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Apps for Flanders – Business Lounge

Mathias Van Compernolle - May 31, 2013 in Apps for X, Featured

During the Open Data Day on the 14th of June, Apps for Flanders takes place at the same venue. During this event, main focus is on the economic value of innovative open data applications . Apps for Flanders is part of Apps for Europe, a European program established by European Commissioner Neelie Kroes.
Apps for Europe wants to encourage governments in 10 different EU Member States to open datasets, and in the meanwhile create and stimulate the social and economic impact of open data. In Flanders this story is lead by the Flemish ICT Organisation (V-ICT-OR), the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and iMinds-Multimedia Lab. Earlier, successful programming contests took place in Flanders where opened datasets served as the basis for the development of new digital applications. In previous editions participants work with data sets from local and central governments as Ghent, Antwerp and the Flemish government, but also from a thematic perspective, such as geographic information and labor market data.
During Apps for Flanders, we organize a business lounge, where selected apps and the teams behind it are getting inspired to find out new business models and coached by experts. In the afternoon we have a pitching session where the jury selects the three best apps! The program:
9u30 -9u50: Warming-up: sketch up of the different actors in the open data field (Hans Tubbax – BICC – Thomas More) 9u50 – 10u30: Get inspired: session on business models for open data ( Flanders DC) 10u45-11u30: Coaching session: selected winners from earlier Apps For X events are coached on their business model to gain economical valorization. 11u30 – 12u00: Plenair (Open Data Day): Keynote 12u00 – 13u45: Lunch and preparation time 13u45 – 15u15: Pitching time 15u15-16u00: Deliberation of the jury 16u00: Wrap up Open Data Day and Award Ceremony Extra information: Subscripition for the event itself: www.opendataforum.be Venue: Boudewijngebouw, Boudewijnlaan 30, 1000 Brussel Contact: Raf Buyle V-ICT-OR raf.buyle@v-ict-or.be Pieter Colpaert OKFN / iMinds pieter@okfn.be Mathias Van Compernolle OKFN mathias@okfn.be

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Over 250 proposals received! Thank you!

Beatrice Martini - May 31, 2013 in blog, Call for Proposals, Geneva, News, OKCon, OKCon 2013

The Call for Proposals will end in a few hours and since we’re too curious we’re already having a look at the submissions we have received. They are over 250! And of really high level, indeed. You’re fantastic, they’re a pleasure to read. Old friends, new faces, groundbreaking projects, illustrious organizations from the World Bank to Wikimedia, Sunlight Foundation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the closest to our heart, our Open Knowledge Foundation community – all willing to join us and contribute to set the agenda of open knowledge. We’re deeply honoured. Next week will be hectic: our team of Programme Advisors and collaborators will be discussing into the wee hours to select the proposals that will fit the event the most and finally contacting the first selected ones. We will keep you posted as we hear the results. Who are our Programme Advisors? Watch this space and you’ll know more about them soon.

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Metametrik first sprint

Velichka Dimitrova - May 31, 2013 in Featured, Metametrik

This blog post is written by Martin Keegan and Velichka Dimitrova. On Saturday, May 25, a team of economists and programming experts gathered to plan a format for the saving of regression results in economics. The project would allow for the building of a database of empirical results, where queries would be made, allowing to answer questions like: do authors tend to get more significant results when using World Bank data instead of Penn World Table data and how conclusions about the relationships of variables have evolved over time. Based on some ideas outlined by the Working Group last year, we worked on a post-publication version of a small system where an informed researcher would be able to enter regression results, which would be saved in a database and then these results would be queried by a researcher who wants to analyse the empirical literature.

We took an approach which turned out to be fairly similar to Guo’s recommendation: create a JSON schema capturing the basics of a regression result (the dependent variable, the goodness of fit, the sample size, standard errors and effect sizes of results), and then make tools which produce and consume data in this format. So far, we have a tool which generates Metametrik format data, and a tool which reads this into a database. What’s needed next is web UIs that produce this data (for articles already published) and allow you to search it. Get updates on Metametrik by signing to the mailing list, follow Open Economics and Martin Keegan on Twitter. To comment on the relationship diagramme see schema.

