The 23rd of February was International Open Data Day.  Since this fell at the end of the ILWhack week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the momentum and engage the stirring Edinburgh Open Data scene.

Many ODD were organised around the world; most of them were hacks.  In Edinburgh we went for a different approach, thanks largely to input from local community activists like Freda, Leah, Andy and Ally.  Some might call it 'social hacking'.  Our aim was to gather together people with little knowledge of Open Data, people with data that may or may not be open, and developers and technical types.

With Open Data stuff exploding worldwide, and developers going nuts creating cool apps and services that make use of data being released, it's important, you see, for {local, small-scale, voluntary, grassroots} groups and individuals to get involved early on.  Such parties are arguably likely to benefit the most from empowerment by data, and if they're not part of the discussion early on we might well see a lot of services developed that meet needs imagined by a not-quite-connected but well-meaning tecchie.

So on that note, we want to spread the word about Open Data to those who might normally be left behind.  When these groups know what the possibilities are (we can show them successful projects, locally (eg. ILWhack) and worldwide), what is available, and what could and should be available, we empower them to take action that will benefit them.  More specifically, people can find out that the English government has released data about such-and-such-of-interest, and politely demand that the Scottish Parliament or local councils do similarly.  They can interface early on with developers who are keen to start making, and make sure their real problems get solved (or at least prioritised over potential imaginary ones).  They can get involved with things like ILWhack, and have a better idea of what it's all about.

Between 10am and 2pm, we gathered around 35 people in the Informatics Forum and, fuelled by tea, coffee and biscuits, began the discussion.

We started with an hour of ten minute talks, about a variety of topics:


Sally Kerr told us about Open Data at the City of Edinburgh Council; the progress they've made so far and where they hope to go in the future; NESTA's local government Make It Local programme helped Edinburgh Council to move forward with Open Data.  She gave a nod to the ILWhack projects that made use of Council data in the week prior.

Alex Stobart of MyDex talked about big, open data, and the challenges this presents to citizens and politicians.

Iain Henderson explained the Standard Label; an easy to read specification for data holders to present to their users how the user data will be used.  Like nutritional advice, but for data.. Other ODD events were centred around hacking with it we spoke!

Bob Kerr talked about OpenStreetMap and GeoRSS.  I love the obsessive hyperlocal detail in some places, like where the animals live in Edinburgh Zoo.  On a serious note, OSM has really empowered local governments and NGOs in developing countries.

Andy Hyde discussed asset mapping for voluntary groups; how ALISS collate dispersed health and wellbeing information into a central, open repository, ripe for manual and programmatic access.

From Lizzie Brotherston we heard about the Post-16 Learner Journey Project; helping the Scottish Government understand the learning landscape.  They're holding a hack in April.

Next it was unconference time!

We had a short while of whole-room discussion, before identifying three key areas:

• Standardising visualisation (headed by Bob Kerr)
• Small scale voluntary organisations (headed by Leah Lockhart)
• Sustainability of data projects (headed by Ewan Klein)

Everybody picked a group and we broke apart for the next couple of hours.

The final part of the day was a return to the main room, and further room-wide discussion of the breakout debates.

The standardising visualisations conversation focussed around bringing people into conversations about data using visuals.  Someone pointed out that if news readers used Open Data visualisations, the general public would be a lot more interested in Open Data.  It's interesting to imagine a future where data visualisations are embedded into the world, into the landscape.  To be able to interact with data meaningfully, you've got to know what it is - to recognise it.  A standard - think periodic table - would help people to know exactly what you're talking about straight away.  This goes beyond graphs and charts, into a world of layered visualisations that allow layered public contributions of interpretations.

Those interested in small scale voluntary organisations discussed data holding and data access issues, including strategies for persuading big organisations to open data (eg. by showing success stories, and proving a certain return on investment).  It was agreed that interfacing with developers is important to get things done that organisations really need; but organisations might not know what they need.  It was discovered that there's a lot of crossover between groups represented by people who were in this discussion; common needs but gaps in talent.

Finally, with regards to sustainability of data projects it was agreed that strategies are needed for keeping things going beyond short hack events; how to sustain that burst of energy for a longer term usefulness?  How to keep track of everything that's going on, and link communities with events (see OpenTechCalendar!).  Some kind of coordination body might be useful, or working groups / task forces.

We wrapped up, collected everyone's details for sharing (to ensure sustainability of the outcomes of the day by making sure everyone can keep in touch!) and people began to drift away.

There was an enormous positive energy throughout the day.  Discussions were lively and passionate, and we had an excellent mix of people, exactly as hoped for.

NB. It looks like Joined Up Edinburgh will come under the umbrella of the Scotland branch of the Open Knowledge FoundatioN, so http://scot.okfn.org will be a good place to keep an eye on now.  And to keep in the loop, join the Joined Up Edinburgh mailing list.

Other people have blogged about this too.  Check out these by Leah Lockhart and Dave Meikle (more links welcome).

