Science Library Pad

SGC Open Notebook Science - January 2018

On January 19, 2018 the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) launched an initiative for Open Notebook Science at an event supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Wellcome Trust.

Open notebook science is basically the concept that researchers publish their research publicly as they conduct it, with all the challenges and successes along the way.  You can read more in Wikipedia - Open notebook science.

An interesting aspect of the particular model of open notebook science being employed by SGC is the combination of described datasets uploaded to the SGC Open Notebooks community in Zenodo, with links from more general descriptions of activity in a blog platform hosted by SGC.

There was coverage related to the event in various venues:

• eLife - Open notebooks galore: The Structural Genomics Consortium - Jan 19, 2018
• University of Toronto news - Open science: University of Toronto researchers to publish lab notes in real time - January 19, 2018
• Springer Nature - Research Data - Data Dialogues - Open Lab Notebooks to increase impact and accelerate discovery - by Matthieu Schapira - Jan 26, 2018

UPDATE 2018-02-19: Rachel Harding and Aled Edwards discussed open notebook science before the event on the Colper Science Podcast.  ENDUPDATE

Twitter hashtag was #SGCOpenNotebooks

Webcast is available at https://youtu.be/vxoxKVUWsUY

Presentations (including mine) linked in the agenda below.  Note that due to technical difficulties the first few slides of my presentation don't show in the webcast.

09:00 - 09:10	Matthieu Schapira, PI, SGC - Twitter @mattschap Introductory remarks
Session 1 – Chair: Matthieu Schapira
09:10 - 09:30	Aled Edwards, Director, SGC - Twitter @AledMEdwards Scientists and society: striking a new bargain (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158763)
09:30 - 10:30	SGC Extreme Open Science Unit: Carla Alamillo, David Dilworth, Genna Luciani, Heng Zhang, Jolene Ho, Jon Fu Wong, Liz Brown, Mandeep Man, Megha Abbey, Nirav Kapadia, Roslin Adamson, Rachel Harding. Scientific project outlines (5 minutes each) (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158769)
10:30 - 11:00	Rachel Harding, PDF, SGC and open notebook trailblazer - Twitter @labscribbles 2 Years of Open Notebooking; lessons learnt from Labscribbles (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1155846)
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
Session 2 – Chair: Arij Al Chawaf, Director SGC Strategic Alliances - Twitter @TweetsFromArij
11:15 - 11:45	David Carr, Open Research Program Manager, The Wellcome Trust, UK Open Research – a funder perspective (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158767)
11:45 - 12:15	Richard Akerman, Senior Policy Analyst, Environment and Climate Change Canada - Twitter @scilib Open Science in the Government of Canada (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1160435) - also available on Slideshare - starts at 2h35m into webcast on YouTube
12:15 - 12:45	Kelsey Merkley, Open Program Designer, Creative Commons - Twitter @bella_velo Creative Commons CC-BY: opportunities for open (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158765)

Previously:
September 21, 2007  Wired on open data
August 9, 2007  the peer review logo
June 28, 2007  thinking about open science - me being sceptical

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

okfest14 - Eric Hysen, Google Civic Innovation - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Keynote - Eric Hysen @EricHysen - Google Civic Innovation

"Let's build the road network of civic technology."

Video of presentation http://youtu.be/0UNRZEsLxKc?t=57m20s

Interview video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeyZxsQzes8

Excited by the great reaction to my talk at #OKFest14. I've posted the full talk https://t.co/fIBAWF3Zzm and slides https://t.co/p054R3uCqf

— Eric Hysen (@EricHysen) July 17, 2014

Google Docs URL for slides.

Text of talk.

• (we need) tools (that can) scale
• Google is building APIs
• what's important is not just code and content, it's connectivity (between parts of the ecosystem)
• right now we have a lot of incredible stagecoaches, but not enough roads
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• (right now open) data is released without incentives
• everyone is repeating the same work (e.g. transit apps)
• (open data released as) spreadsheets far exceeds the releases of data as structured (e.g. XML) data
• plus you must release the data under a proper license, that allows reuse and modification, in order to give developers certainty
• "open data is hardly ever appropriately licensed"
• open data is rarely updated, or when there is new data, it's released as a new dataset (rather than linked to the previous data)
• summary: open data needs to be structured, updated, licensed
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• (it is) too hard to connect different types of data
• we need unique IDs
• example: The Popolo Project (open government data specifications relating to the legislative branch of government)
• example: The Open Civic Data Project
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• hackathons -> apps -> then nothing
• hackathons produce apps, not ecosystems
• example: Code for Germany (based on Code for America concept) with multple OK Lab locations across Germany
• example: Voting Information Project
• example: Google Civic Information API

Q: Andrew Clarke, Omidyar @andrew_c_clarke - What is the most needed (thing in this space)?

