Science Library Pad

open policy @ DFAIT - Storify of the tweets

A lightly-curated Storify of the ~500 tweets from the February 9, 2012 event at DFAIT.

Canadian G4 open data cities presentation at GTEC

Just a quick Storify of my livetweeting of a GTEC panel

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

GTEC is a big annual IT tradeshow/conference for the federal government in Ottawa.

Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, did the opening keynote.

I like to tell people that when I was Industry minister, I was responsible for Canadian innovation. Now that I am President of the Treasury Board, I want to champion innovation in government.

...

a government that takes on the challenge to be a global leader in openness, transparency and security.  We have already taken some steps towards making that government a reality. But there is much more to do.

...

We can transform the way we do business by harnessing IT in new ways—including

• An understanding of the value of social media tools, as a way to bridge the distance between government and Canadians; and
• A further commitment to all three streams of Open Government—Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue.

Our Government is committed to offering Canadians greater opportunities to learn about and participate in government, in the economy, and in our democratic process. They will have greater access to data from federal departments and be able to find, download and use information they want more easily.

Our Open Government activities are detailed at www.open.gc.ca, where we describe actions to strengthen Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue. We will post information about new activities as they are undertaken.

As announced last March, starting in 2012, all departments and agencies subject to the Access to Information Act will be required to post summaries of completed information requests on their websites.

Canada will soon have the chance to step on the world stage as a leader in Open Government. We were one of the countries to signal our intent to participate in an international Open Government Partnership.

As part of our leadership role in increasing governmental transparency and accountability, Canada has joined the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from other governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Having joined the partnership, we will be delivering an Open Government plan informed by broad consultation by March 2012.

Being part of this partnership will offer Canada a means to connect internationally through its Open Government agenda. This will be an opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their innovations.

In the long term, open governments and economies will pay dividends for our business sector. They also stand to have an impact on Canadian society in general: increasing transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.

from Notes for remarks by the President of the Treasury Board - Speech for GTEC 2011 Canada's Government Technology Event - October 18, 2011

Notable is his specific committment to an Open Government plan for Canada by March 2012.

This is a reiteration of our existing commitment to the Open Government Partnership - the country page for Canada has a letter of intent from Minister Baird and the text "Country Action Plan coming in March 2012".

Tony Clement tweets at @TonyClementCPC

The Open Government Partnership is @opengovpart

and GTEC is on Twitter @GTEC and hashtag #gtec

Here is a Storify (my tweets along with a couple from Tony Clement):

Previously:
June 3, 2011  open data in 2011 Canadian Speech from the Throne
June 1, 2011  open data statement in Canadian Digital Economy Strategy update
May 20, 2011  open data supported by Treasury President Clement

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

Mathew Ingram at Third Tuesday Ottawa

First to get some administrivia out of the way - yes, in words I think I can attribute to Douglas Adams, as his trilogy grew to four books and more - "there was a miscounting" and Third Tuesday was indeed on the 5th Monday.  But regardless... thanks to Joseph Thornley, CNW and everyone involved for bringing Mathew Ingram of the Globe to talk in Ottawa.

I think as part of his role of engaging the community Mathew has been giving this talk a lot, but it was still good - he covered a range of topics including the Public Policy Wiki and Twitter, with unexpected praise for CoverItLive (which I didn't know was Canadian) and TweetDeck as powerful tools.  I have to admit that while I had skimmed through the TweetDeck interface options, I hadn't tried them all - the Twitscoop tag cloud integration is a way to keep an eye on the realtime news topics streaming by - Mathew said he found out about the Mumbai attacks when he noticed Mumbai getting larger and larger in the word cloud and clicked through to see what was going on.  (See my posting on Twitter modes for a bit more about TweetDeck.)

There was time for a number of questions (it's always good to see a presentation that makes time for this) - I won't go over them all - you can see the--what are we supposed to call it--liveblogging? livetweeting? of the event under hashtag

#tto

He had a posting earlier this month The Guardian ups the ante on APIs and if you've been reading this blog, you know I'm all about the APIs, so I was glad to have an opportunity to ask him a question about it.  It would be great if the Globe could offer this kind of capability.  In my opinion the winners in the online space are going to be the ones who figure out how to be open, machine readable, and (somehow) monetized.  (Maybe we all buy tshirts that say "I love the Globe API", I don't know :)

UPDATE 2009-03-31: Brief summary with links to audio of presentation and Q&A now available.  Via Twitter/FF.  ENDUPDATE

SIDEBAR on the space and on technology: It was a good meeting space, although there's no free wifi.  I'm getting increasingly tempted to get a Rogers Rocket Stick 3G USB network stick, but I don't think I could justify the cost - I wish they had a pay-as-you-go version, I'd use it all the time.

Since my tiny netbook got attention again, I'll mention it's the Asus Eee PC 4G, it's a first-generation device and handy to throw in a backpack or shoulder bag, but it has a few issues: small screen, tiny keys (I'm lucky that my fingers are small), limited battery life (maybe 1.5 hours) and limited storage 4G "hard drive" - internal flash drive.  People asked if it was slow but it's actually not compute limited for basic web surfing tasks, even using WinXP - that's one of the lessons netbooks are teaching us - you can even play full motion video on it.  You can add an SD card in a built-in slot for more storage, it appears as a second drive.

I think you're probably better off with a second-generation device, say 9" to 10", with better keyboard, longer battery life, and 160GB internal HD, something like an Acer Aspire One.  There's a good comparison chart of netbooks in Wikipedia (although look at the raw weight numbers only, not the colours, since they've made an eccentric decision to colour the weight ranges differently depending whether it's measured in pounds of kilograms).  END SIDEBAR

Brady Gilchrist - presentation notes - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

Social Media Breakfast Ottawa #7
Brady Gilchrist

Summary of Presentation

I would say his message was: instead of marketing TO your customers, market WITH your customers.
In other words, instead of just repeating "Cos-tanza" over and over again, you'll have to actually be interesting and engaged (which is much harder).  Be a real person, not a faceless "brand".

My Thoughts

Brady is a very good speaker and I thought he made a compelling case for the transformation that is sweeping over the media landscape - and he understood that this has been coming for over a decade, and that it's about engagement, not particular technologies.  Also he gets bonus points for mentioning Battlestar Galactica and showing the Star Trek: The Next Generation PADDs as precursors to our modern mobile devices (I made this same point myself - using the same image - on slides 4-5 of the Trendspotting presentation I gave two years ago).

You can see the power of customer engagement just by following the #lost and #bsg hashtags as the shows are airing on old-fashioned television (and of course before and after as well) or by seeing all of the work that has gone into the Wikipedia Battlestar Galactica pages and the entire dedicated Battlestar Galactica wiki.  This is all work that consumers do for free, because they are engaged with the product.  They're not doing this because it's some obscure thing that geeks do, they're doing it because people will share what they're interested about.  That could be your thing they're talking about and creating content around and (implicitly) promoting - if your thing is interesting enough.

There were some good (thoughtful) questions from the audience.

On the Interweb

You can follow Social Media Breakfast Ottawa discussions using hashtag #smbottawa , they also have a blog.  Brady said the best way to connect with him is through his Twitter (bradygilchrist), he also has a website.

Raw Notes

he's talking - good speaker

* talking about challenge of getting people to understand the technology
* talking ab0ut Kurzweil - rate of change - things changing so quickly we need open minds

* blogger in 1999 accidentally
* digital life - wired sailboat
* Starship Millenium - "most expensive blog ever done"
* ISDN-B Inmarsat channel
* (lots of talk about) rate of change
* more voices and more knowledge
* Tim Berners-Lee (not recognized - photo)
* business models are based on scarcity - but we live in an age of abundance
* everything is coming out of its containers
- music
- starting to happen with books

World we live in
* Near Web (desktop)
* Mobile Web
- "there isn't anything that isn't connected"
- "digital snacks" - low price
- fundamental shifts - "unboxing of newspapers"
- newspapers are made more interesting by social media
- the community joins the media
* Far Web (broadcast + Internet) - (ed comment: more like video on demand web)
- (paraphrase) has anyone noticed that the people with money aren't watching commercials
- what do people talk about: Lost, BSG...
- Eee PC-in-a-keyboard
- social media are great tools for creating a revolution (ed comment: maybe)
- could have very rapid adoption curves, e.g. Twitter
* Not so new.  1991. - Third Wave - ubiquitous computing - ubicomp - Mark Weiser - "The Computer for the 21st Century"
- (paraphase) we are now surrounded by computer chips / computer technology

*** Star Trek PADDS
- in science fiction technology doesn't really matter for technology's sake
* William Gibson
- "The future has already arrived.  It's just not evenly distributed yet."

