Open Knowledge 1.0
Saturday 17th March 2007, 1100-1830
Limehouse Town Hall
http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
Organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation
* Programme: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme/
* Registration: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/
* Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon/
* http://www.okfn.org/okcon/after/
On the 17th March 2007 the first all-day Open Knowledge event is taking
place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups
from across the open knowledge spectrum and includes panels on open
media, open geodata and open scientific and civic information.
The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space
is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs
but concessions are available.
## Speakers
### Open Scientific and Civic Data
* Tim Hubbard, leader of the Human Genome Analysis Group at the Sanger
Institute
* Peter Murray-Rust, Professor in the Unilever Centre for Molecular
Science Informatics at Cambridge University
* John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector
Information
### Geodata and Civic Information
* Ed Parsons, until recently CTO of the Ordnance Survey
* Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map
* Charles Arthur, freeourdata.org.uk and Technology Editor of the
Guardian
### Open Media
* Paula Ledieu, formerly Director of the BBC's Creative Archive
project and now Managing Director and Director of Open Media for
Magic Lantern Productions
* Fleur Knopperts of DocAgora
* Zoe Young of http://www.transmission.cc/
## Theme: Atomisation and Commercial Opportunity
Discussions of 'Open Knowledge' often end with licensing wars: legal
arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open
Knowledge 1.0 will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked
aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility.
Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian 'apt' packaging
system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree
of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what
other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the opportunities and
problems of this approach for forms of knowledge other than Software?
Atomisation also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted
access to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates
commercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary
approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function
with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?
Bringing together open threads from Science, Geodata, Civic Information
and Media, Open Knowledge 1.0 is an opportunity for people and projects
to meet, talk and plan things.
Open Knowledge 1
Source: http://www.epsiplus.net/epsiplus/news/open_knowledge_1
21/03/2007
The Open Knowledge 1 conference demonstrates the value to be gained from opening up data and information.
London: Saturday, 17th March 2007
The old Lime House Town Hall in east London built in a by gone age (1879) hosts an Information Age event organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not for profit organisation that is incorporated in the United Kingdom as a company limited by guarantee.
The Open Knowledge Foundation exists to promote the openness of knowledge in all its forms, in the belief that freer access to information will have far-reaching social and commercial benefits.
The event titled Open Knowledge 1 focussed on two pragmatic aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility. This theme was developed throughout the day via an interesting programme that brought together the Science, Geodata, Civic Information and Media communities. The event concluded with a series of short sharp workshops that covered a broad range of topics.
The programme opened with an introduction from Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Rufus explained the objectives of the Open Knowledge Foundation and then the audience of 80+ people considered and took part in active debate following a series of presentations grouped under the headings:
Session 1: Open Geodata
An audio recording of this session has been published.
A range of topics then arose in the discussion that followed as a result of questions raised by the audience. The topics discussed included amongst others:
- UK Ordnance Survey of Great Britain – behaviour of a monopoly, pricing, licencing, data quality, NIMSA, internal culture, led and dominated by the legal people employed.
- Role of legal advisors – they are involved in all parts of the business process but the Business Managers should be taking the decisions and guiding the organisation not the legal advisors.
- The role of the UK HM Treasury – lack of policy, Corporation Tax, not recognising the Information Society changes and that their policy needs to change
- The Role of politicians – they need to be challenged
- Whether Civic campaigns brought about change or rather direct action to over come the immediate issue lead to change in culture and policy. For example – providing maps for all by capturing topographic data and making that available.
Session 2: Open Media
A range of topics then arose in the discussion that followed as a result of questions raised by the audience. The topics discussed included amongst others:
- Metadata – metadata interoperability, why not WWW Consortium
- BBC Creative Archive – what can be done to ensure the BBC opens up the archives that they hold on behalf of society? BBC Charter, BBC Trust.
- Understanding the collaboration process
- Business models
- Middle Class approach – most people have to focus on earning a living there is limited time available for voluntary activities such as some presented.
- Educational aspects: How to create a community. How to respond to a community.
- Human nature and the herd instinct.
- Life cycles: how long are people interested in particular information and initiatives.
Session 3: Open Scientific and Civic Information
A range of topics then arose in the discussion that followed as a result of questions raised by the audience. The topics discussed included amongst others:
- Transformation government policy: too many web sites
- Allowing society to contribute by opening up the data: public sector spends too much time thinking about a solution before delivering it, allow innovation to operate, need to enable parallel paths and peer pressure competition to operate, allow the community to assist rather than be held at arms length.
- Skills – the society is skill rich and has a role to play.
- Use of click-Use-Licences
- EU initiatives and frameworks.