A: government (unique) identifiers

csvconf 2014 - The Content Mine - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

14:00 The Content Mine by Peter Murray-Rust @petermurrayrust

Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/csvconf

• "liberating scientific facts for humanity"
• crawl, then data mine the literature, publish resulting facts CC0
• uses technology to extract information from PDFs, "can now turn PDFs into science"
• information will go to Wikipedia and as linked open data to DBpedia
• site is contentmine.org

Peter is using the UK Exceptions to Copyright for Research (PDF), specifically the text and data mining exception.

Web Experience Toolkit - CodeFest 2013

A modern technology for web components, the Web Experience Toolkit, had its second CodeFest.

The open source code and community are hosted on GitHub.

https://github.com/wet-boew/

Government of Canada employees have played a substantial leadership role in the creation of the toolkit, in its release on GitHub, and in growing the community.  It's a great example of government working in a modern way.

I've embedded links to the keynotes below, as well as a Storify of the event (I didn't attend, but I watched the keynotes on YouTube).

Event info at http://wet-boew.github.io/codefest2.0/

Keynote presentations

Ben Balter @BenBalter - http://ben.balter.com/open-sourcing-government/
https://github.com/benbalter/open-sourcing-government (repository for slides) - video from 14m43s http://youtu.be/E-AxzfaZQVc?t=14m43s to 1h13m

Raymond Camden @cfjedimaster -
https://github.com/cfjedimaster/CuttingEdgeHTML (repository for the slides) - video from 1h35m32s http://youtu.be/E-AxzfaZQVc?t=1h35m32s

Hillary Little @hilittle - http://www.hilarylittle.com/blog/2013/08/09/codefest-2013-keynote-2/ - video http://youtu.be/51hN1trnpXA

Previously:
January 11, 2013  open source in government - The Web Experience Toolkit

Related articles

The Software That Builds Software

key steps for online science publications - Council of Science Editors

My presentation for the session "Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing" at Council of Science Editors 2013 Annual Meeting. I presented the theory of how publishers can adapt to the online environment, and Cameron MacDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press) presented the practice, the specific steps that they have taken as part of the development of CSP as a private company. CSP provided the funding for me to attend the event.

Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing from Richard Akerman

A few key points I conveyed:

• online offers a much richer communications environment than print; take advantage of channels such as video for abstracts or demonstration of complex methods
• online is not just about moving your print journal experience to a screen using PDF; you are missing out on the opportunity to transform your processes and leverage the power of machine processing if all you do is post PDFs
• being OF the web means adopting new ways of developing online (what is often called "agile web development") - discovery, alpha and beta - but this is really just bringing the scientific method to journal service development - hypothesis, first small experiment, larger experiment
• social media demands that you be authentic, no corporate boilerplate - and the progress of science can hugely benefit from humanizing and demythologizing the work you do - expose some of the challenges of your work, the human interactions, and you may create more entry points for young people curious about science
• fundamental to the journal as part of the scientific ecosystem is an emphasis on replication and retraction - realise that in the online environment we could leverage the power of the machines to automate and connect, for connecting replication (and non-replication) of papers into a coherent body of work, as well as for ensuring that retractions propagate throughout the entire system and are tracked in a standard way
• another key support for replication is ensuring that the data and code associated with an article are provided alongside it - and that you consistently apply this policy, and measure yourself
• as indicated on the slides, the American Economic Review has an excellent data & code policy, but they did not follow it for the 2010 quick release of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper

Twitter hashtag for the event was #cse2013 but there wasn't a lot of tweeting.

video: changes impacting scientific publishing

Below is video of me presenting a modified version of my 2012 CALJ conference talk "Springtime for Publishers" to an NRC Research Press audience in Ottawa.

I will be presenting some related topics (with less of an open access focus) May 5, 2013 at the Council of Science Editors conference.  The session is scheduled at 4:15pm and is called Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing.  I will be presenting with Cameron MacDonald of NRC RP.

