[open-economics] Summary Meeting 11-06-23

Fri Jun 24 10:38:16 UTC 2011

Hi,

Welcome Ruben and thanks Guo, for this very elaborated summary!

Will see some of you in Berlin.

Best,
Anders

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Ruben Laleman <Ruben.Laleman at ugent.be> wrote:
> Hey open economists,
>
>
> I am a new member of the group (invited by Dirk Heine)
> since I am doing a PhD on renewable energy/ the low carbon transition,
> I share the same interest as Velichka, I thought it might be interesting to
> share some information,
> For example, I would like to know what here plans are for research/data
> publication,
> Maybe I can be of some assistance,
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Ruben Laleman
>
>
>
>
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: open-economics-bounces at lists.okfn.org
> [mailto:open-economics-bounces at lists.okfn.org] Namens Guo Xu
> Verzonden: vrijdag 24 juni 2011 12:14
> Aan: open-economics at lists.okfn.org
> Onderwerp: [open-economics] Summary Meeting 11-06-23
>
> Dear all,
>
> Here's a summary of the meeting for all those who could not attend:
> <http://econ.okfnpad.org/meeting-11-06-23?>
>
> Overall, six people participated at the conference, living in four
> different time zones - I think this alone shows how exciting and
> diverse the Open Economics group can be!
>
> The main goal of this meeting was to get people together and
> brainstorm about the next projects at Open Economics. Here are some
> thoughts:
>
> Rodrigo joined from the Apps4Development Competition and proposed to
> participate at the Apps4Environment competition
> <http://www.epa.gov/appsfortheenvironment>. His idea was to create an
> app that utilizes the data from <http://www.epa.gov/data> to help
> people find out how to live "green" - more specifically, the idea was
> to create an open catalogue of green stores and products, matched with
> GPS coordinates to help people find "green" products. Rodrigo will be
> sending around a summary and more detailed specification of his idea.
> I feel this is a great idea for making "green" consumption fun by
> creating an interactive platform for sharing experiences/
>
> Anders is a journalist based in Den Haag. He proposed to use the XML
> data from the European transparency register
> <http://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultation/mainstatistics
> .do
> action=prepareView&locale=en#en>. The idea was to match the lobbyists
> against corporate records and maybe find some interesting
> relationships we can visualize. I feel that this would have a high
> potential as open knowledge and transparency is one of the key
> instruments in fighting corruption and nepotism (by the way, for the
> economists here, this is a great paper on the power of open knowledge
> in fighting local capture:
> <http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v119y2004i2p678-704.html>). I
> think we might already have some decent apps to visualize this and all
> we need is to scrape the data and connect the database.
>
> Alfredas is a PhD student is leading an extensive data mining project
> (<http://enipedia.tudelft.nl/blog/>). His team has been mining
> environmental data and infrastructure data (to quote: "everything
> physical that turns you off") and is providing an API through which
> others can access it. Again, this might be a very simple yet effective
> way to connect the project with Open Economics - this would involve
> examining the data and brainstorming how and what we could visualize.
>
> Velichka has a background in environmental economics and is keen on
> exploring ways to use open energy data. Alex - who unfortunately could
> not attend - has an economics background in housing and has proposed
> to focus on housing pricing and real estate developments. Niall - who
> could not attend either - is very enthusiastic in promoting Open
> Source - his idea was to do some independent research/collect data on
> the contribution of Open Source technology in fostering innovation.
>
> In addition to these great new contributions we still have some of the
> older ideas going, namely ProgressVote and Metametrik. ProgressVote
> (http://openeconomics.net/yourtopiaprogressvote/) is an extension of
> Yourtopia and it would suit the Apps4Environment competition well.
> Dirk has been working on this, especially in getting public support
> from policy makers and renowned economists. Finally, Metametrik is a
> proposal to create an open standard for saving regression results -
> regression results would be collected in a database and be available
> for visualizations and meta-regressions (hence the name). Personally,
> I feel this is a great project for Apps4Science - but most of the work
> would lie in collecting the data and filling the database, so it could
> be a more long-term project.
>
> Overall, the main idea was to brainstorm and think of various ways to
> combine the projects. It would be great if you could send in more
> specific descriptions of projects - for those attending OKCon next
> week, we might also be able to push forward a few ideas while in
> Berlin. In any case, feel free to add your ideas to
> <http://ideas.okfn.org>.
>
> Most of the ideas were based around environmental economics - this
> once more shows the potential of connecting Open Economics with the
> Open Energy Group - we could certainly benefit from a closer
> cooperation.
>
> Also, it would be great if we could create a list of stuff to do for
> volunteers. The idea here is that there have been quite a few
> volunteers who were willing to contribute but just did not know how -
> it would be fantastic if we could create a list of simple "10-minute"
> jobs. Examples are: Administering/registering data on CKAN, moving
> http://atlas.openeconomics.net to Wikipedia etc.
>
> We decided to have a next meeting in a month - in the meantime, we
> should use this list more extensively - again, there are quite a lot
> of passive readers and it would be great to include them in the
> discussion! In case I have incorrectly summarized some of your
> contributions, feel free to clarify and correct over the list :)
>
> Again, thanks for participating at the conference - happy
> brainstorming and I'm looking forward to more discussions on the list!
>
> Guo
>
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