[open-heritage] Open Data in Cultural Heritage - Group Coordination, Thoughts and Your Ideas (please :))

Ian Ibbotson ianibbo at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 09:28:11 UTC 2010


Hello All,

I've been mulling over ways that we might be able to build some
momentum and coordinate our open heritage activity as a community.
Ultimately, I think it would be great to see this working group come
together in a physical strand of an OKCon or similar event, but first
things first...... Here are some starter for 10 thoughts. I'm not at
all precious about *any* of them, so feel free to tell me they're not
realistic / not useful / already present / other.

(1) Monthly Newsletter? Would anyone be interested in a brief monthly
newsletter of announcements, events, new data sources, new projects,
funding, just plain interesting-to-the-group information? It seems
like this might be a good way to keep people in the loop, and also
provide some content for a possible web presence? I'm only thinking
single page update here, and I'm absolutely talking about editing, not
creating content... But if there's demand for it, and sufficient
information, I'm more than happy to edit a monthly(?) open heritage
newsletter. Anyone feel thats worthwhile? Obviously, sending
information to me to put into the newsletter would be pretty key! Be
prepared to see content reused on the blog tho :P

(2) Twitter? Because everyone and their dog has to have one :)
http://twitter.com/openheritage - It won't be the most high volume
feed, but i'll keep an eye on it every day. If you want to ping
interesting links / information for the newsletter, please feel free
to use that channel.

(3) Delicious? I've started using delicious.com/tag/openheritage as
another way to identify links interesting to the group / another
source of content for a newsletter. If there are any delicious users
out there, please feel free to join in and use the tag. If you could
be a good citizen and add text to your bookmarks explaining what the
link is, and why it's interesting that would be great! I've also toyed
with the idea of openheritage-datasource and openheritage-project
subtags... Not sure if thats a good idea or not yet tho.

(4) Directory? Is it worth trying to get a comprehensive list of open
heritage projects into CKAN (I really hope so!). I know that elsewhere
people have indicated they find the CKAN interface a bit hard to cope
with. Again, I'm absolutely more than willing to play an editorial
role here, but whats critical is the raw data. If people think it's
worthwhile I wonder if the place to start with this is a
straightforward audit of what we know? Is it realistic to ask people
to send me details of any open heritage project they know about? I
absolutely don't want to duplicate work already done, but currently
there's only 1 package in CKAN with the culturalheritage tag, I'd love
to see that figure go up. As the number of data sets goes up, so do
our opportunities for engaging people who might be able to do
interesting and novel things with the data. To quote Rufus: "The
coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone
else". Lets face it, as a community, CH as one of the most utterly
unique sets of data one could imagine (Along with some of the most
interesting problems).

(5) Blog? Of course ;) I think we need to have a chat with the OKFN
infrastructure team (Wow that sounds grand :D) in the near future and
talk about getting an openheritage site set up under WP. Again, I'm up
for curating this rather than creating content. However, in the spirit
of eating ones own dog food (And because Jonathan has been eternally
patient waiting for me to write up a post about Culture Grid) I'll
undertake to get a first posting out within the next week. Not sure
exactly where thats going to end up, so I'll probably just post it to
the list in the first instance.

I can't stress strongly enough tho how important participation is in
all this. No matter how embryonic, it would be great to hear from
people with any ideas for postings, projects, problems, feedback,
anything. I'm hanging out most of the time in the #okfn room on irc
(see http://www.okfn.org/contact) if anyone wants to chat, or feel
free to IM/email/skype/etc.

Right.. I'll stop ranting now. Hope to hear from you all soon.

Best regards,
Ian.




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