* when creating a business: work in the space between early adopters and early majority - GET OUT EARLY before it becomes commoditized

* discussion about whether lurking has negative impact - it's ok to be a watcher -
1. You need to pay attention to what's going on
2. even if there's a small amount of interaction it's still good
* Black Swan - changes all the rules

* (paraphrase) if you're a business you'll never see it coming - you're out of your mind if you're waiting for it to hit the mainstream media
* social media as early warning medium for business

* "social media makes people smarter" - "deeper connectors on subjects"

* Rome burns and few react
- no one is paying attention to PVRs
- just "digital" doesn't solve anything - "Understand how to create abundance, knowledge, trust and connection is (the solution)."
- The One Computer Theory - the Internet as one big computer
- don't silo yourself

- "all roads must lead to dialog" - Age of Connection - lateral connections

New Rules

1. Be Present
2. Connect to others
3. Participate in ways that enhance social capital (ed comment: "don't be a marketer, be a market")

* master ubiquity and engagement

* "Many decision makers have no clue"
- the idea of the media buy (or he's maybe saying media pie) (old thinking)

* (advertising) money is being spent in places where people aren't looking

* "Motivation is the new segmentation"
- (I think he said) by participating in the conversation you can help shape the motivation

END PRESENTATION

Q: What do you tell broadcasters, newspapers to do?
A: Understand your audience / Ask your audience - create a platform for dialog

Q: Is social media just the vocal majority
A: (paraphrase) well, mass media is all lurkers - so social media is "truer"

Q: Is what's working well companies creating their own social networks?
   e.g. some companies go awry on Facebook
A: What is participation - add value to existing dialog, or spark a new one

"semantic web for marketers" - (ed comment: ???)

Q: some industries are starting to adapt
how do we compete as a country if a lot of new technologies are not available here
(Kindle etc.)
A: (paraphase) CanCon is killing CanCon

... consumers find a way... (geoproxy)
"the more you deny it, the more bittorrents..."

Canada as a digital ghetto?

Q: how does the Globe continue to create... they have extraordinary content that makes their platform worthwhile... now what do they do in terms of costs and sustainability?

A: no one knows - engage with audience/... "I don't have the answer"

Comment on music industry - they tried to fight with DRM and are now giving up...
A: "information wants to be free" - but everyone spends money on things they find interesting

"DRM sucks!"

END QUESTIONS

People Promote Their Events

* (didn't catch name of event) Mark Evans April 2
"brandividual" ????

* cupcakecamp.ca
March 29

podcastersacrossborders - Kingston, Ontario - June 19-21

The usual sidebar about wifi

I was (as usual) the only person I saw with a laptop (my little Asus 7" Eee PC 4G) - this did make it easy to camp the power outlet.  Also the only person to ask about wifi (AFAIK) - result:
* tried to get online but no luck - user/pass doesn't work
"The User Name and Password combination you have entered is invalid. Please try again."

Sometimes I feel like I'm back at Internet Librarian 2004 all over again (where I was in a giant room full of people, and almost the only one have a laptop, open it up and start typing).

I think I probably annoyed people with my aggressive typing, I'm sorry (but welcome to the 21st Century).  In a way I feel on the outside as usual - I'm not in the "writing on paper about how technology is transforming our lives" crowd (which I could never understand - writing URLs and notes on paper?  so then to share it, you have to transcribe it to digital?  what?) - and I'm not in the 3G-erati, the iPhone crew who never have to worry about Wifi access.  (I refuse to pay for the iPhone which doesn't meet my needs, just so I can get 3G, and I'm not getting a 3G stick for the small amount of usage it would get - what I'd like is pay-as-you-go 3G - there's a market opportunity for you.)

I think they're going to work on getting wifi access for future events.

Us Now - presentation notes

Disclaimer: These are just raw presentation notes, with some editorial comments inserted.  I apologise it may not be clear whether something is a quote, or to whom exactly it should be attributed.

I should also mention that Paul Miller in this context is PaulMiller.org Paul Miller, not CloudOfData.com Paul Miller.

*** begin raw notes

Us Now
Canada School of Public Service

Thursday March 5, 2009

masslbp.com

US NOW - playing

more people can say more things to more people than ever in history

can we all govern? - we become part of the government

reconstituting what is a government

* couchsurfing

low barrier - all you need is desire to engage

Eric Tomczak

social status and interaction plays out online in ways that it couldn't do in the broadcast world

* netmums

"about loss of the community ... we have to find some other way of doing it - moms net

Clay Shirky
- "is couchsurfing a small organisation (staff)... or a huge organisation (users)"

- "The old model of social trust and anointed experts is only one of many patterns"

CouchSurfing - "it's not as dangerous as you might think"

if you show trust... you reduce the incentive to game the system...

You can use a number of mechanisms for trust and reputation - Shirky

can you trust google more than a doctor... the good rises to the top
(ed comment: a lot of trust in google rank)

you get advice from 25-30 people in minutes...
moms - you trust other moms more than traditional authorities - motivation to network peer to peer

directionless.info - sources questions to local area people
connect to people with local knowledge

gift economy has always been there... social media is bringing gift economy out into the open

not generic do-gooding, it's highly specific to individual interests and abilities

Shirky - "what's happened in the 20th century was really an anomaly" - we're returning to old,
empowered, gift economy ways

public service built on model of passive consumers - the problems and needs model

(paraphrase) these hugely centralised approaches have got huge problems - people can now work together to ask deeper questions about the role of government

we now have tools that are competitive with large institutions in terms of organising people

Shirky - "everyone is available for group action" (now)

Ebbsfleet FC United - co-op football team

Paul Miller - turn institutions upside down using the net (a different Paul Miller than the Talis one)

semi-final of FA Trophy

MS vs. Linux - (ed comment: a bit of "self-organisational" magic worship - it's not as easy as that)

you can no longer instruct and tell - you have to persuade
from manager to leader... people who are comfortable letting go (of direct control)

William Heath - Ideal Government - would Gordon Brown listen to the people directly

Shirky - "more and more people take it for granted that they can get involved, ... and that there is significant value (in doing this)"

Don Tapscott - "because the web drops collaboration costs, consumers can now produce"

zopa (UK microlending)

Don Tapscott - customers can cocreate, coinnovate value for organisations

zopa guy - banks have got themselves into trouble by focusing on optimising rather than their clients

"I fought the Lloyd's and the Lloyd's lost"

Slice the Pie is a financing tool for the music industry - fan financing

Don Tapscott - "the power of transparency" - "(the net) is becoming a new mode of production"

change in the relationship between customers and corporations... mirrored in change of relationship between citizens and their governments

Don Tapscott - (traditional model of government) "is inappropriate in the 21st century"

... participatory budgeting

citizens deciding how to spend L20,000 in ?poulton?

TheyWorkForYou.com

Tom Steinberg... "much greater transparency makes (politicians) much more electable"

George Osborne (ed note: I think this is the right guy) - Shadow Chancellor - "it will shake up British politics"

Don Tapscott - "vested interests fight against change"

Paul Miller - "representative democracy was based on the idea that people are thick" (ed comment: I don't think Canadian audience got this idiom)

the point - London Birmingham Rail Link

Green Party Canada - policy wiki (ed comment: it was called the Living Platform, I don't know the details)

Don Tapscott - "I call it Government 2.0" (ed comment: yeah, you and everybody Don)

Don Tapscott - "governments could more create a platform where citizens could self-organise to create better value than already exists"

some other guy - "we should be careful about being too utopian"

Paul Miller - "a politics where you can say how you can help"

*** end movie

Panel:

* David Hume (err, not that one)
* Maryantonett Flumian, University of Ottawa
* Mike Kujawski, Marketing Professional
* Anthony Williams - coauthor of Wikipedia

(ed note: notes are even more raw at this point because I'm trying to transcribe as they're talking)

David Hume:
- what they're doing in British Columbia
- 1/3 to 1/2 workforce retiring/not available in next 10 years
- focus on human resources "being the best"
- building a culture of innovation and collaboration - Web 2-y "ideas factory"
- how to bring in citizens

- how do you address climate change - you can only go so far in legislation
- need to "facilitate action"

Maryantonett
- how does government stay relevant
- fear (of)... disintermediation... government being replaced by other actors in society
- participants are across the age spectrum (not just a youth phenomenon)
- all based on trust and confidence
- (ed comments: some backhanded complements for this technology)
1 how do we manage accountability? (without hierarchy)
2 privacy and security issues
3 leadership skills are going to have to change
- what are the costs of not collaborating

Mike
- what is the cost of not collaborating
- this isn't about technology
- it's about the people
key concepts
- trust - people are inherently good
- people are talking anyway (you can't control it)
- Most of the time (if your offering is good) negative comments will be neutralised by positive commenters
- don't hide from discussion
- the Era of Free
- why should (your presentation etc.) sit and collect dust - let others do something with it
- CrimeReports (ed comment: I don't think it's live as Mike says)
- it's not everybody, but it can be tremendously leveraged
- mention of appsfordemocracy.com
- government 2.0 best practices wiki