A few notes about the presentation below:

• as indicated in the talk, I'm using the "springtime" language as a hook to hang concepts of change and revolution - I in no way want to indicate that the changes in academic publishing are comparable to the multi-country struggle of the Arab Spring
• I said the We the People minimum for response was twelve thousand - at the time it was actually 25k signatures, and it's now 100k signatures
• I said the Jenkins report (a Canadian report about research & development) but what I meant was the UK Finch report about access to government-funded research (see executive summary or full report - both PDFs)

---

Here's the deck I am presenting from:

Springtime for publishers - 20120711 from Richard Akerman

Since the presentation, there have been two important developments:

• On July 16, 2012 the UK government announced it would "open up publicly funded research"
• On February 22, 2013 the US government announced its response to the We the People petition (which by then had reached over 65,000 signatures): Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research - also see White House blog post Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research

learning about open data from our peers

We're only in the early days of national-scale open data across a broad spectrum of data sources.  Data.gov launched in May 2009.  (Historical sidebar: I created the Data.gov Wikipedia page in April 2009.)  Data.gov.uk had its big launch in January 2010.  So we're about two and a half years in.

Amazing things have happened.

Municipalities across Canada and around the world have open data sites.  The EC has announced a strategy for open data from the European Commission.  The World Bank has not only released open data at data.worldbank.org but is also providing support to emerging countries to help them in their open government and open data initiatives.

Communities are being formed.  The World Bank has launched an initiative called the Open Development Technology Alliance (OpenDTA) and organised an event "How Can Countries Start and Run Open Data Ecosystems?"

The three-hour event had a lot of great information, but I found one presentation in particular provided a great summary of the challenges of national open data.  Al Kags, the chair of the Kenya Open Data Taskforce, presented "6 [Building] Blocks of Open Data" (PowerPoint).

His list is

1. Leadership
2. Policy & Legal Framework
3. Technology & Apps
4. Capacity Building
5. Citizen Engagement
6. Innovation & Financing

In his deck, he has colour-coded these to ideas in his first slide, which is a mind map of the connections between the many pieces needed for a successful, sustainable open data initiative.

If I look at Canada, we are well positioned for the first two at a national level, but there is much work to be done on the other four building blocks.

One step would be developer and citizen outreach.  Data.gov has a /developers page which leads to discussion forums.  Data.gov.uk has a top-level item that links to their forum.  data.gouv.fr links to the Etalab group that created the site, where there is extensive explanatory information in the form of audio, video, documents, blog posts and presentations.  Data.worldbank.org has a /developers page and a pointer to their Google Groups discussion.  Kenya's open data site has a /developers page.  These all provide connection points that help build the ecosystem.

I also found it notable that not just this presentation but other speakers mentioned the value of different *Camps and Hackathons as ways of innovating and engaging with developers, citizens and civil society.

I encourage you to review Mr. Kags' presentation and think about how his lessons can apply to your municipal / provincial / national initiative.  This kind of thinking can also help when working on national Action Plans as part of the Open Government Partnership.  This kind of sharing also illustrates the tremendous opportunity we all have to learn from one another worldwide.  It was wonderful to see the energy, enthusiasm and insights from countries on different stages of this path towards more open and transparent government.

UPDATE 2011-12-16: I neglected  to mention that the meeting was ably chaired by Neil Fantom, and I have added his Twitter ID below.  ENDUPDATE

Many World Bank Links

Two things launched today:

1. Open Development Technology Alliance (OpenDTA.org)
2. Five discussion papers on Scribd, with commenting enabled

The speakers also pointed to the existing Open Data Innovations Group on LinkedIn (ODIN, Twitter hashtag #odin) as another place for discussion of these issues.

The video and liveblog coverage (which is available for replay using CoverItLive) are both up at live.worldbank.org

The video is in Windows Media format, it will play on a Mac using the free Flip4Mac components.

@WorldBankICT says the video will be up soon on the event webcast archives page (which is different from the live page): http://go.worldbank.org/77KTMO8B90

UPDATE 2011-12-15: Thanks to @livbarton in the comments and on Twitter for letting me know that the video is now up on the live page.  I have updated the text above accordingly.  ENDUPDATE

The event webpage itself, with some of the presentations, is http://go.worldbank.org/Y2PF8NAYM0 (I believe they will try to get more presentations up)

(I'm glad I have Twitter links otherwise I would probably never have found any of the above pages.)

I made an Archivist file of the #opendta tweets, in the archive I put together there are 611 tweets from the December 14, 2011 event and an additional 189 tweets related to the December 8, 2011 $35 Tablets event.  The archive is available in XML and Excel XLSX formats.

