Some things I did this week:

• Admin
  • Advisory Board meeting
  • Drafted job descriptions for #opendata evangelist and Open Metadata Evangelist
  • 6 month plan
  • Reviewed HR plan
• Events
  • Organising for Open Government Data Camp 2011. Calls with Daniel, Hauke, Kat, Lucy and Kat. Call with Alek. Call with LAPSI. Set up organisers’ mailing list, organisers’ wiki page and invited lots of groups/people/projects to be partners.
• Working Groups
  • Open Science – Contact with OSI, Shuttleworth and others re: Panton Fellowships
  • Public Domain – blog post on public domain related activities and planning with Mark and Primavera
  • Open Government – blogged re: international open government data principles
• Local Chapters
  • Call re: OKF activities in Canada

I had a useful call with Mark and Primavera this morning on next steps for the OKF’s work on the public domain.

Here are some key points:

• Strategically we have to realise that we’ll never do everything we want to do in this space by ourselves – hence we should work to build a strong vision for what this area could look like, and encourage others to rally behind it! (As per recent post on this topic on OKF Blog)
• Work will be coordinated by Mark and Primavera.
• Aim to have a library of 20 working public domain calculators in an open source Python library by March 2012.
• Aim to strengthen network of legal researchers who could contribute to developing flowcharts.
• Flowcharts may be undertaken in an intermediary language – before being implemented to Python.
• Will develop a basic guide to metadata standards in different fields, with input from key people, organisations and projects. Not just books, but music, art, films, etc. Don’t want to reinvent the wheel – will include review of best practises in this field, e.g. Europeana Domain Model. Primavera to lead on this. Aim to have first version by end of 2011.
• Will test calculators with example data – and provide documentation about how they can be integrated with existing systems.
• Will create a nice front end for PublicDomainWorks.net – focusing on design, user interface and user experience. In the first instance this needs to be more a proof of concept than 100% functional (a bit like alpha.gov.uk), and we can then take this to others to encourage them to work on a collaborative project to federate collections of public domain works from around the world. For example, users should be able to:
  • browse public domain works by different criteria, display images related to public domain works (e.g. paintings, photographs, etc),
  • see multiple copies of public domain works in different formats, from different places (e.g. txt, PDF, scanned jpg for books),
  • make arbitrary lists of works (a la the original idea for Bibliographica)
• For now will use publicdomain.okfn.org for regular updates.
• We will create a separate website with information on opening up cultural heritage metadata and digital copies of public domain works. In the first instance we can draft material on pads, docs, etc with key stakeholders like Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation, and others.
• Jonathan to put together a role description for an Open Metadata Evangelist and to send to Mark, Primavera and others.
• Organise a public domain sprint in Berlin this autumn, with key people from Creative Commons, Europeana, Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, COMMUNIA, K4ALL and others. Need a good set of questions and a clear idea of what we to achieve before the event.

For a while I’ve been thinking about how the Open Knowledge Foundation can do more to support open data in science. In particular how we can do more to encourage research funders and publicly funded research bodies to adopt open data policies and mandates.

With this in mind, I floated the idea of setting up Panton Fellowships for Open Data in Science to Cameron Neylon (STFC), Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge), Tim Hubbard (Sanger Institute) and Karien Bezuidenhout (Shuttleworth Foundation) at OKCon 2011 in Berlin last week. Since then I’ve spoken to Melissa Hagemann at OSI, Peter has mentioned this to colleagues at JISC, and Tim has mentioned this to colleagues at the Wellcome Trust.

Here’s a brief sketch of what shape they might take:

Background

The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science strongly encourage scientists and others to place scientific research data into the public domain using an appropriate license or legal tool.

There is currently a window of opportunity to encourage more research funders, publishers, institutions, and societies to adopt these principles in relation to scientific research data that they fund or publish. Policies and norms in this area are still being determined – and it is much easier to encourage best practises from the outset than to change them once they are fixed.

Leading advocates in this area often have ideas and contacts, but lack time to do as much as they’d like. Many graduates or early career stage researchers are interested in this area and may have more time, but may lack contacts, guidance and a sense of strategic priority.

Fellowships

The Fellowships would focus on:

• communicating and encouraging more stakeholders to adopt the Panton Principles
• understanding and overcoming obstacles to opening up scientific data in different fields
• identifying opportunities for opening up scientific data in new fields and engaging new stakeholders

They would be targeted at graduate level and early career stage scientific researchers, co-funded by a loose coalition of funding bodies, and located at leading partner institutions.

There would be 2-4 Panton Fellowships per year. Panton Fellowships would last between 9-12 months. Panton Fellows would receive a stipend equivalent to the level of financial support received by PhD or post-doctoral students.

Yesterday Kat, Rufus and I caught up with Jonathan Brun, David Eaves, Tracey Lauriault, James McKinney about how the Open Knowledge Foundation might be able to help:

• To promote open knowledge in Canada,
• To strengthen/expand the open knowledge community in Canada – in particular the increasingly active open data community
• To support the development of specific OKF open data projects and initiatives in Canada

We discussed the possibility of establishing a Canadian chapter of the OKF to help with some of these things.

We concluded:

• There is lots of amazing stuff happening in Canada already, lots of this occurs without need for a more formal organisation – which could duplicate existing work or even have a negative effect on existing efforts. Hence if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
• There is some work to be done in helping to connect different initiatives. In the medium term it could be useful to have someone dedicated to bringing different people, organisations and projects onto the same page. Someone suggested having a basic okfn.ca site to help link to existing stuff (Kat said she’d help with this). We also agreed to put together a role description for someone who could help to connect the dots between existing projects/people/groups.
• David Eaves and others will help to promote and encourage the development of the OpenSpending.org project in Canada.
• We we will not set up an okfn-ca list for now – as there are already lists which are used to discuss open data stuff. For example, the civicaccess-discuss which OKF people should join, contribute to, and point people towards!
• We asked about who we should invite from Canadian projects/organisations to Open Government Data Camp 2011 in Warsaw. We can catch up further then!

While we mainly discussed open data (open government data in particular) we’d also like to help build an open knowledge commons that includes cultural works (e.g. public domain works), scientific research, and so on.

We agreed to keep an eye on developments and catch up again in a few weeks.

Just posted a comment on an interesting article by Michael Gustein, following on from his talk at OKCon 2011:

For what its worth I (and many others at the OKF) fully agree that the legal/technical openness of information is not in itself sufficient for value to be derived from this information.

There are all kinds of other factors and ingredients involved here. For example, access and ability to use ICTs, basic data literacy (which often even the most technically literate computer users may not possess), prerequisite contextual knowledge to interpret official documents and datasets (e.g. when the UK government released fine grained spending information, several journalists published articles saying it was ‘secrecy via transparency’ as the data was so hard to make sense of), etc.

The process of deriving value from information is not straightforward – and I don’t think there are any easy answers. I also don’t think that responsibility for catalysing/supporting the process of deriving value from information lies solely with the ‘open data movement’. It probably lies with society (e.g. media, NGOs, you and me) and with the state (e.g. via the education system, state funded data literacy initiatives, etc).

But I do think that making sure we all have realistic expectations about what open data does and doesn’t do, and who is in a position to benefit from it, and what we have to do to enable more people to benefit from it, is probably a Good Thing. Hence my inviting Michael to OKCon 2011 to kick off discussions – which he seems to have succeeded in doing – both offline at the conference, and online here!

For several years I’ve wanted to write an article called something like “Open Data is not a Panacea”. I discussed this more recently with Rufus Pollock. Perhaps now we have a good excuse to do that!