Anthony
- we have an unprecedented fabric of connectivity now in society
- reach outside of traditional silos - tap into pockets of expertise that exist in society
issues:
- regulation (example: lack of financial transparency, corporate social responsibility - conflict diamonds)
- service delivery (netmoms, patientslikeme)

Q: There was a question about how to handle "information overload" - I was at the mike so I don't have it transcribed, but I blogged my thoughts about it - connecting with information and finding your community

Q (me): how to create positive engagement?  negative engagement
issue - YouTube comments, 90% lurkers

(ed comment: I don't have full notes on their answers since I was standing at the mike)

David
- engage your community - not about the size, it's about the impact

Mike -
* Understand your audience
* Remember you're human
* Be respectful
* A small number can be extremely meaningful

Maryantonett
Be careful how you engage - shouldn't just be playing with a tool, have a purpose

Q from the regions - what weight should online participation be given
A: - use it as appropriate for important topics
- the ultimate decisionmaking has to remain with the representatives
- use it to generate ideas
- design the consultations to include everyone you want to reach (online and offline)

David - remember that you're serving your minister by gathering MORE information
- realise that not everyone is connected - takes a broad practice of consultation - use both online and offline

Q: conflict between open consultation and people who won't even circulate drafts without approval - the risk averse
A: Maryantonett - change how we work - get the best value and decisionmaking - if you can't demonstrate value people won't adopt it
This is not just an add-on, this is a new way of doing business - this is not about a process, it's about an OUTCOME.
The nature of how we use information has CHANGED.

Q: ?Bruce Foresster? - Department of Defence - Question of Trust
Need to know vs. need to share...
Practical applications to gain, hold, spread trust
are their differences generationally?

A: David - be open and honest, do what you say you're going to do - continue to be open
By sharing (in New Zealand wiki consultation) - able to move fast - put responsibility onto the entire community

A: Maryantonett - 9/11 was a breakdown in sharing information
intellipedia
We can't assume that the smartest person in the organisation sits at the top.

A: Mike - find relevancy at a personal level (use these tools so you understand how they work)
usedottawa site
It works because if you put in a little bit, you're going to get tenfold in return.

Q from region: collaboration between different agencies - turf wars - how do you see collaborative technologies helping?

A: Anthony - look at the vision of what we could create together
e.g. if states could work together they could share common software

A: David - ircan.gc.ca (for Government of Canada)

A: Maryantonett - 1000 wikis is no better than 1000 siloed programs
Create panels of client groups and ask them what they expect and let that be a guide in what your collaboration does -
let's not just talk to each other, let's really engage citizens.

Q: Jan from Treasury Board - biggest challenge is culture of government
Sometimes the organisation doesn't care about outcomes.
How to create cultural change?
Her comment: It's important to separate the culture of collaboration from the technology - you can collaborate without using any technology at all.

A: Maryantonett - the biggest thing we need to do is culture change -
put the citizen first (Service Canada)

Spend way more time opening up to what people actually need and want from our organisation
- ask in a forum that you can partially control.
Constantly bring the outside in.

Understand: everyone has a vested interest in the current structure.

SERVE THE PUBLIC

Technology can be powerful if you find the right things to do at the beginning.

A: David - change starts with you

Q (comment): Came in with expectations of government use of social media... discovered there's not much yet.
A: We are the drivers of this culture change.
Get people internally to work together.
Cost of contributing is far less than the benefit that you get back.
Find the community of people who get it internally.  Find the people who help you.

Q: one of the challenges is the language barrier - discussions in realtime -
how to establish a discussion across the official languages (in government)

A: Anthony Williams thinks machine translation will fix this issue in 3 years (ed comment: I've heard that one before)

Questions I would have asked if there was more time:

Q: how to connect online to offline (not about technology)

That is, how to you connect between the online interactions and having meaningful discussions and making real change happen offline?

Q: sustainability of these tools

That is, what happens if we move the whole government to Twitter, and Twitter goes bust or everyone moves to using Twitter 2.0?  Also we're only a few years into Web 2.0, do we even know what we're talking about?

Q: spread of unauthoritative info (vaccination)

That is, it's all great for the netmums to be supporting one another, but what happens when they start reinforcing bad information, such as the ongoing scare about vaccination that is leading people to NOT vaccinate their children, based on unscientific information?

SIDEBAR: When I arrived and asked what the CSPS Wifi password was, I got a startled gaze that indicated to me that probably no one taking this kind of training had ever asked this question before.  Then seeing the rows of people in the audience dutifully writing down information about the the transformational power of the web and great URLs to check out... on paper, I was reminded of Internet Librarian 2004 where I snapped open my laptop and looked around to find myself alone in using technology in the audience.  While this doesn't bode well for technotransformation in the short term, there is a positive example in that many library conferences are now very tech-enabled, but I don't know if I have the patience to wait for an entire new culture (the government) to spend the next three years discovering the amazing 1999 world of blogs.  (For a discussion of the Web 2.0 timeline, see my presentation Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming.)

Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?

I went to the event about open government, it was good.  (It was a "meetup" I guess, in the popular terminology, or a new term I learned, 5à7).

Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca did a presentation that I liked a lot, about mobilising government data by opening it up for public engagement through APIs.

Her presentation should show up at

http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell

In the meantime the presentations currently there give an idea of the concepts and objectives.

UPDATE 2009-02-12: Her presentation Benefits of Open Government Data is now available, and I also found an article by her that covers some of the same ground

Bell, J. 2009 Feb 1. Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source. Open Source Business Resource [Online] 0:0. Available: http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/829/802

ENDUPDATE

Given my experience trying to sell the idea of APIs and open data to a community that mostly understands plain web pages, this is a challenging concept to promote, but I think there are some good US and UK examples that we can point to (about which more later).

Having learned from the experience of twitter-spamming people by live-tweeting an event, I made a FriendFeed room for my live notes instead.  I don't know how well it turned out - because of screensize limitations on my 7" netbook, it was much easier if I kept creating new top-level items, rather than just making a long section of comments - I'm not sure if this mix is right - maybe they all should have been toplevel items, or all comments.  Anyway the room is at

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/open-government-canada

in the spirit of the event, it's currently completely open.  You're welcome to add any relevant items, they don't have to be specific to this event.

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 0

Jennifer also mentioned the possibility of a ChangeCamp Ottawa (for background, see my previous posting about ChangeCamp Toronto).  It looks like a good way to connect is through the ChangeCamp Twitter account,

http://twitter.com/changecamp

and the rather long hashtag #changecampottawa

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 1

New web technologies face many adoption challenges for Canadian Federal Government - official languages rules, Common Look and Feel rules, slow tech adoption and a risk-averse culture.  That being said, there is a lot of excitement about the potential of these tools both internally, in an Enterprise 2.0 sense, and externally, in a Government 2.0 sense.  As I said in my Web 2.0 presentation at CISTI, in some ways I find it hard to get particularly excited when this is stretched to include blogs and wikis, which are actually both pre-Web 2.0 technologies (as you can see from the timeline I posted on FriendFeed) that are now quite mature.

That being said, the "Standard Set" of modern web tools (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook) is getting deployed (perhaps somewhat quietly) on Canadian Government websites, the example I have been using is the Prime Minister's Official site, under Family Centre - Social Networks.

Part of what prompts this section of my posting is that there was a recent "Social Media for Government" event in Ottawa (unfortunately rather expensive).  Via the Twitter tag #ali I see that the Canadian Afghanistan mission is also using the social media tools: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook (and RSS feeds)

http://www.afghanistan.gc.ca/canada-afghanistan/multimedia/index.aspx?lang=en

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 2

In addition to the internal drivers of change, the entire government information environment is changing worldwide.  Whether it's phenomenal reports like the Power of Information Taskforce in the UK, or President Obama releasing principles of openness on WhiteHouse.gov in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government

• Government should be transparent
• Government should be participatory
• Government should be collaborative

or declaring in his Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act that

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Of course, words alone won't achieve these goals, and people like Don Tapscott have been talking about transparency for years (see e.g. "turn your organization inside-out" and Tapscott keynoting about transparency at SLA 2005).  What is changing is that more people with IT expertise and a passion for engaging the public are gaining prominence.  One great example is Vivek Kundra, who is rumoured (but AFAIK not yet currently announced) to be the Obama administration's choice for Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and information technology (an obscure title but one that is as powerful if not more than the government CTO).  Even if Kundra just stays working for the DC city government, he's already done some great things:

47 Applications in 30 Days for $50K

Like many cities, Washington, D.C., collects a vast amount of data and metrics about its people and operations including both realtime (or near realtime) data as well as relatively static information such as neighborhood demographics. Much of that information is now available to the public through more than 200 data feeds accessed through the Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Web site.

Kundra's idea was to use a competition to encourage developers to use those feeds to create applications for the public good.