The World Bank has many organisation and individual Twitter accounts, some to follow related to this event are

• @worldbankdata
• @worldbankICT - the Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) sector at the World Bank
• @eDevelopment - the role of ICT in development
• @worldbankDM - World Bank Development Marketplace
• @worldbanklive and hashtag #wblive

• @tkb - Tariq Khokhar - Open Data Evangelist at the World Bank
• @alwalji - Aleem Walji - Practice Manager for Innovation and Technology at the World Bank Institute
• @neilfantom - Neil Fantom - Manager, Development Data Group, World Bank

And here are a couple of my tweets (@scilib, the QR Code), up on the World Bank's video stream for a moment (I was running it in a window in the corner of my screen, so it's a small grab that's not actually readable):

Government of Canada open data and data stewardship presentations

The Ottawa chapter of Data Management International (DAMA-Ottawa) had an event on June 15, 2011 that was primarily about exploring possible alignment between the DAMA Data Management Book of Knowledge (DM-BOK) and the draft Directive on Data Stewardship, but which included some coverage of open data.

The presentations are now up

Data Management – Enabling Open Data and Interoperability (PDF) - June 15, 2011 - Pierre Boucher, Deputy CIO, Government of Canada

Directive on Data Stewardship (PDF) - June 15, 2011 - Mark Armstrong, Senior Policy Analyst, Treasury Board Secretariat

The complete set of presentations from DAMA-Ottawa is available on their Events Archive page.

I declared the hashtag for the event to be #damaott - and have recorded an Archivist Desktop archive (XML) of the tweets.

video from ICSTI Workshop - Multimedia & Visualisations for Science

Just a quick post to gather together links to the videos from the sessions at the ICSTI Workshop "Multimedia & Visualisations for Science" held at Microsoft Research in Redmond on February 8, 2011.  You should be able to get downloads in most any format, if the player doesn't work for you.  The entire day's worth of video is online.

Featuring Michael Ackerman!  (No relation.)

• Session 1: An emphasis on interactive multimedia and visualization
• Session 2: Tools and technologies for communication and problem solving
• Session 3: Accelerating discovery through multimedia and visualization
• Session 4: Combining and refining data to reach new discovery

You can also find links to the presentation slides at ICSTI.

I think the hashtag was #icstiw11 but it wasn't clear, I also saw use of #icsti11 and just #icsti

Speakers / hosts who are on Twitter include

• Rafael Sidi (@rafaelsidi)
• Lee Dirks (@ldirks)
• Peter Fox (@taswegian)
• Jennifer Lin (@jenndox)
• and Microsoft Research itself (@MSFTResearch)

Thanks to Jennifer Lin for tweeting the link to the videos.

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

Carleton Science Café talk on LHC is up

The Large Hadron Collider: A particle smasher designed to answer the fundamental question about our Universe

Listen to the Science Cafe podcast featuring Louise Heelan

View the powerpoint presentation by Louise Heelan

Speaker: Louise Heelan, PhD candidate
department of physics

Minor note: as is often the case, what is just an MP3 audio file is called a "podcast", although there doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe to it.

From Carleton Science Café archives.

A bunch more are coming up, including "Leonardo Da Vinci and his mathematics" on April 22, 2009.

Previously:
March 11, 2009  Large Hadron Collider at Carleton Science Cafe

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.

City of Ottawa connects to citizens using Web 2.0

I had never really thought about it, but it does make sense for our local government to draw upon the highly talented tech workforce in the area.  And for that tech workforce to create systems to help citizens who are passionate about a particular topic (e.g. transit) to connect to their government.

I wonder if this community supporting City of Ottawa could be connected with the Federal Government Web 2.0 initiative.

Via an ad (which I didn't click on, but googled about) I happened to find

Ottawa builds online community out of Igloo - Igloo PR - October 14, 2008

which led me to

Cities that want to jazz up their citizen interactions with social media tools, but have shoestring budgets to work with, should look to the City of Ottawa for inspiration.

In June, Ottawa introduced a social media site to engage citizens in city planning at earlier stages of the process...

Developed by Igloo Software, a social media platform provider based in Kitchener, Ont., the site was set up by a group of high-tech volunteers in just a few weeks, says Rob Collins, chairman of the City of Ottawa's task force and former CIO of Cognos, a business intelligence vendor acquired by IBM this year.

"We went to the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance and said, 'We want to develop this site but we have no money - but you have a few bucks and you can use this as a forum to show off what your members can do. Igloo offered to put in the time and energy to help us.'"

The project is part of a larger initiative by the City of Ottawa to tap into its high-tech community to find ways to squeeze more benefits with the strategic use of technology, he adds.

Current city planning processes don't encourage citizen involvement and are ripe for improvement with social media, he says. Citizens must travel to a specific meeting place at a particular time to comment on plans that have often already been cast in stone and are difficult to change. "You have to debate ideas long before they become firm plans," says Collins.

Ottawa builds online community out of Igloo - InterGovWorld.com - October 14, 2008

Unfortunately the article doesn't provide an actual link to the site (a common failing of many news articles).
Some more googling turns up OpenOttawa.org

OpenOttawa.org is a volunteer organization with that builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community areas of their lives.

