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.

Staff from VicRoads, who are running the hackfest and provided refreshments for the launch, were there in force. Brent from HERE Maps showed the incredible range of services available through the HERE Developer portal, which is open to anyone throughout the hackfest. Airbus are providing access to high resolution satellite imagery, available through a range of geospatial services – see the hackfest page for the details. And What3Words provides an alternative, simpler location service in which any location on earth can be specified with three words.

Full details of the competion are at www.geonext.com.au/hackfest.

Steve Bennett’s slides with a summary are here.

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!

On Wednesday, the 20th of May, Steve and Matt gave a great workshop of open source mapping tools available to suit all of you, mapping enthusiasts’, needs. If you have some data associated with a specific geo-location(s), this workshop would be a great way to learn how to plot it on a map.

In a nutshell, the evening provided an overview of two different mapping tools. Both do need some knowledge of web development and both can be used for free.

The first one is easy to work with for all of you, not very techy people. The mapping tool is called CartoDB. It can be obtained for free, but be wary the free version is the most limited one. Their website provides a lot of tutorials and examples. Also, Steve has gracefully presented how easy it can be to plot your data on a map using CartoDB in real time.

The second tool is for those with a bit more web-development knowledge, called LeafletJS. It is an open source javascript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. It is quite easy to use and it has great documentation. There are plenty of examples provided as well. I would recommend to play with it even if you are not very tech savvy – take a look, challenge yourself to learn something new and exciting.

In any case, I am sure if you have any questions on how to user those tools, the peeps from OKFn who have the knowledge will be happy to help.

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.

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!

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!