[okfn-coord] OK2 planning catchup? less luck with speakers

Mon Jan 14 19:22:16 UTC 2008

jo at frot.org wrote:
> dear all,
> 
> http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme/
> 
> I am having no luck with scheduled speakers for Transport/Environment. 
> I have yet to hear back from Graham Stickler and will try him again in
> case email got caught in the post-New-Year rush. 
> Sean Gillies wrote back to say Pleiades weren't able to support his
> travel expenses as he'd hoped. 

That's too bad ...

> He suggested one of the organisers of LocWeb if we wanted another
> archaeologist, but that didn't seem appropriate. (And as with Frank K's
> suggestion of David Newbery, i didn't follow that up because it seems
> better to have someone  more 'open' than more on-topic. 

I agree.

> I am beginning to feel stumped. Has anyone else contacted Tom Steinberg? 
> I know they are doing transport visualisation work at MySociety, 
> and it's likely he would have good contacts and suggestions. 
> Otherwise I am not really sure where else to lok.

I've just spoken with them and they've agreed to come speak about their 
transport stuff and the need for more open data. (I hope this what was 
wanted -- rereading your email now I realise maybe it was more to ask 
them for suggestions for speakers ... :-/ oh well at least it means we 
are down to locating one speaker).

I did also ask them for suggestions at the same time and Francis made 
these suggestions:

> Richard Pope <richard at memespring.co.uk> -- works at Moo, mySociety
> volunteer, good at graphic designy things.
> 
> Tom Carden <tom at tom-carden.co.uk> -- works at Stamen, and has done
> loads of relevant things. Lives in SF. He will be able to suggest
> other people too.
> 
> Muki Haklay (http://homepages.ge.ucl.ac.uk/~mhaklay/) at UCL taught
> people like Tom Carden, and may have suggestions.

I think the last on the list Muki Haklay looks really promising. *Would 
you like to email him or shall I*?

> How is the rest of the programme looking generally - is there more
> to add to the outline on the wiki page above?

Saul (or ...): we need to confirm Liz Turner.

For the rest of the tools session I'm just trying to confirm 1/2 people 
for the (one already confirmed has had to pull out for visa reasons) as 
follows:

> 
> William Stein is the lead developer for the Sage project,
> http://sagemath.org. Sage is a rapidly growing open source system for
> mathematical computing, and I think a talk highlighting the open and
> collaborative aspects of Sage, both in terms of its internal
> development (even its mere existence is due to open tools being
> available) and in terms of what it offers to users, would be great.
> William, I don't expect you to be necessarily available, but I know
> Sage has users in the UK, so perhaps you can act as a contact for this
> with Rufus and suggest a person already in the UK who might make it.
> 
> - Gael Varoquaux is an active developer in the Mayavi open source
> visualization system:
> 
> http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/MayaVi
> https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/MayaVi
> 
> Mayavi is a very sophisticated environment that wraps and makes much
> easier to use the large (but complex) VTK library
> (http://www.vtk.org), and is tightly coupled to the rest of the Python
> scientific computing tools (http://www.scipy.org), thus enabling not
> only 'pure visualization', but visualization workflows that also
> incorporate numerical processing.

What do people think? Does anyone have other suggestions? (I know 
Jonathan has invited Soren Aurer of DBPedia though he could go in either 
Education and Academia or in Tools and Visualization).

> If a request-for-demos was sent out late last year it is likely that i
> missed it :/ Is this worth another round? I'd like to help if poss,

Yes, it was part of the general announce

> aware that the date is 2 months away and a wide announce should be
> going out 6 weeks or so before it...

But like you say there is no harm recirculating (plus hitting lists 
we've missed). I think Jonathan also wants to do this and we should 
probably coordinate general 'announcing' via okfn-discuss or the wiki, see:

   http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/material

~rufus