You can see the competition site at

http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/

I think these kinds of open government initiatives are pathfinders that show us ways in which governments at all levels - federal, provincial, municipal - can open up and engage citizens.

are your circulation stats a gold mine?

Chris Keene has an interesting posting about the ALT TILE meeting.

(TILE = Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the e-Framework)

(ALT TILE = Association for Learning Technology meeting 'Sitting on a gold mine' - improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using 'learner behaviour data')

He says

This is one of those things that once you get discussing it you’re never quite sure why it already hasn’t been done before, especially with circulation data. There’s a wide scope, from local library services (book recommendation) to national systems which use data from VLEs, registry systems and library systems. A lot of potential functionality, both in terms of direct user services and informing HE (and others) to help them make decisions and tailor services for users.

Chris Keene - nostuff.org blog - sitting on a gold mine - December 12, 2008

via my FriendFeed and Twitter

I suggested to Chris that TILE should also have a look at all the information Johan Bollen is gathering in the MESUR project.

Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming

I completed a presentation about Web 2.0 at work, I would say overall it was about 60% successful.

First, here is a version I did at home, slides plus audio (SlideShare calls this SlideCasting).

Web 2.0 timeline and future

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 ib2)

You can click through the slides as usual, but if you press the green play button (arrow) in the centre, you will also get audio.  (I will have a follow-up post about how to make a slidecast.)

If you have some background in Web 2.0 you may want to start on slide #46, "Social Netwhat?"

UPDATE 2008-12-15: Thanks to some great work by CISTI Communications, the video of my presentation is available.  The camera is only on me, so you may also want to bring up the slides to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  The lighting is not great so it's a bit murky, but good I think for a first attempt, the audio is clear.  It's about 50 minutes of me presenting, plus an additional 5 minutes or so of information from our head of communications about how government employees can use Web 2.0 appropriately for work.

Google Video: Web 2.0 timeline

In case you're wondering why GVideo and not YouTube, GVideo allows unlimited size and length of video (I think YouTube limits are 1GB and 10 minutes).

Note: I would really consider the SlideCast audio to be the "full" presentation, in the video I ran out of time at the end to fully cover the social networking and lifestreaming parts.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2008-12-19: If you want just the 1.5 hours of audio narration (I'm not sure how much sense it makes without the slides), it's available as an audio stream or in various formats for download at

http://www.archive.org/details/Web2_December2008

ENDUPDATE

(Not) Fitting 1.5 Hours into 45 Minutes

When I ran through the slides at home, even with a big section of organisation-internal stuff taken out, it took an hour and a half, this should have been a warning to me.  I only was supposed to present for 40 minutes (40 minutes for me, 5 minutes of material from our communications department, and 15 minutes for questions in a one hour slot).

As a presenter it's really my duty to make sure I fall in that time constraint.  I'm there for the audience (otherwise they could just look at the slides online) and an important part of that is leaving time for questions and comments, because as we know from the Wisdom of Crowds, the audience is going to have more information and ideas collectively than even the best-informed presenter.

When I told my supervisor that my test run went an hour and a half, and that I had cut out 2.5 slides, leaving me with 45 slides (or 43 slides plus opening and closing title slides), he suggested that I cut ruthlessly but there wasn't any part I was prepared to lose.  I guess one of the consequences of picking a large topic and then spending time over a period of months preparing it is you grow quite attached to the form and content of your presentation.  I really did think that I could "just say less" for each slide to get under the time limit.

More realistically for my speaking style (which tends to be a bit detailed and digressive) I should have had about 30 slides for 40 minutes.  I was thinking about it and it really is two presentations, the first piece is reasonably general and takes you through the history of Internet and Web at CISTI and NRC, through a timeline of Web and Web 2.0, to the current situation with these technologies at the Government of Canada and CISTI.  The second part moves into more advanced topics, explaining the nature of social networking and finishing with the very recent development of lifestreaming.  (If there had been time beyond that, I would have talked a bit about how mobile devices are shaping web use, and how we appear to be moving into a more personal and real-time web.)

The logical cutting points for the presentation would have been to end on the slide just before the social networking section (Social Netwhat?), or end on the first slide of that section, or end with the first "Zero Degrees of Separation" slide.  Lifestreaming is a topic that really needs another 45 minutes of presentation all on its own.  I really should have done more runthroughs until I could get the material under 40 minutes, as it was, what happened was that I was watching my time carefully and made it through the first section of the material ok, and then looked at my watch at the start of the social networking section and realised I had another 30-45 minutes worth of material to present in 5 or 10 minutes before the absolute end of my time at 15:00.  I should have just stopped then in order to allow some questions.  Instead I gave a very rushed and probably neither very comprehensible nor useful sweep through the remaining slides down to "Web 2.0 Warnings".  (I should have realised when I was telling people online to *start* at slide 46 for the social networking section, that there was no way I would be able to reach and cover it fully in my presentation - anyway in the online version you can start there and hear me very unhurriedly go through the material.)

The Venue, Presentation Technology and the Perfect Storm

I had a good venue and great support from the technical staff and presentation committee, who agreed to all of my unreasonable presentation diva demands, including a wireless clip-on mike and using my Mac to present using Keynote.  This was an additional complication for them because we use Adobe Acrobat Connect so that people in our offices across the country can see the slides, fortunately it installed and ran fine.  For audio we use a separate voiceconferencing service and a Polycom speakerphone.  To add to the tech mix, I was trying out Salling Clicker on my Nokia N82, it worked quite well, just a couple issues, one (that I was aware of in advance) is that the N82 has a sensitive position sensor, so if you're swinging it around in your hands while presenting, the screen tends to rotate, which also rotates which buttons move the presentation forward and back (I always used the "down" button to advance, since it works in either screen orientation).  It would probably be good to lock the screen from rotating before presenting.  Another issues was that for some reason a couple times it got out of slide-turning mode and into the general presentation selection mode.  It has a nice feature of displaying slide notes on-screen, but I found I didn't actually use the on-screen notes, I always present without notes anyway.  (As a sidebar, I didn't know Salling was an actual person, until with zero degrees of separation he contacted me to answer a Tweet about how to see more than one phone-screen of notes for a slide.)

The presentation was also video-ed, they were concerned about the video camera's audio though.  In retrospect, there are a bunch of other audio recording options we could have added, including:

• recording the audio from my mike directly somehow
• recording the voice conference either through the service itself, or through channeling it to some recording software/service
• both of my phones (K790 and N82) I'm sure can record an hour of audio easily
• I actually have a dedicated audio recorder that I never remember to bring.  It can also store over an hour of audio, has reasonably good pickup (I could have placed it next to the speakerphone) and is easy to work with since you can just plug it into USB when you're done and download the standard-format file it creates (I think it makes a Windows audio file).  It's an Olympus WS-320M.

The logistics side was quite complicated due to a series of unforeseen events.  First the number of RSVPs for the presentation exceeded the firecode limitations for our usual room, so in the weeks before the presentation they had to arrange for an auditorium in another building, which of course means different setup, (somewhat) different network, sending out a room change notice etc. etc. all of which the committee handled very ably.  Then, with everything arranged, on the day of my presentation the entire transit service (mostly buses) for Ottawa went on strike, plus there was a fairly big snowstorm (snowfall from 15-25 cm, later upped to 30cm, with risk of freezing rain).  How did the day go?  Well here's how the Ottawa Citizen put it: Strike, storm lead to commuter chaos.  (My workplace is about 35 minute bus ride from the downtown core where I live, and Ottawa is a very widely distributed city, so people come to my workplace from many different directions with often long commutes.)

I was grateful that anyone showed up at all, I was worried there would be about 5 people in the audience.  I (as usual) forgot to take an audience photo despite having both of my cameraphones, but I would guess around 25 people.