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OKCon 2013 Event Update

Elaine Shaughnessy - May 31, 2013 in 2013, blog, Events, Geneva, News, OKCon, OKCon 2013, Switzerland

The OKCon 2013 conference on Open Data – Broad, Deep, Connected is being held in Geneva, Switzerland in September. OKF Events and Marketing Team Beatrice Martini and Elaine Shaughnessy have been to check out the venue and to meet up with our colleagues from OpenData.ch – Andre Golliez, Hannes Gassert and Jan Zuppinger and with Sylvie Reinhard and Magaly Mathys from Lift Events. The venue is at the CICG Conference Centre and is a great space for listening to our keynote speakers and engaging with the programme and for community workshops, exhibitions and events. Participants will have an area where they can give a ‘stand up/pop up show’ to talk about their own projects and ideas. There will also be challenges and competitions and a preview of the Urban Data Challenge exhibition, a 3-city transportation data challenge between the cities of Geneva, Zurich and San Francisco.

We had discussions on the programme and were really excited that there were already over 200 great responses to the Call for Proposals. They were so good that the deadline was extended until tonight (at 23:59 BST)! Also exciting is that the keynote speakers are confirming their attendance – so keep your eyes on the blog as Jan will be posting some speaker profiles next week. We thank the Swiss team for their hospitality and for helping us check out Geneva’s attractions including a very charming jazz bar and an evening apero sitting in the sun alongside the river Rhone.

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The Baby’s Own Aesop (1908)

Adam Green - May 30, 2013 in aesop's fables, collections, Digital Copy: No Additional Rights, Internet Archive, limericks, New York Public Library Picture Collection, texts, Texts: 19th, Texts: 20th, Texts: Childrens, Texts: Picturebooks, Underlying Work: PD Worldwide, walter crane

The Baby’s own Aesop: being the fables condensed in rhyme with portable morals pictorially pointed by Walter Crane; 1908; F. Warne, New York. Walter Crane’s beautifully illustrated version of Aesop’s fables, shortened and put into limericks for the younger reader and first published in 1887. Aesop’s Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop: … like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. (Wikipedia) The book is housed at the Internet Archive, contributed by the New [...]

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Working Group Stories

Joris Pekel - May 30, 2013 in Featured, WG-roundup

Inspired by the great Global Communities Stories, we want to give you an update about what has happened over the last months in our different Working Groups. Working Groups are a great place for people that are interested in open data related to a specific topic such as science, economics, linguistics or government data. We currently have 14 active Working Groups and a few more incubating so there is always something that fits your interest. And if not, you can always set up your own group!

Open Humanities

The Open Humanities working group has been organising several developer focussed online Hangouts over the last few months. They have built a game that helps you learn passages from Shakespeare called Bardomatic as well as done some tweaks for the Timeliner which allows you to make elegant timelines out of Google spreadsheets. To stay informed about the next hangout, please join their mailing list. They are currently working on mapping correspondence data and they invite any javascript developer, designer, litaerature student or basically anyone who loves the humanities to join. For more info see their blog.

Open Economics

The Open Economics group has been very active. They have been running a series of workshops and events and worked together with the Open Science Working Group on the Open Research Handbook. An interesting project that has started recently is the Automated Game Play Project which has the goal to “build artificial agents by developing computer programs that act like human beings in the laboratory. We focus on the simplest type of problem of interest to economists: the simple one-shot two-player simultaneous move games. There is a wide variety of existing published data on laboratory behavior that will be our primary testing ground for our computer programs.” For more info see their resources page Also the Open Economics international workshop is coming up – June 11-12 in Cambridge, MA. Some prominent speakers include Micah Altman (MIT Libraries Research Director), Shaida Badiee (Head of World Bank Development Data Group) and Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management) will be present. For more info see the events page Meanwhile they have also been posting a whole range of interesting blogposts such as the most recent one with reasons people use not to share their data and the the Reinhart Rogoff saga which got the attention of the LSE Social Impact blog and the New Scientist which concludes that making data and code available is essential in order to replicate scholarly results.

OpenGLAM & Public Domain

At the beginning of this month, the Public Domain Remix competition was launched in France. The competition aims to give a new life to the public domain by encouraging the creative remix of works that are no longer protected by copyright law. By re-using, re-mixing and using these works as inspiration, these artists show the value of our shared cultural heritage.
The group has also been active pursuing cultural institutions that are using restrictive licenses on content that is out-of-copyright, which resulted in the Walters Art Museum removing the non-commercial restriction of their digitised manuscript collection. Finally, the group has been working on defining a set of OpenGLAM principles which serve a a set of guidelines for cultural institutions how to open up their data and digitised content.

