[ok-scotland] An update on things for the Spring

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

I have been surfing over email like a wave over water, which currently 
involves not really reading much of it, apologies for dropping out of 
the conversation. An update,

Last Friday i met with Michael Fourman and James Toon in the School of 
Informatics, we talked mostly about the "Open Scholarship" stream of 
things, and use of space. James is keen because he's putting together an 
initiative, advisory board, etc for open scholarship across universities 
in Scotland as a follow on from the OATS declaration on open access: 
http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm and wants to do several 
gatherings as the new declaration progresses.

And Michael has similar interests, and a remit to organise something, as 
part of the Digital Scotland effort (this? 
http://www.rse.org.uk/enquiries/Digital_Scotland/index.htm ) so is up 
for supporting booking the main space in the Informatics Forum for 3 
days or a week, and providing a budget for coffee and biscuits and 
flying a couple of people over. We thought about dates a bit, the 
cut-off for purdah for government workers seemed to be about a month 
previous to the last election. So we were looking at the middle two 
weeks of March, the week of the 8th or of the 15th, as decent candidates.

The initial soundings regarding FOSS4GG were less definite. James talked 
to AGI (Association of Geographic Information) people, in April they are 
putting on their own (semi?)-annual AGI Scotland event, i spoke at the 
last one where there was a lot of fuss from the likes of Ordnance Survey 
about purdah, and clear overreaching from it, if it really applied. Um. 
So AGI are interested in doing open source *stuff* but not an entire 
open source event. Meanwhile, Michael suggested that it would be more 
interesting/valuable to broaden the scope beyond geographic information 
software (though geodata is everywhere!) to free software in general for 
open government in particular. AGI members already do a lot of 
government business and government focus. Relatively very few are out 
there doing open source stuff with pride. So perhaps it's conflict of 
interest? In any case. There are Scottish government folks who've talked 
about doing a one-day workshop that James nor i has yet to reconnect with.

The (Linked?) Open Local Data stream i have not reflected on. Chris 
Taggart said somewhere that he didn't care so much if it was linked, 
just as long as it was and remained open. I see there is a Scottish 
Linked Data meetup in Aberdeen on October 6th - 
http://sldig2.eventbrite.com/ - wish i could make it, but have to travel 
to meet my son that day. Perhaps you can discuss this there?
And where is the ScotGovCamp intersection with that?

So to summarise, free space for a week, small budget, could use a little 
bit more, timing depends partly on whether we could get some kind of 
"star" along, which i am told is desirable? And any suggestions for a 
person with a public profile whose work crosses or at least can be 
related to, all three streams, gladly received.

love,


jo
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