[okfn-discuss] incubator.okfn.org

Tue Dec 29 17:35:10 UTC 2009

Just to follow this up, here is something a bit like what I would hope
for in the longer term with OKF incubator, at the University of
Edinburgh...

"IDEA lab is a virtual laboratory that will facilitate prototyping of
novel applications of state-of-art informatic technologies. IDEA lab
will enable and support multidisciplinary "proof-of-principle
prototyping" (POPP) projects that develop and use informatic tools and
techniques to: (i) collect and manage data, (ii) discover and
visualise structures and relationships; (iii) model, simulate and
analyse processes, (iv) facilitate collaboration and create
communities." [1]

The idea is to build a developer community around the idea lab, and
also there is a £300k fund to help catalyse development [2]. At the
moment they are working on idea.ed.ac.uk in Drupal, but are also
looking at Google Wave [3].

[1] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-is-idea-lab.html
[2] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/09/cse-popp-fund-approved.html
[3] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/10/project-development-and-proposal.html

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Rufus and I were recently talking about the OKF's project 'incubator'
> and I suggested turning this into a project in its own right.
>
> There are so many interested ideas kicking around - that I think it
> would be useful to have a project dedicated to documenting and
> refining these! This could be anything from entirely new open
> knowledge/data/content projects (like 'Where Does My Money Go?'), to
> tools to 'scratch an itch' (e.g. scripts to convert MoinMoin syntax to
> Markdown, scraping texts from Project Gutenberg and stripping out
> header/footer to make them public domain,...).
>
> The incubator project could let people propose, vote and comment on
> ideas. Mike Chelen recently suggested we could use IdeaTorrent (GPL)
> for this:
>
>  http://www.ideatorrent.org/
>
> What do people think? Would anyone be interested in having a go at
> setting up and tweaking an instance at incubator.okfn.org?
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://www.okfn.org
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org