[okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Scotland, May 13th, 3-7pm, Edinburgh

Tue Apr 6 10:35:12 UTC 2010

dear all,

A group of us in Edinburgh are organising a mini-OKCon in the 
Informatics Forum, with support from IDEA Lab and EDINA.
May 13th, 3-7pm. A couple of "clinics" planned on open data licensing 
and Linked Data, plenty of space for lightning talks.
Please consider contributing a talk, or forward this mail to those you 
know who might be interested. Looking forward to it...

Open Knowledge Scotland
-----------------------

Where: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
When: Thursday May 13th, 3-7pm (coffee & registration from 2:30)
How much: Free
Register:  http://okscotland.eventbrite.com/

This event brings together interested parties from across the open 
knowledge spectrum based in Scottish educational institutions, Scottish 
research organisations, Scottish local and national government, and 
members of the public for the purposes of teaching, learning and discussion.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a 
wide range of areas from governance to science, culture to technology. 
Opening up access to digital content can radically increase access and 
reuse, improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing 
societal welfare.

In addition to high profile initiatives such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap 
and the Human Genome Project, there is enormous growth among open 
knowledge projects and communities at all levels. Moreover, last year, 
the UK government began opening up their data on the Linked Data cloud 
through data.gov.uk.

In academia, open access to both publications and data has been 
gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up learning materials have 
been heard in education. This gathering flood of open data and content 
is the creator and driver of massive technological change.

During the event we will consider questions such as: What data can be 
made available? Are there privacy or ethical concerns? How can we 
connect it together? How can we use it to collaborate and share our 
work? How can Scotland benefit from open data? Are there public 
implications for entrepreneurial or ‘big business’ participation?

In the spirit of openness and exchange we invite participants to offer 
contributions on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing open 
content in accordance with  http://opendefinition.org/ .

We hope that this event provides an open forum for discussion amongst 
researchers and practitioners about open knowledge in Scotland.

Potential topics for discussion could include:

¨       Open educational resources and tools

¨       Business models for open content

¨       Semantic Web and Linked Data in relation to open knowledge

¨       Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating 
open knowledge

¨       Open Licensing, Legal Tools and the Public Domain

¨       Open government data and content (public sector information)

¨       Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models

¨       Open models for scientific innovation, funding and publication 
('open-access')

¨       Tools for analysing and visualizing open data

We welcome contributions in the form of short 10 minute lightning talks, 
posters or demonstrations. If you are interested please register your 
attendance and optional short talk at http://okscotland.eventbrite.com/

We look forward to meeting with you soon.

The Open Knowledge Scotland Team