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

Tue Sep 28 16:21:13 UTC 2010

Jo and all

Thanks for updates on various fronts
I am spreading increasingly thin but determined to remain on the case
Plan to attend Aberdeen meetup; will continue to cross post with open gov
activities
Send updates!
PDM

2010/9/26 Jo Walsh <metazool at gmail.com>

> 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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