dear all, Prompted by this afternoon's coord group IRC chat ( http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-coord/2010-July/000021.html ), wanted to write a bit about what we learned from organising a small Open Knowledge conference in Scotland back in May.
Put together Open Knowledge Scotland with two colleagues from EDINA, Robin Rice and Stuart Macdonald, and input from Paola di Maio. We did a half-day event which had 3 sessions - Open Research, Linked Open Data, and Open Data for Scotland. This is what came from a completely open call for short (7 minute) talks. We managed to fit in everyone who asked to talk but that left little to no open discussion time, which was a real shame. At the end we invited Andres Guadamuz and Charlotte Waelde to present an open data licensing "clinic" session. * Half a day is too short a time. * There is lots more Open Knowledge out there than in 2004. (Next year there is talk of taking OKCon to 2 days (as WSFII was) as this year's was so action packed with too many good things going on at the same time in the 3 different rooms.) One object of OKCon has been to bring together people who would never otherwise meet but actually have a lot in common. This was a good mix of academics into open access, local and central government folk supportive of open data, people from national archives and libraries, an OpenStreetmap contingent. In that respect great, and we hardly had to promote it at all to get full to capacity. (80 people, 18 speakers) So we had lots of different kinds of people and though I heard that some of them met up again later in clusters (and i experienced some of this) there wasn't much common ground between some of the attendees. Should we try to encourage people in the OKF community to organise more closely themed events? I'm still serious about an Open Scholarship event but am not going to have the time and energy to work on it this year, i think. But there are other thematic things going on - In October the Germans are doing a themed one-day Open Knowledge event, on Bibliographic Data. Around the same time the Archaeology WG hopes to put on a workshop on Ethics in Open Archaeology. There is a Cultural Heritage thing planned i think. We were talking about local chapters earlier - what are they good for - building local networks of people and projects, mutual support. Ideally this sort of thing should emerge sort-of naturally after an event. Have not made much effort to do the followup after OK Scotland, partly because am not clear *myself* what a local chapter or interest group, if it existed, would do. We invited everyone who signed up to eventbrite to join the ok-scotland mailing list, a fair few of 'em did. I guess that's now a good constituency to promote a new event or project, or to ask to join in some OKF initiative... In short i would say go for it and organise a local OKCon. If you have a friendly local organisation willing to put up event space and drinks budget as we did in IDEA Lab and EDINA, then you can do it cost free. It took us six weeks from making a wiki page and eventbrite site to putting on an event which, though it could have been improved in various ways, was great fun and has densened the local network. If you can get a partner organisation to do it, so much better for the perceived gravitas and network interconnection. be well all, jo -- _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
