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

Thu Sep 30 13:43:28 UTC 2010

Paola,

Great to know that you will come. Please feel free to bring friends. :-)

Cheers,

Jeff

On 28/09/2010 17:21, "Paola Di Maio" <paola.dimaio at gmail.com> wrote:

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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