[Wg-economics-advisory] Notes from the first conference call of the Open Economics Advisory Panel

Fri Mar 23 09:42:46 UTC 2012

Thanks Ms Dimitrova for this quick summary. I was happy to join the call, 
at least for a period of it. Unfortunately, I didn't get properly 
connected on fixed line through the Asian Development Bank communications 
net (as the time between 1am and 2 am HongKong time is a bit outside 
office hours for our switchboard), and then I ended up on connecting on my 
mobile, where the sound of the conversation was a bit uneven, and I 
appreciate this summary. Next week, Europe moves '1 hour closer to HK time 
because of summer' -- and possible next time a conference call could be 
set-up at 16.00GMT, then I can connect more successfully at a more civil 
hour (11pm).

Just to add a few points to pieces of information I did get:

## What should be the Focus
There are organizations, like ADB, or the World Bank, that gather and 
access huge amounts of economic data (and most of it goes to waste). And 
we also work with people, and hire them on and off, to maintain data bases 
and work on them, also for reasons of policy making. This should be a main 
focus.

Crowd-sourcing of data seems to me to be an important area of discussion.

Recently, I sent to Rufus a proposal on setting up a 'scoping workshop' 
for a project to develop economic geography model applications (and the 
pilot model is already up and running with me), based on open knowledge 
access. This could be discussed further.

As to workshops, there was a discussion on the timing of a Cambridge 
Workshop -- the idea of having it around the time of AEA meeting is worth 
pursuing. May/June is not so good, and too early.

Hans-Peter Brunner

Hans-Peter Brunner
Senior Economist, South Asia
Asian Development Bank
Tel  (632) 632 4159
Fax (632) 636 2337

From:
Velichka Dimitrova <velichka.dimitrova at okfn.org>
To:
wg-economics-advisory at lists.okfn.org
Date:
03/23/2012 03:00 AM
Subject:
[Wg-economics-advisory] Notes from the first conference call of the Open 
Economics Advisory Panel
Sent by:
wg-economics-advisory-bounces at lists.okfn.org

Dear all,

Thank you very much for taking the time to join the first conference call 
of the Open Economics Advisory Panel, we appreciate your comments and 
input and we hope that has been a useful exchange for you as well. We will 
try to improve the structure of these calls according to the feedback we 
received. The notes of the conference call are summarised here:

## Agenda

Introduction to the Working Group
Topics for the Working Group to focus on (including specific fields in 
economics and and other potential activities)
Academic workshop (planned for ~ Summer 2012). Precise date, topics and 
suggestions for speakers and people to invite
People to invite to the Advisory Panel

# Participants

David Levine
Albert Bravo-Biosca
Josh Lerner
Hans-Peter Brunner (joined later)
Rufus Pollock
Velichka Dimitrova

Bronwyn Hall (could not join because of dial-in problems)
Lionel Bently (apologies for not being able to join)
David Newbery (apologies for not being able to join)
Tariq Khokhar (apologies for not being able to join)

## Activity of the Working Group

Improving information sharing and utilization within economics both within 
academia and more broadly. More details at http://openeconomics.net/
Concretely: two workshops, building a community, some mini-projects

## What should be the Focus

3 main areas:

Economists to open up data
Other people to open up data that economists could use
Role that open data and content can play in broadening participation 
outside of pure academia

Greater weight on first two than the third.

## Suggestions for Additional Members of Working Group Advisory Panel

Introductions from David Levine (*)

* Christian Zimmermann
* John Rust - software for journals <jrust at gemini.econ.umd.edu> (*)
* Economics at NSF, Matthew Lutz (*)
* Shane Greenstein at NBER and digitization project (Josh Lerner)

General suggest to contact journals:  Econometric Society, AEA ...

If you have any additional suggestions for people to invite as Advisory 
Panel members, please let us know. 
Could you possibly write an introduction e-mail cc-ing us?

## Open Datasets

In addition to openness

Easy accessibility
Permanence (Providers disappear) (Institution along the lines of RePEC?)
Formatting and Standardisation
Programming issues (making data conversion easy or doing the data 
conversion directly
Reproducability and Validation

Is data available -- what's the situation? Should we do research here?
Crowd-sourcing data collection about existing papers (to students) once 
format is there

Journals and data archiving
Enlist archives participation
Likely support archiving and data conversion 
Greater benefit for the journals?

## ACTIONS

Circulate poll for timing of workshop
Follow up on Advisory Panel suggestions
Circulate workshop outline proposal

If you mind any issues missing in the summary and would like to add 
something, please do so. 

-- 
Velichka Dimitrova
Open Economics Working Group Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation

Dr Rufus Pollock
Co-Founder and Board Member, Open Knowledge Foundation
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, University of 
Cambridge
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