Part 1: History of Web 2.0 - Some Key Messages

The messages that I wanted to convey included:

• libraries were a little slow in some cases to embrace Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but around 2006 there was a tipping point and I would consider that now e.g. library conferences are leaders in web-enabling (what Lorcan Dempsey calls amplified conferences, a concept which Brian Kelly has, well, amplified and extended).
• That being said, the academic sector, including academic libraries and some large research and technology organisations were early to the Internet and to the Web.  In fact it's not an exaggeration to say these groups were the Internet, in the pre-Web days.  USENET newsgroups were filled with scientists and students asking questions and having conversations.  The Web itself came out of CERN, and so it's not surprising that scientists were also early to the Web.  So when we say scientists aren't using Web 2.0, to some extent it's because they already have well-established communities online, and because science has always been about your peers, they already know their networks and connect to them online and offline.
• My organisation in particular was (based on my amateur USENET sleuthing), posting to newgroups in 1988, talking about xmosaic in 1993, and putting up websites in 1994.  That's about as early as you could possibly adopt - so I don't think we can say that (academic) libraries are necessarily always late adopters.
• Many libraries unfortunately got "stuck" in the mental model of the browse-based web that existed from (very roughly) 1995 to 1998, the pre-Google Web.  It was a very compelling analogy:
  • physical address-> web address (URL)
  • front desk -> front page (home page)
  • browse through stacks -> browse through web pages
  • library -> digital library
• Unfortunately this model of the web, where users type in specific URLs and then browse for content usually within a single site, the Yahoo model of locating information, the model that is even embedded in our terminology of "web browser", is completely false in the post-search world, the post-Google Web.  In the post-search world what matters, the only thing that matters really, is rich content that gives you PageRank.  The page that shows up may be many layers deep within your website, and people may stop there only briefly, before jumping to another site in order to satisfy their need for photos of rabbits with pancakes on their heads (err, or whatever particular topic you provide expertise on).
• Web 2.0 is about many things, including this rather awkward term of "user-created content".  (I kind of messed up my message here, I was trying to say, with the Communications team in the audience, that Web 2.0 is typically personally-identifiable, amateur content, whereas organisational communications are typically more anonymous and professional - I think I may have unintentially given the impression that Web 2.0 communications are "cool", when I just want to say that they're different modes of presenting information, they both have their pluses and minuses.)
• I also didn't have time to cover some interesting work that Alison Ball and others are doing with delicious bookmarks and the Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

Part 2: Social Networking and Lifestreaming

Skipping towards the end of the presentation (as this posting is getting as over-long as my presentation itself) there are some trends that we can see.  One is that we have many new options for making social connections online - but you have to keep in mind that the solution you choose is going to depend on where your network already exists.  If, like is often the case with librarians, your colleagues, your social network is already in mailing lists, then it's going to be very difficult to get much benefit from new social tools.  I give a very simple example, which is that my generation (I finished my undergrad in 1990) is primarily email-based.  If I want to reach my friends, I send them an email.  I can send them messages in Facebook until I'm Faceblue, but they'll never get them, because they never check Facebook.  So this kind of "build it and they will come" idea ONLY works if either people don't have good ways to connect to their social network, or if somehow you convince enough of them to move over (which is tremendously difficult to do).

That being said, IF your connections (friends, work colleagues, whatever) are using social, Web 2.0 tools, you can see their lifestreams, their patterns of activity.  This may be in Facebook (which really was just intended for university students to tell each other where they were, what parties they were going to, and to share drunken pictures of themselves), in Twitter, which I think of as a kind of digital watercooler, and in FriendFeed, which is a sort of meta-site for aggregating all your activity in other Web 2.0 sites.

So your choice of social network online will be shaped by where your current (or desired) community already participates.  Additionally (and I'm grateful to Owen Stephens for this insight), your choice of tool may depend on how you consume the information, in particular, mobile device versus computer screen.  Facebook and in particular Twitter have mobile versions that work very well on a small smartphone screen, their "short snippets of stuff" design takes this environment into consideration (and Twitter can even be used entirely just through SMS).  FriendFeed, with its longer message fields, extensive comment threads, and more complex content, is not at all as well suited to this environment.

Additionally, as we move past Google at 10 Years, we're starting to see a change in search and information exchange.  In the Before Time, because looking up information was expensive/timeconsuming, we often turned first to friends or to reference experts like librarians when we had questions.  Then we had the era of keyword search.  But with the rise of Instant Messaging, SMS, and other more real-time social network interaction, people are again turning back to asking questions first.  That is, they will post a question to their social network, and use keyword search only as a supplement to the information they get from their peers.  This may seem like we've actually gone back to an old way of doing things, but as with all historical cycles, it's both similar and different.  People are asking others questions again, but now they can ask many more people at once than ever before (in theory, you can ask the entire Internet world - sometimes called "crowdsourcing").  There is, I think, an opportunity for librarians to re-introduce themselves into this new real-time question-driven environment.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an overall conclusion, for me it's that as someone who is web-based (rather than mobile), with a widely-dispersed web presence, and whose community is fairly intensive web users, FriendFeed is the best Web 2.0 tool for me.  Facebook I didn't like much at all, it mixes work and personal together and neither my work nor my personal community are particularly active users of it, so it doesn't make any sense for me to spend much time there.  So you can catch me Web 2.0 lifestreaming at

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

As a presenter, there's always a risk of putting yourself forward as the Expert, and I want to say that I very much don't consider myself a Web 2.0 Expert of any kind, I'm not even in the right generation to be talking about Web 2.0 (although perhaps being an outsider to this environment gives me a chance to see things that the Digital Generation may take for granted).  I invite your questions, comments and corrections (and I wish I'd made time to do so in my presentation yesterday).  You collectively know much more than I do.

SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

Just an experiment with CoverItLive - may fail totally, we'll see.

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled.  Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

Microsoft Summit on Repository Interop - notes

April 1, 2008 - I had read the posting by Savas (probably via Lorcan), so it was great to have an opportunity to hear about Microsoft's thinking directly from them.  The most dramatic announcement was that Microsoft Research will be developing entirely on the Linux platform.

UPDATE: Lee Dirks said I almost gave him a heartattack with my little April Fools' prank, and the day is wearing on, so it's time to update and move my text up from the bottom...

Thanks go to Lee Dirks and David Flanders for making my first full day in Southampton a very interesting one.  The Linux platform bit is was my contribution to April Fools.  MS Research Tech Computing are in fact of course entirely dedicated to Microsoft platforms.  ENDUPDATE

For further discussion of the MS Repository Platform efforts, they have created a group

http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

I'm sure it has happened before, but it was the first time I had seen the leads/directors of Fedora (Sandy Payette), Dspace (Michele Kimpton) and Eprints (Les Carr) brought together.

There was a lot about SWORD and also some on OAI-ORE.

Notes on Microsoft Summit on Repository Interoperability event

Lee Dirks
External Research, Technical Computing
- Putting computing into science
- Putting science into computing

Science + computation are not the entire equation
* Microsoft must improve its offerings throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle

Approach: Conduct prototyping projects and proofs-of-concept to evolve Microsoft's scholarly
communication offerings

Five factors Microsoft considers key
* Interop is paramount
* Optimize for data-driven research & science
* Data preservation (and provenance) should be baseline
* Community protocols & conventions
* Social networking & semantic knowledge discovery

when possible IP shared at
http://www.codeplex.com/

Project Execution Models
* internal FTE
* external devel (vendor)
* external devel (institutional partner)
* mixed models

projects 1-2 years

Examples:
* GenePattern for Word 2008
- integrate data and images from GenePattern workflows into research papers
- will move into production in April/May 2008

* Math in Word 2007

* Chemistry Drawing for Office 15
- Peter Murray-Rust et al.
- Chemistry Markup Language (CML)
- proof-of-concept plugin ... but two versions of Office from now, Chemistry will be built-in (we hope)

* PLANETS
- EU project
- preservation of Office documents based on Office OpenXML (OOXML)

===

Savas
"Supporting researchers worldwide"

working towards an "eResearch Platform", a grouping of Microsoft tools that can support research

Flow: Author->Publish->Archive->Discover

Author
* Semantic Annotations for Word
(current target: protein databank)

* NLM DTD plug in - will support SWORD
- export a Word document in NLM DTD -> .nlmx

* Research Ribbon concept - tools relevant to researchers in Office

* can search arXiv from within Word using OpenSearch

Publish
* Conference Management Tool (also SWORD endpoint)
* eJournal - manage peer review (also SWORD endpoint)

Archive
* Research Output Repository (also SWORD endpoint and will support OAI-ORE)
* arXiv (also SWORD support)

? Repository interop/federation

Q: Shibboleth / OpenID support?
A: haven't started looking at it yet

===

Santosh
Microsoft's Research Output Repository Platform

Platform for storing scholarly works and metadata
- papers, videos, presentations, lectures, references...
- enables the development of new funcionality and services on top of the platform
- relationships between stored entitities

* SQL Server 2005 or 2008, Entity Framework, .NET 3.5

* the repository software (but not the servers) will be available to the community for free

Platform Overview
- variety of resource types (publications, tech reports etc.)
- resource tagging
- relationship between resources (triple-based)
- set of well-known predicates (IsVersionOf, Contains, etc.)
- new resource types and predicates through extensibility

Platform
* Core API
* Framework API
* OAI-PMH, Syndication, BibTeX, Search
- UI Web Controls

"A semantic computing platform"
- hybrid between relational database and a triple store

community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

===

Stewart Lewis
Update on SWORD Protocol & Future Directions

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD

- Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit

JISC/CETIS end of 2005
- identified lack of standard deposit API as #1 issue

2006: Creation of Repository Deposit working group

November 2006
- JISC call for funding, bid submitted for SWORD
- Julie Alinson
- lightweight and agile project

Workpackage 1: Evaluate existing standards
- WebDAV
- JSR
- OKI OSID
- ECL
- SRW Update
- SPI Google Data API
- ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP)

-> page on wiki examining them all

Workpackage 2: Tech Dev
- DSpace
- Fedora
- Eprints
- intraLibrary
* Java client library
- command line, desktop app, web interface

Workpackage 3: User testing and feedback
- arXiv
- SOURCE
- SPECTRa
- White Rose Research Online
- FeedForward

How does SWORD work?
* Two stages
- Discover
GET a Service Document
- Deposit
POST an item to the URI of the collection

GET
- X-On-Behalf-Of
- get a URI

POST

SWORD extensions to APP
* SWORD level
- 0
  - basic
- 1
  - full implementation

- X-On-Behalf-Of
- X-Verbose
- X-No-Op
- X-Format-Namespace

Discovery SWORD interfaces
* Recommend /sword-app
* Recommend /sword-app/servicedocument
* Recommend <link rel="sword" href="/sword-app/servicedocument" />

Authentication
- Required: HTTP BASIC

What?
- any package supported by the repository
- DSpace/Eprints: ZIP files with a METS manifest in SWAP format, with files
- Fedora: image files / METS documents (pull in referenced data streams)
- OAI-ORE resource maps

SWORD 2
- follow-on project
? more APP
? UPDATE / DELETE
? more clients
? client libraries
? provide support to users

Q: What is relationship with APP?
A: none

Comment: Sandy - We need a basic protocol that supports read and write.
Comment: Michele - We need to get into workflow - Zotero, EndNote etc.