The day clearly demonstrated that:
- The information society was very broad as it touched on most human interest areas and as such no one part of society has the complete knowledge and skills to develop the knowledge economy.
- Opening up public sector data as well as that of large private sector publishing organisation’s would enable society to develop the information society in parallel with the Government initiatives.
- Knowledge and skills existed throughout society and that this would continue to grow as a result of the changing demography within Europe (The aging society and shrinking workforce). Opening data would enable this latent force of knowledge and skills to contribute to, participate in and benefit from the Information Society.
- The information age was clearly challenging the old models and methods developed and adopted by large organisation’s whether they be in the public sector or private sector and that they were slow to adapt.
- Civil society through direct action provided the catalyst for change.
- Infrastructure initiatives needed to ensure all parts of society were involved not just one part.
- The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Charles Booth Online Archive (Charles Booth and the survey into life and labour in London (1886 – 1903)) map of Lime House Town Hall summarises the issue neatly as the Charles Booth map is available and the comparison with the map of today from a private sector is also available!
ePSIplus analyst Chris Corbin whom filed this report attended the Open Foundation 1 meeting.
Freeing the Data in London
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 20, 2007 at 7:46 AM
quoted from http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/freeing_the_data_in_london/
How much access should members of the public have to the data and media projects that their tax dollars fund? How about corporations looking to make a buck from government-financed data? Does information really “want to be free,” as Stewart Brand famously pronounced more than two decades ago, and if so, who’s going to pay for its production?
These and other questions were on the table at the Open Knowledge 1.0 gathering this past weekend. Radical geographers, documentary filmmakers, DNA researchers and UK bureaucrats were among the panelists and audience members at London’s grubby but vibrant Limehouse Town Hall. What motivated this disparate bunch to devote their sunny Saturday to data? A passionate belief that information becomes more valuable when everyone is free to repurpose it.
Rufus Pollock, executive director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, kicked off the event by exploring the day’s themes of “atomization and commercial possibility.” From “genes to geodata, statistics to sonnets,” he suggested, data differs, but commonalities are greater. He noted that software developers have a rich history of open source practices for developing collaborative and iterative projects like the Linux-based operating system Debian; the idea now is to migrate those habits and legal structures to other disciplines.
According to Pollock, software development has learned to effectively atomize information processing, parsing out packets of coding to discrete individuals and stringing them back together into a working whole. Versioning systems, tagging, and numbered releases are all examples of practices that can be applied to other modes of knowledge.
Such a divide-and-conquer approach “allows us to deal with complexity,” he said. “Without it we’d be hopeless” His remarks reflect a similar realization in the creative arts—that the future is in aggregation and recombination, that reuse is the new creativity.
Mapping for the people
Becky Hogge, executive director of the Open Rights Group, moderated the day’s first panel on open geodata—a topic that has become particularly hot with the rising popularity of Google’s map-based mashups. Panelists included Charles Arthur, the technology editor of The Guardian and a principal organizer of the Free Our Data campaign; Ed Parsons, the former CTO of Britain’s national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey; and Steve Coast, the founder of Open Street Map, a project that allows ordinary people to create collaborative digital maps by participating in “mapping parties” in which they attach GPS devices to their cars, bikes or persons and wander an agreed-upon region. Volunteers then translate these “traces” into lines, which are merged with existing public domain maps to provide up-to-date renderings.
Parsons kicked off the session by agreeing that government-funded geographical information should be more openly available, but noting that it is both expensive to produce and not particularly politically compelling. “Geodata doesn’t get votes,” he said. He suggested that the answer lies in more innovative, less bureaucratic licensing of the data for different uses.
In contrast to the United States, which places federally funded information in the public domain, Britain keeps much of its government-funded data under wraps, charging taxpayers, corporations and other government agencies to use it. Parsons had headed up an effort to provide more geodata for noncommercial use via an Ordnance Survey project dubbed OpenSpace, the hope of which was to “fill in the white space that is the gaps between the roads.” But the project has been scuttled for now, and he wasn’t able to provide details about what had happened to it.
Coast explained how his OpenStreetMap project is leading the charge against government ownership of geodata by harnessing the energy of volunteers to generate up-to-the minute maps, a “grassroots remapping.” The work of OpenStreetMap has revealed some of the tricks of commercial map-makers, who place small “easter eggs,” or false cul-de-sacs, in their maps to detect and prevent copyright infringement. OpenStreetMappers around the world can contribute to the “Free Wiki World Map” on the group’s site, and the process is “atomized,” because different volunteers perform different steps along the way. While the project is in is infancy, Coast suggested, it will gather momentum as data is added, putting pressure on private and government map-makers to lower the price of their information.