I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events.  At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time.

The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February.

* Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience.  Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education...  And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better.  But that aside.

The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects.  This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well.

I knocked up a website with two primary functions.

1. Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online.
2. Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch.  This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants.

We anticipated about 50 students, and invited them to form teams of up to 5.

In parallel with gathering sponsorship, we came up with five prize categories of equal merit:

• Best for travel
• Best for health and wellbeing
• Best for communities
• Best visualisation or UI
• (First year prize for) Best data mashup

We hoped to encourage students to make whatever they wanted, using whatever technologies they wanted, with use of open (or specially provided) data being favourably looked upon. 

Skyscanner were the first main sponsor on board, pledging prizes for two categories and some massive datasets that aren't usually public and access to internal APIs, as well as engineers to mentor.

We partnered with ALISS to encourage use of their local health and wellbeing data API; ALISS also sponsored in part a prize category.

The City of Edinburgh Council were on board with some never-before-seen downloadable datasets (still online!), a bunch of pre-approved API keys and refreshingly open minds and supportive attitudes.

CompSoc heroically sponsored an entire prize category and promoted the event to its members.

Open Innovation sponsored a prize category too, and the School of Informatics contributed towards prizes and catering.

Greener Leith proposed a challenge and sponsored a special Mosque Kitchen lunch for everyone after the mid-point presentations on Wednesday.

We were able to hold some terrific practical workshops, thanks to:

• Tom Armitage and Stuart MacDonald, for handling geolocated resources.
• Philip Roberts, for data visualisation with d3.js.
• Oli Kingshott, for an introduction to version control, and HTML5 for beginners.

We also recruited mentors from UG4 and PhD students, as well as industry professionals, who were consistently present in the hacking space all week or available by Twitter, email and IRC.

We marketed the event in the couple of weeks prior (though we were organising up to the very last minute) through shout outs in lectures, posters around the Informatics department, emails to many university mailing lists and word of mouth.

As a result, we overshot our expected numbers, with well over 100 sign-ups by the start of the week.  This was good news and bad news at the time, as we had to scramble around to make sure we had enough sponsorship to feed everyone and whatnot.

By the end of the week, there were around 80 students still actively participating, across about 25 teams.  Pretty good!  Most of them were Informatics undergraduates as expected, but we had a handful of postgraduates and students from the ECA as well.

And the outcome?

Some amazing projects and really positive feedback from participants and supporters alike.

Naturally only a couple of days passed before somebody noticed that I hadn't sanitized input fields on the website for HTML and CSS input, so they made the projects page spin and play the Harlem Shake before I sorted that out, having been alerted at around midnight. /grumble.  Should have seen that coming, of course.

In the end we gave away £1500 in Amazon vouchers, five Nexus 7s and ten Kindle Fires.  Skyscanner even upped their sponsorship to three prizes because they were so spoilt for choice.

You can read about the projects, teams and see some demos here.

It was a really exciting and inspiring week for everyone involved.  Many of the students are taking their projects further (which is probably the most important outcome) and are in discussions with relevant parties to do so.

You can see photos and see other peoples' write-ups about the event here.

Will we do it again next year?  From the feedback gathered, the response has been a resounding yes!

11th to 24th February

I went to the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop; read about it.

I helped organise and run the Innovative Learning Week Smart Data Hack (18th - 22nd), and Edinburgh's version of International Open Data Day (23rd).  Both were successful. 

4th - 10th February

When helping to organise an event, it's impressive how much time sending emails, updating websites and spreadsheets, having meetings and generally coordinating things can take up.   So that's a lot of what I've done this week.  Not PhD, but related enough to be excusable... sort of... (Smart Data Hack and Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh)

I have finally booked plane tickets to Serbia for Resonate new media festival, at which I'm hoping to make useful contacts with independent digital media producers, learn some stuff about big data visualisation at the workshops (my places at the ones I've applied to haven't been confirmed yet though), and generally learn more about the digital art scene (and figure out ways SW technologies can benefit people who are part of it).  And also to enjoy Belgrade, as I'll have a spare couple of days either side of the festival.  Because the flights were cheaper then!  Honest!  I actually lost an entire afternoon hunting for cheapest flights on websites that weren't obviously scams (Cheap-o-Airlines?  Really??  Ultimately booking through JAT directly was the best option), then negotiating cheapest trains to London in order to catch flights, then sending CouchSurfing requests, because why spend money on a hostel when you can meet wonderful new people and get tourist advice for free?

I also applied for a place at the Semantic Web Summer School in Spain in July.  It looks fantastic and educational and stuff.  And I applied for funding to help cover then 900EUR entry cost (a whole week, accommodation and meals included), and SICSA are providing £500, yay!

Two thirds of Ontologies with a View met this week, and we discussed BBC use of Linked Data.  I only managed to skim the paper, but knew the general principles from articles I'd read about their work before... I will read it properly at some point, though I think a more technical discussion of what they did might be useful.