Q: OAI-ORE and SWORD together?

===

Experience implementing SWORD at arXiv.org
Simeon Warner
Thorsten Schwander

1. Background
2. SWORD implementation choices
3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

automating from Microsoft Conference Toolkit

CS unusual in that conference publications very important
- use arXiv to host open access proceedings

work internally at arXiv to present conference proceedings as a whole

http://arxiv.org/help/api

Authority
1. author
2. the conference organizer
3. the CMT system (will use the organizer's authority)

returning errors
- all additional errors returned HTTP 400 Bad Request
- return an Atom document for each error code

3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

* Primary goal should be to reduce pairwise customization

- improved self description
  - self-describe size limits for uploads
  - improved error reporting
  sword:errorcode with namespace (and with description)

Integration with complex workflows
- asynchronous notification

===

DSpace
Michele Kimpton

Interop

* Business
- need defined business case / use case need because there is a small developer community

community will rally around common protocols

* operational
- policy transfer-control
  - embargo, authentication, dark archive...
- metadata loss
- identifier compatibility and acceptance

* technical
- numerous content packages
- representation incompatibilities
- interpretation of standards

Community Efforts

* OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, SWORD, METS, IMS, SWAP
* federation acorss DSpace repositories
* working with key apps
* integration with "content creation" tools to ensure materials are deposited

===

issues: strong standardization of library *DATA*
        weak standardization of repository data

===

Les Carr
Eprints

drawing funny diagrams

user level interop

===

Sandy Payette
Fedora Commons and Interop

2007 Content Model Architecture (CMA)
- Registry of "content model" types for digital objects

Now: Simplicity

2008: Atom Syndication Format, OAI-ORE, simple common web APIs with wide appeal
and adopt other standads where possible

high-end interop (web services apis)
backend interop (Akubra) - various underlying storage - transactional stores, Sun HoneyComb,
Internet Archive PetaBox

* Topaz - application level objects and semantic interoperability

ligh-weight ways to let apps define object types

info objects mapped into triples and persisted in Mulgara triplestore

* Fedora Middleware Projects
- Simple JMS layer with e.g. Gsearch, OAI, Ingest on top

What do users really want interoperability to achieve?

Q (me): heavyweight APIs vs lightweight?
A: light for integration with web apps, heavy inside enterprise

===

Issues
- federation & interop
  - support for delete, update
  - document formats
- content creation opportunities
- content flow -> ingest

discussion of harvesting for search, Google Scholar

how are people providing federated search
- OAI-PMH
- one-off federated integration

Andy said something like "there's fundamental tension between simple and complex".
You can find Andy's liveblogging of the event through his Twitter stream

http://twitter.com/andypowe11

OCLC stuff - NISO Discovery Forum

Very raw notes.  Basically OCLC continues to build out services based on their data holdings, are adding services where organisations can provide additional information, and are aiming to systematize the services with documentation on OCLC DevNet.

Mike Teets
VP Global Engineering, OCLC

identities, xISBN, xISSN

other identifier services are coming...
xOCLCnum service
WorkID service?

-

Worldcat Identities

http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities

-

Worldcat API

OCLC Grid

"invitation only release"

essentially programmatic access to WorldCat

Web Services
- access WorldCat records and holdings
- mashups with WorldCat

Request: OpenSearch & SRU
Response Formats: RSS, Atom (OSS), Marc XML, DC (SRU)
Return holdings based on geographic context

WorldCat Search Web Service builder
(a demonstration application)

-

WorldCat Registry

institution registry

worldcat.org/registry/institutions

unique id for each institution

-

Worldcat OpenURL Resolver Gateway

worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway

Allows you to register your IPs and associated resolver.

contacts:
Roy Tennant tennantr@oclc.org
Don Hamparian hamparid@oclc.org *

Developer's Network
worldcat.org/devnet

whither the generalist library in a world of domain specialists?

Peter Murray-Rust blogging about the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (APE 2008)

Panel Discussion: What Matters? The Future Role of Libraries in Science and Society? Swallowed by OA Repositories, turned into University Presses or kept as Book Museums?

Here I have a problem. I appreciate that libraries have many roles and I’m a keen supporter. Guardianship of scholarship, preservation, access, etc. But this doesn’t come across in science. I see librarians because I’m working on information-rich projects but if I didn’t I wouldn’t. How many PhD chemistry students will come to the library. (We have a lovely library in our building, funded by Unilever, and students like working there because it’s quiet. But we wouldn’t build the same facility today. And Henry tells me that Imperial has closed its departmental library. They have a nice quiet work area - with terminals - but it’s not a library.  Librarians cannot make a new role out of being super-purchasing and contract officers for information - scientists neither see nor care. So I challenged the panel with this and similar points.

Science and technology move so fast that none of us can keep up. Subject librarians trained on the classical model cannot provide what scientists need. The bioscientists look to PubMed, EBI, PDB, etc as the repositories of knowledge - not to their institutions. What they need are information scientists embedded in their laboratories. People who know how to hack perl, python, Java, XML, RDF, RSS, etc. Where the flow of meta-information is from the scientist to the information scientists as well as the other way round. It’s a tall order. But the average 18-year old does not look in a library for scientific information - they look to Google and Wikipedia (which is why I contribute when I can find time).

Thes views are reinforced by what the biscoientists and physicists are doing. They create domain repositories. They either have large national or international organisations which are beneficient and wish to oversee the free movement of scientific infomation. With bio- it’s Pubmed and Pubchem, NCBI, PDB, EBI, etc. and with physics it’s arXiv and SCOAP3. These are domain repositories and that’s what we critically need.

I can see that certain primary research will naturally go to IRs - mandated fulltext, theses, etc. But  many will see Pubmed and SCOAP3 as the primary places, not their institution.

I guess underlying this is an element of social networking that the Internet exposes: allegience to local institutions is an artefact of physical proximity.  When physical interaction is a real part of your community, this is not a problem - the local public library remains a real meeting place.  The university library acts as a neutral meeting ground and study area.  But we find in the online environment, people tend to coalesce around their interests, not their locations.  When you go online, do you go to your city or neighbourhood web network (if such a thing even exists?) or do you instead go to sites around your personal network and interests: your Facebook friends, a digital photography site, your Warcraft Guild page and Guild Bank, your aggregator with blogs that interest you.

I never really quite got this school spirit thing of "our" team versus "their" team.  You may find that scientists consider their peers in their discipline as the group to which they owe their loyalty, not their institution.  That means their content and their efforts are going to flow to the online representations of their scientific network, whether that's domain repositories, conference sites, or specialised scientific discussion groups.

This is a challenge for the physical library, which brought together disparate groups on the basis of being the gatekeeper of physical content, and then built services (e.g. reference) for the crowds of people who flowed in.

One possible role is for the library to participate in the domain networks, as we see with the roles of NLM and British Library in PubMed Central and UKPMC.  And it's certainly a legitimate role to be the collector of the institution's output in an IR, as long as you recognize that the IR is just going to be one node in a much larger network of content that may be aggregated on a domain basis (e.g. one can imagine a chemistry portal that draws on PubChem, anything "chemistry tagged" across any IRs it can search, and other chem resources).

Stanford Library Cyberinfrastructure - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 7, 2007

I would really call this more a Service-Oriented Architecture to support advanced digital library activities.  Definitely some interesting work, a good contribution to library SOA.