Arthur picked up the call for more public geodata with an explanation of his Free Our Data campaign, the goal of which is to make “impersonal data collected by the UK government organizations available for the cost of reproduction—which for digital is zero.” He explained that there’s some funny math happening within the government’s accounting: taxpayers dollars are used to produce one agency’s information, and that agency turns around and sells it to another agency for a profit, creating a false market value. “There’s a lot of data in there,” he said, “the trouble is that we can’t get it out.” He characterized data as the “mitochondria in the cell of government,” and suggested that by putting it in the public domain the government would both rid itself of administrative costs and significantly benefit the UK economy. He offered South Africa as an example—in 2000 the government made its maps available for free, and use of the data has grown by 500 percent.
“I don’t think this is a conspiracy, it’s a cock-up,” commented Parsons. “Government really doesn’t understand the value of the data that it’s sitting on.”
Content, copyright and community-building
The next panel examined some of the technological and legal underpinnings that are determining the use and distribution of digital media. Paula Ledieu, the director of Open Media at Magic Lantern Productions, and the former project director for the BBC’s Creative Archive project, spoke about the potential of open content and the challenges of licensing media in the digital age. She lauded the current explosion of user-generated archives like Flickr, “an extraordinary body of still images as a repository for us…a few years ago this would have sounded like a utopian la-la land.” However, content producers are still having a hard time finding visual, film and audio that is in the public domain. And, she warned, license experiments like Creative Commons risk creating “content ghettos.” She also noted that open culture experiments like the BBC’s Creative Archive are at risk; the project is currently closed down as the BBC puts it through a “public value test.” Measurements for assessing the value of such resources are scarce and poorly understood; Ledieu encouraged audience members to explore this area further, and in a later presentation, to respond to a whitepaper published by Ofcom (the UK’s version of the FCC) about the role and structure of public media in the digital era.
Other panelists offered examples for how content producers can engage with open information practices. A duo of presenters from Platoniq, a Barcelona-based collective, described a series of projects designed to combine open media distribution with public spaces, such as Burn Station. Their Bank of Common Knowledge project adapts the techniques of peer-to-peer media sharing to peer-to-peer education, allowing discrete chunks of information to be broken down and passed on via a network of volunteers. Presenters from the Transmission project described an international effort to develop open metadata standards for digital documentary film; the effort would make it easier for viewers to find the films online. They urged audience members to “join them in the fight for the freedom of the feeds.”
The science of openness
The final panel of the day tackled the question of how scientists might more easily gain access to data and research, often restricted by proprietary corporate ownership or the copyright protections of scientific journal publishers. Tim Hubbard, the leader of the Human Genome Analysis Group at the Sanger Institute, described how the process of opening up information about the human genome during a multi-organization collaborative research effort both made the research more effective and ensured that the data would remain in the public domain. The result was a shift in both scientific and corporate understanding of why it makes sense to “free the data.” Even companies are now agreeing, he said, that there’s “pre-competitive” information which it benefits everyone to have access to. He noted some current experiments in liberating pharmaceutical data from corporate control for pressing public health issues like malaria. “Biology is too complex for any organization to have a monopoly on data or ideas,” he said.
And yet, the scientific process of publishing research in peer-reviewed journals does often create a monopoly on news about new discoveries, held by influential publications like Nature. Peter Murray-Rust, a chemist based at Cambridge, described the efforts of the American Chemical Society to crack down on an open database of chemical structures, and praised the efforts of the Wellcome Trust to support open access scholarly publishing. He pointed audience members to the World Wide Molecular Matrix, an open respository of chemical information and molecules.
John Sheridan, the head of e-services for the UK government’s Office of Public Sector Information rounded out the day by trying to defend the official stance on public sector information, and to explain that they’re dancing as fast as they can. The audience was not impressed.
Formal panels were followed by informal presentations of a few interesting projects, including a proposed multimedia archive of the works of filmmaker Sally Potter, a database of public domain works, and a forthcoming project to make obscure but crucial U.N. documents more accessible to members of the public.
Proprietary system designers, grabby governments, and privatizing corporations beware! This was only version 1.0 of this intriguing event.
Applications are invited from doctoral students registered at U.K. universities in film, television, media or cultural studies, history, American studies, architecture, anthropology and other relevant disciplines for an Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsored collaborative doctoral training programme on using moving image archives and archival materials in academic research. Leading academics, together with representatives from the BFI National Archive, the Imperial War Museum, The British Universities Film and Video Council, the Media Archive of Central England, the national archives of Wales and Scotland, the Broadway Media Centre and others will deliver training events between November 2007 and December 2008. Students can be linked to an archive/institution appropriate to their research. Bursaries are available to defray the costs of travel and accommodation.
