality is what they want workshop and prototype with you. They want to make a plan on how government, industry and the community can work together and solve civic problems that affect us all.

This is an event for everyone.

Urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organisers and anyone with a passion to make their city a better place.

Expect to get to know the latest ways government is using data, hear the experience of working in the US government and opportunities to make your ideas a reality.

CKAN SDK Sprint in Canberra

Link Digital will be releasing a PHP and a .NET CKAN SDK on GitHub. These SDKs will be available from 21 February for testing, feedback and further development. Any suggestions for additional languages people would like to see SDKs developed for are welcome so please feel free to leave a comment below.

If you are based in Canberra and want to come along to support the sprint then please let the folks at Link know via an email to info at linkdigital dot com dot au.

CKAN is an open source project that provides web application software which is suitable for the establishment of open data catalogues. Learn more at http://ckan.org.