Defining and Designing a Cyberinfrastructure for the Library of the Future
Tom Cramer, Lynn McRae, Rachel Gollub
Digital Library Systerms & Services
Stanford University

* design pattern & process

Environmental Scan at SULAIR
1. Digital preservation
2. Google Book scanning
3. Internal digitization
4. Discovery
5. Content delivery
6. Ongoing proces re-engineering

[diagram - The Digital Library: Content, Services & Infrastructure]

- content management & content infrastructure

content streams->digital library holdings->services
supported by content management & middleware plus SDR (Stanford Digital Repository)

The Challenge

Analytic Environments, Delivery Apps, Discovery Apps on top of many other components

Strategy 1: Hardware Approach - ILS (nope)
Strategy 2: Repository-centric (nope - SDR is preservation infrastructure)
Strategy 3: MacGyver It (duct tape)
Strategy 4: Library Middleware
- Content Registry
- Collections Registry
- Access Broker
supported by
Reporting, Intelligence, Monitoring
"Content & Service Middleware"

Parallel to Identity Management - in enterprise computing, we have patterns that we use

"identity management for digital content - content registry"

The process

1. Recognize need
2. Think through narratives
3. Idenity parts
- Applications
- Services
- Infrastructure
4. Assemble in an architecture
5. diversion into ESBs
6. Validate concepts & find a name

What's the Need? The Gap to fill?

what it's not
- not an ILS, nor a new catalog, nor a repository, not protocol or standard, not discovery nor delivery apps, not user-facing

what it is
* infrastructure underpinning applications
* design pattern & architecture

Narratives

1. Support for scholarly workflows
2. Personalized academic work environment
3. DIY Library/Research Environment
4. Integrated, comprehensive content discovery
5. Creating, managing, publishing dynamic digital collections
6. Extend library infrastructure & workflows to already digital content
... more

1. Scholarly workflows

Support collaboration, research and publication through a full information and creative lifecycle

[list of use cases]

extract set of capabilities from use cases

2. Personalized Academic Work Environment

Highly personalized services and resources based on persistent and intimate knowledge of the scholar's identity,
roles, background, explicity choices, and implicity preferences

* Endow all services with an awareness of personal identity, preferences and contributions

3. The DIY Library/Research Environment

Enable scholars to use the tools of their choice to incorporate library data, metadata, and complementary services
into their workspace

* APIs to content, metadata, libraryservices

4. Comprehensive content discovery

Ability to discover across all content stores

...

8. Library management, operations, reporting

internal monitoring abilties

Five themes derived from narratives
1. Identity
2. Preservation
3. Personalization
4. Access
5. Management

bound together in a common infrastructure

Services, Infrastructure

Translating function into architecutre

[diagram]

SOA on ESB

Content Management
* data/metadata stores
* data/content sources

Services -- Preservation & Management
Services -- Access/Identity/Peronalization
Infrastructure services

metadata store, "a bunch of XML files", sitting on the ESB
- including plugin service API, management services API

ESB gives you a bunch of functionality, Fedora gives you a bunch of functionality...

"Lyberstructure"

ILS Discovery Interface - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 6, 2007

I'm not sure I really grok this idea of bindings, it sounds like they run the risk of ending up with a catalog of specialised implementations, rather than a unified API.  But it is very much needed work, and we do have to be practical.  There was a follow-up discussion session, but I missed it.

ILS Discovery Interface (ILS-DI)

http://project.library.upenn.edu/confluence/display/ilsapi/

* We need Integrating Library Systems
* We need practical solutions soon
- The ILS may undergo radical redesign... but our users won't wait for that, and we can't

Scope

Out-of-scope
- acquisitions
- cataloging integration
- item management

in-scope
- patron-driven discovery from search to use
  -- finding relevant resources (discovery)
  -- acquiring them (delvery)
  -- managing their usage (patron info and account)

You are here: Rough draft recommendation being presented and discussed

Early 2008: Formal recommendation to be released

Beyond? Recommendation will be updated as new technologies, functions, tools emerge

Survey on Current Use of OPAC and Beyond

Current use
- majority considering replacing ILS in next 2 years
- widespread frustration with OPAC interfaces, metadata schemes, resource scope
- generally ok with ILS inventory management functions

Beyond the OPAC
- 3/4 using supplementary discovery apps
  -- many locally developed
- wide variety of interactions with OPAC
  -- data export most common

a lot of duplicate work being done on extracting info from ILS

1. Improve discovery by supporting interfaces to ILS
2. Articulate a clear set of interaction expectations for ILS and app developers
3. Making recommendations applicable to a wide variety of systems and technologies
4. Make recommendations that are feasible to implement
5. Work with applications beyond "traditional library" domain
6. Be responsive to the user and developer community

Functions
- areas of interest: data aggregation, real-time search/query, delivery, patron info & services,
OPAC embed / escape / entry

Bindings
* Specific technologies that implement desired functions

Data Aggregation (getting the data out of your ILS)
- GetBibliographicRecords
* want to have selective export (by date or record type)

Real-time search/query
- GetAvailability
- Search
- Scan
- SearchAuthorityRecords
- ListCourseReserves
- ID-based record retrieval

Delivery Functions
* Holds
* RecallItem
* Security, policy issues can be complex for these functions

Patron information and Service Functions
- RenewLoan
- CancelHold

...

OPAC embed/escape/entry

* OutputRewritablePage
* OutputIntermediateFormat

Getting to an official recommendation

* Make sure we're not missing any essential functions
* Get more specific on functions
* Also find or point to specific bindings of the functions
* Try to finish in reasonable time
* Now is the time to encorage implementor involvement

How can my solution be incorporated?

- show the group how your solution works as a binding for an abstract function we've specified

- it has to be openly and fully specified

* it ideally has service and client implementations in product

- it also helps to have
  -- no IP encumbrances

Beyond the recommendation

* periodically update
  -- is there a sustainability model?

Pennvibes - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 6, 2007

PennVibes

Currently the production & maintenance of library web pages is labor intesive, involving:
* content specialists
* web production staff
* IT staff
* hand-coded HTML
* adding any kind of tools to a page requires special code

This results in a very limiting economy of production:
* we can't modify our pages too often
* we can't have to many pages

Enter Web 2.0

* Netvibes, PageFlakes, iGoogle

* pages are custom-tailored to the user's needs

Can this Web 2.0 model be of use in a research library context?

* yes if
- we develop library-oriented widgets
- if we build a framework that is community oriented (e.g. for a librarian to build pages for
patron use)

Enable a new level of service
- e.g. microsubject pages

[PennVibes Demo]

main focus is on rapid web page development - even to a web page developed to respond to a
specific patron request

Next Steps:

* Release Into Production
* Goal: Progressively replace core library web pages with Pennvibes pages

Longer term:
* more customizable pages
* group maintenance of pages
(but these customizable & maintenance features requires significantly more infrastructure)

* widget interoperability
e.g. Librarian adds a PageFlakes widget to a Pennvibes page and vice-versa

* need for industry standards

* a pool of library widgets from many organisations?

Zotero 2.0 - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 6, 2007

raw presentation notes

Zotero

Trevor Owens

"The Fluidity of Bibliography"

Smart Bib: easy metadata embedding
(coins embedded)

Read Write Bib (using Wikipedia exmaple)

Visualizing Bib (using Simile Timeline)

Smart Bib:
demo of grabbing embedded bib info from a web page

Zotero 2.0 - Zotero Server
* shared collections and notes
* scholarly groups in macro- and micro- disciplines, official groups
* recommendations
* bibliographic feeds
* APIs

Q: Where is the server
A: One server, at Zotero (Center for Media), closed source

Q (me, paraphrased): Will there be server API usage limitations?  We might like to send queries to retrieve recommendations every time someone does a search, that could be a lot of traffic.
A: TBD... it will be mostly constrained by server performance and capacity

NCSU CatalogWS API - DLF Fall Forum 2007 - Nov. 6, 2007

Very interesting presentation by NCSU on their CatalogWS Web Services API they have build on top of their Endeca layer.

Here are my raw notes

Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform

UPDATE 2007-11-08: [PRESENTATION] ENDUPDATE

Next Generation Catalogs

Library Technology Reports - Next Generation Library Catalogs

Examples
* Endeca (NCSU Libraries)
* AquaBrowser
* Encore (UQueensland)
* ExLibris Primo
* WorldCat Local
* Solr (UVirginia Project Blacklight)
* vufind (also Solr powered)

Modern search
- relevance
- faceted
- tag clouds
New content
- user contributed content
? enriched content
? content or context awareness?

Focused on optimizing a single discovery context... the OPAC

Question

Why should the discovery of catalogued library collections be limited to user interaction
with a single catalog application?

Catalog as Discovery Platform, beyond the OPAC

Web Services: CatalogWS API

Platform

"a platform is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers..."

- quote from Marc Andreesssen

Discovery Happens Elsewhere

"No single website is the sole focus of a user's attention."

