[OKFN-AU] CKAN -au User Group

Thu Jul 18 23:01:42 UTC 2013

I would be pleased to take on this position! Hopefully I won't take on
any more positions after this one! I eagerly await the proposed org
structure to work out where best to fit, be it core group, working
group, ambassador etc.

Perhaps broadening the title to CKAN and Data Platforms Working Group
to include things like RDA and the back-office work for getting data
ready for use.

Clearly the first thing for the group to address is the metadata
customisation to meet Australian recordkeeping practices. A collective
approach to pooling resources would be good here.
One pie-in-the-sky goal could be to enable datasets to be categorised
and browsed by the function they serve, not by the portfolio of the
organisation that made them via
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/publications/agift.aspx
and/or COFOG.
An agreement on some common subset/mapping of metadata will become
more important as people start to desire federation including
potentially not just with State Government data platforms but
cultural/academic collections and different tiers of data sources.

In terms of monitoring upcoming functionality and sending priorities
back to UK/EU, the situation seem to be improving with activity points
like https://trello.com/b/MkqvtXnH/ckan-roadmap-ideas-requests or
https://github.com/okfn/ckan/wiki/Ideas:-new-feature-requests-&-ideas
But we still need to track the state of play in Australasia (through
datacatalogs.org and ckan.org/instances ) and work out where best to
direct our resources, be it poking Europe or writing patches.

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 9:48 AM, David F. Flanders
<david.flanders at ands.org.au> wrote:
> I've become increasingly aware of more data.state.gov moving over to CKAN,
> perhaps we considered establishing an Australasia CKAN user/admin/dev group?
> I've three reasons for this (off the top of my head, additional argument for
> and/or against appreciated):
>
> a.) legal implications for Australasia will impact feature and functions
> that need to be developed, e.g. rather than building features in isolation
> pulling resources to build features such as a CKAN export to RDA?
>
> b.) community based groups working with these systems and their APIs will
> want standardisation around datasets, etc. i.e. common use of schema.org
> metadata elements/URIs so there is a common API across all data.state.gov
> instances?
>
> c.) As a group we can better represent our interests back to the core OKFN
> CKAN dev team, i.e. my contacts and understanding of the UK/EU based team
> might help cut through some of the listserv blackhole that CKAN currently
> seems to be experiencing, i.e. a letter sent to core CKAN with several
> signatures requesting prioritization of a bug or a feature?
>
> Most importantly, is the question of: is anyone being interested in leading
> this Working Group?  My personal feeling is that it should be someone who is
> somewhat neutral,. e.g. someone not running an instance of CKAN for
> government.  Or perhaps someone who is associated with a CKAN but feel as if
> they can state their bias clearly while chairing the group?
>
> BTW this goes towards the new organisational structure for OKFN that Pia and
> I have been discussing with the CKAN core team, TBA.  In theory the
> structure has two sets of leaders/ambassadors.  One set to lead local groups
> per city/state/territory (as per Govhack) and the other set to lead special
> interest groups, e.g. data journalism (Craig/Marc), Open Census (Alex),
> OpenGLAM (Geoff), CKAN (???), etc.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Flanders
>
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Flanders' Channels:
> blog: http://dfflanders.wordpress.com/
> twitter: http://twitter.com/dfflanders
> skype: david.flanders
> mobile: 0407 821 686
>
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