[ok-scotland] Thoughts on local Open Knowledge conference organising based on our experiences in Scotland

[jo at frot.org]

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
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