- quaote from Lorcan Dempsey

Platform Motivation

* move beyond the one-size0-fits all approach
make it easer to reuse and repurpose catalogue data outside the opac
* build catalog interaces optimised for different use contexts

CatalogWS API

Goals
- can we have RSS feeds for the catalogue
- can we integrate catalog results into library website quick search

Final result
* rich API

[diagram of architecture]

API implemented as layer on top of Endeca

Limitations
- subset of catalog data
- read-only
- not real-time

Technical Design
- RESTful
- Java, Tomcat, XOM, Saxon 8.8, JSON

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ws/

* discovery-oriented
* catalog availability (known item lookup isbn)
* catalog search (both known and exploratory searching)

can pass a style parameter (URL of XSL), for server-side XML transformation, or XML to XHTML

Why new XML schema?
- include as much of data as possible in reponse
- MARC XML and MODS didn't appear capable of capturing the varied data
- XML response includes links

Demo of Current CatalogWS Apps

* integration with external apps
- Quick Search (NCSU library website search)
- iGoogle Widget

* alternative catalog interfaces
- mobiLIB catalog
- facetbrowser

Collection Promotion
- FacetBrowser - ability to easily create blog entries for selected items
- automatically generated "bookwalls"
- RSS feeds for new titles

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/catalogwsapps/

Internet Archive 20th Century Search - DLF developers' preconference - Nov 3, 2007

Before the main event there was a preconference (with a fraction of the main attendees) exploring technical challenges and possible collaborations.  There were also a couple brief presentations, here are my raw notes on Kris Carpenter Negulescu, the Director of the Internet Archive Web Group talking about

"20th Century Find" using Amazon S3 & EC2

Internet Archive stats

3.5 PB
1.5 million downloads/day

this project is about providing full-text search of their web archive for the 20th century 1996-2000, ~22TB

NutchWAX = Nutch + Hadoop
focus moving to Nutch with plugins

Amazon S3
Amazon EC2 (beta)

there are now more EC2 node options: small (default), large, extra large 8 times small performance and better I/O ($0.80/cpu hour)

indexing began in October 2006
1996: indexed via 20 EC2 in ~36 hours
1997: 100+ EC2 nodes
1998: 300+ EC2 nodes

1999 was attempted in September 2007 using cluster of ~270 EC2 nodes but halted due to lack of
consistent CPU/IO across nodes.

deployed (alpha) index is 1.35TB in size, no compression, ~600 mill docs

Enhancements
* multiple instances of a page
* improved ranking of results
* handle dimension of time
* easy UI

Why Amazon Web Services
* pay as you go
* simple to provision
* committed to support
* indeal for indexing Web pages, providing offsite storage, reliable hosting
* great platform for experimentation, iteration
* geographically disperse from Internet Archive ?Data Repository?

Cost Effective, budgeted $20k

* Note: fees can add up fast if not vigilant

Working Well

* APIs
* tech support
* S3
* fee structure
* speed of provisioning
* S3 uniformity of nodes

Challenges - S3

Oct 2006 - June 2007

* (internal?) bandwidth availability
* no specific guarantees for data preservation
* issues related to popularity of the service

Fall 2007

* available bandwidth consistent (~4h to move 7.5TB into EC2)

Challenges - EC2

lots of issues Oct 2006 - June 2007
* location of S3 nodes relative to EC2 was a significant factor for large-scale data processing

July 2007 - present

* working well but hitting IO and CPU constraints on small (basic, default) nodes;
however will continue to use these small nodes

Consider Using AWS When

S3
* need cost-effective backup for data
* multi-provider preservation, geographically diverse

EC2
* if you have spiky computing needs (e.g. spikes in demand)
* you have available R&D resources

Will experiment with AWS for crawling and harvesting, starting Jan 2008, Heritrix/AWS.

data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Lee Dirks - Director, Scholarly Communication - Microsoft
"Open access, data-driven science & the impact on research communication"

* basic research ACTIVITY unchanged
  but output options dramatically changed
  - blogs
  - wikis
  - scholarly journals
  - IRs
  - discipkine repositories
  - podcasts

Current Issues vs. Anticipated Trends

* OA to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm

* international cross-discipline research facilitated by interoperable standards

* "evolved" methods of peer review will be adopted

* preservation of data will become a requirement

* services develop around scientific content and prevail over pure publishing
  - data analytics, publishing workflow tools, long term storage/access

EDUCAUSE "Horizon Report" 2007 - for higher education IT in USA

* key trends
  - academic review and rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
  - the notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
* critical challenges
  - assessment of new forms of work
  - isses of IP and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done

OA momentum

... S.2695

Blogging
- example: useful chem
- recording experiments that fail

Wikis for Sharing Lab Protocols
- example: OpenWetWare

Bookmarks
- example: Connotea

IR
- 1400+ repositories worldwide

Influence of IRs

http://www.webometrics.info/top3000.asp

The Promise of Data Sharing

PLoS article - Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

"this is going to radically change science"

ISSUES
- data integration and interop
- annotation
- provenance & quality
- exporting/publishing in agreed formats
- security

"an aspect of competitive differentiation"

Publications as Live Documents

MS will have some results on this later this year

* helps with reproducibility if you can get to the raw data, simulations etc.

Trend: The Rise of Mass Collaboration

* Novartis released all its raw data on genetics of type 2 diabetes

[missed the end of the presentation]

Community peer review in Wiki environment - Christine Chichester - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

This is very cool stuff, if they ever manage to make it all work.

Christine Chichester - Knewco Inc.
"Community peer review in Wiki environment"

http://www.wikiprofessional.info/

? OmegaWiki

goal: distill down every unique scientific concept to a unique identifier (the "knowlet")

Many challenges in current biomedical research
* volume of data
* complexity
* distributed systems and databases
* incompatible data formats
* multi-disciplinary
** multi-linguality

[Brazilian Portugese sp etc]

*** ambiguity of terminology
* inability to share knowledge

"Too much to read" indicates major trends

* from reading to consulting
* from reading to meta analysis
* from texts to facts
  ... to central and community annotation

Synonym issue

difficult homonym disambiguation issue: use context
- first order symantic enrichment

a knowlet is a triple
* types
  - facts
  - wiki annotation
  - co-occurrence
  - concept profile match
  - sequence similarity
  - co-expression

build an association matrix for large data sources

- disambiguation of author names
[Dr. somebody has algorithms]

1 million disambiguated authors
- from MEDLINE

1 million for genes, drugs and ?proteins

Assignment of protein function and discovery of new nucleolar proteins based on automtic analysis of medline
Martijn Schuemie, Christine Chichester, Frederique Lisaceck, Yahoo Coute, Peter-Jan Roes, Jean Charles Sanches, Barend Mons
Special issue Systems Biology in Protemics, 2008 (in press)

put discovered hypotheses into WikiProf and then if approved into e.g. swissprot

WikiProteins
WikiMedical
WikiPhysics
Wiki Authors
...

databases
- uniprot
- GO gene ontology
- intact
- NLM UNMS???  UNLS?

runs on OmegaWiki which uses MediaWiki

[knowledge space knowlet thing]

Wikiproteins Peer Review: ??? automated selector/requestor for peer review of annotations ???

Institutions, repositories and research assessment - Tim Brody - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

He presented a model by which future assessment could be more automated.

Tim Brody - University of Southampton
"Institutions, repositories and research assessment"

Intro to UK RAE

* RAE 2008
- submission deadline November 2007
- for 2009 funding onwards

http://www.rae.ac.uk/

Individuals' Measures
* subject-specific research outputs
* for most researchers: 4 self-selected published papers per research staff member
* "measures of esteem": editorships, awards, conferences

Submitting to RAE

* Scanned PDF or DOI

special deal with publishers to permit scanning to PDF and sending
if they don't have a paper copy,
they can order doc online from BL, but don't have rights to submit that PDF,
so they print it and scan it again

[a completely mad example of publisher rights insanity]

panel members read papers
e.g. 1000 papers per panel member

beyond 2008... mostly metrics based

* Open (Access) Research Metrics?

1. Researchers self-deposit or publish in OA journals
2. Metrics services harvest full text, citation links, and aggregate downloads
3. Funding agencies extract and generate reports
[4. PROFIT!]

[Tim Brody's page]

What Metrics
* if the data are *OPEN ACCESS* anyone can experiment
* page rank
* downloads/cites comparison

Experiments with Google Scholar
* experiment undertaken to provide some metrics for the ECS department's measures of esteem submission

Technical Implementation
* query Google Scholar
* etc.

[again unique identifiers are important]

From ad hoc evaluation to monitoring systems - Stefan Hornbostel - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Stefan Hornbostel - DFG, Institute for Research and Quality Assurance (IFQ)
"From ad hoc evaluation to monitoring systems"

http://www.forschungsinfo.de/

2005 IFQ

Types of Activities

* Funding Monitor
- database with web frontend
- including public information

reports generated from database
also plan to use it for internal project management

future plans
- store final report documents
- link to repositories
- generate a scientists directory

* ProFile online survey
- database of new PhDs
- career development
- etc.