Open Hardware & Design

The Open Hardware and Design working group is one of the younger ones. They recently celebrated their one year anniversary with a summary blog post. They have recently launched the first version of the Open Design principles, held Github workshops across Europe, delivered a keynote lecture at LibreGraphics in Madrid, did a lot of arguing about design paradigms, planned a new design hardware challenge in France and helped run the first Design/Hardware/Fabbing topic stream at the Open Knowledge Festival in Finland. This year, they will focuse on fostering the Open Design community in new ways, from building local installments to participating in MOOCs to inviting design practitioners to feature their works in new and unexpected ways. That’s it for this roundup, next month we will highlight activity from some of the other Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups. If you want to be closer involved in one of them, have a look at the overview page, select your topic of interest and get involved!

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Extending The Call For Volunteers Until 2nd June

Jan Zuppinger - May 30, 2013 in 2013, Geneva, OKCon, OKCon 2013, Volunteers

What. Volunteering at OKCon 2013
When & where. 16th-18th September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland.
How. Find the call and the submission form here
Deadline. The deadline to submit your application is 2nd June, 23:59:59 GMT.

We are very grateful for the huge response to our original Call for Volunteers and for the amazing applications that we received. However, many of the applications came from people offering their editorial skills and we need some more hands-on people, for all the practical tasks, that need to be covered during OKCon 2013. We also hope to receive some more applications from Switzerland and neighbouring countries. This is why we have extended our Call for Volunteers until 2nd June. This is your last chance to join us! If you are interested and available from 16th to 18th September 2013, please apply on the OKCon Call for Volunteers webpage. Deadline for the applications is Sunday, 2nd June at 23:59:59 GMT. We look forward to receiving your application!

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How Are Civil Society Organisations Using Data to Pursue Their Mission?

Liliana Bounegru - May 30, 2013 in Data for CSOs

I am pleased to be joining the School of Data, where I will be focusing on how civil society organisations (CSOs) and advocacy groups are using data to pursue their mission, in the service of the public good – from greater election transparency, to alerting people in conflict zones to attacks, and reporting and advocacy around energy and climate change.

Over the coming weeks, we are going to be collecting the best examples of how CSOs are using data to improve their research, to boost their advocacy and outreach, or simply to inform and assist their work, by using analysis, visualisations and other means.

If you know of any particularly compelling examples, then we’d love to hear from you. You can contact me via email (liliana.bounegru[at]okfn.org), this form or Twitter using the hashtag #data4csos. We’ll be featuring case studies and behind the scenes stories based on some of the best examples on the School of Data blog.

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Making Data Count and the Value of Research Data

Velichka Dimitrova - May 29, 2013 in Featured, Open Research

Last month in Berlin, the Knowledge Exchange gathered around 80 representatives from funder agencies, research institutions, universities and scholarly societies in the Making Data Count workshop with the aim “to discuss and build on possibilities to implement the culture of sharing and to integrate publication of data into research assessment procedures.”

The report “The Value of Research Data: Metrics for datasets from a cultural and technical point of view”, which was presented during the workshop argued that while data sharing between scientists in not a common practice, the development of data metrics should serve as one of the incentives for researchers, being incorporated in the professional and career reward structures and making data more visible and establishing a better practice of data citation and data re-use. Some of the conclusions of the report also emphasise that data sharing has many important functions. One of them is serving as “a potential source for scientific recognition”, where the creation and curation of datasets may be seen an important contribution to be considered in promotions and the allocation of research funding. Another function of making data openly available to the research community is providing the possibility to verify and reproduce research findings as part of good scientific practice, “protecting against fraud and faulty data”. Additionally, data sharing allows a more efficient use of research resources where repeated collection of data is avoided and new opportunities emerge for the re-use of the data and for new scientific collaborations. Data sharing is also mentioned as tool enabling new research agendas, international research collaborations and interdisciplinary research. Then, the availability of research data provides training material and supports the work of educators. The report also discusses the current data metrics models, the opportunities and limitations of data publications, which the authors point out as the most developed model of all. The recommendations include bringing down the costs of data publications and making the process more efficient, incorporating data metrics in the scholarly award structures, reducing the dispersion of data repositories, developing standards and interoperability protocols across the different actors, etc. The report was written by Rodrigo Costas, Ingeborg Meijer, Zohreh Zahedi and Paul Wouters of Leiden University. Read the report

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Mother Goose’s French Birth (1697) and British Afterlife (1729)

Adam Green - May 29, 2013 in Articles, Books, Literature