Based on the posting Mayor’s Taskforce Report on E-Government, I guess the Igloo-powered site is

http://ottawa.taskforcereport.ca/

There are lots of other interesting pointers in the OpenOttawa blog as well, including this presentation about Metronauts and the Toronto Transit Camp from mesh 2008.  (Note to self: Try to go to mesh in Toronto in April 2009.)

Government 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mesh08 gov20)

The Ottawa online transit consultation (now closed) used different software from Igloo, the system is called eDeliberative, from Nanos.

http://ottawa.econsultation.ca/

I don't know if there is an equivalent of the Toronto Transit community in Ottawa, the main place I've seen it discussed is on SkyscraperPage.com, in the Ottawa-Gatineau forum.

As the next step in the Government of Canada's Web 2.0 initiative is to set up a social network for government employees, it will be interesting to see what technology they choose, and whether they connect to the OpenOttawa community.

bold new programming opportunities for... public libraries?

When I listened to this talk from Mark Ramsey about public radio, it made me think about the challenges that public libraries and libraries in general have in finding their audiences.

It works best if you (manually) combine listening to the audio with his slides on Slideshare, as he refers to a lot of the visuals.

Via CBC Radio Spark, specifically their Twitter feed, also thanks to Mark Ramsey for letting me know his slides were online.

Singapore 2025 science - and novel presentation

This showed up in my FriendFeed

a map of predictions about global science and innovation created at a recent IFTF workshop in Singapore (the interface is a novel service for online presentation called ZuiPrezi

Future of Science on the (ZuiPrezi) map - Freelancing science - September 30, 2008

You can see the presentation, or "prezi" at

http://zuiprezi.com/prezi/297/view/

(It's Flash-based, and may take a while to load fully.)

This is doubly interesting because not only are the ideas themselves useful for thinking about the future of science, but the presentation allows you to move around the ideas like moving around a map.

I've always felt we are very limited by PowerPoint, everything ends up as bullet slides - or at most we try to fight that by having photo slides.  We're on computers that can run video, play audio, show screencasts, and with the Internet, can do anything from (the always risky) live demos to live video.  And yet it's usually

• bullet point
• other bullet point

Zuiprezi is showing some of what is possible when you think outside the PowerPoint box.

If the interface isn't clear, you can click to zoom in, drag around, or use the controls in the lower right to follow the presentation trail and zoom in and out.

library support for open science

A nice overview of the challenges and opportunities for academic libraries as we plan to support 2020 science.

The Future of Research (Science and Technology)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: library research)

Some calls out to the Microsoft Towards 2020 Science report as well as various open science and science data initiatives.

From a presentation to the British Library Board on an Awayday (a charming term) by Carole Goble.
If the embedded presentation isn't working, you can also try it directly on Slideshare, or download the PowerPoint.

via FriendFeed

Previously:
March 23, 2006  various ideas about the future of science and computing

Science 21 video and presentations

I have been following the Science in the 21st Century conference via the FriendFeed room

http://beta.friendfeed.com/rooms/science21

and via that room I see that the first day's presentations and video are already up on the Perimeter Institute's archive, PIRSA

http://pirsa.org/C08021

IFLA Science Portals presentations up

The presentations from IFLA Science Portals 2008 are up

http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals/

which reminds me I haven't managed to blog my conference notes yet (too much microblogging these days).

Topics included

• The Role of Librarians in the Era of Digital Information
• Science.Gov and Worldwidescience.Gov
• Science, Technology and Medicine at the British Library
• Past and Future of Portal Building for Scientific Communities - the INIST Experience

Err, and for full disclosure, a very brief presentation from me as well.

Government 2.0

A grab-bag of things about government and Web 2.0

Wikinomics - Government of Canada and the Web 2.0 reports on a study done for Agriculture Canada

Library Boy - Federal Library Community Forms Web 2.0 Interest Group

Public Sector Marketing 2.0 - Update on Social Media Policies in the Canadian Government (January 2008)

If you want the latest official word, you probably want to go to the keynote by Ken Cochrane (CIO GoC TBS) at GTEC 2008.

The GTEC 2008 theme is "Make the shift to Government 2.0".

Also interesting in the lineup is "NRCan's Collaborative Technology Revolution" by Marj Akerley, Chief Information Officer, Information Management Branch, Natural Resources Canada and Peter Cowan, Director, Enterprise IM, Natural Resources Canada.

NRCan has a fully running internal wiki.

You can also watch videos such as "This is MY NRCan - Eric Gagné" in the jellybeancontest YouTube account and see the audio-less version of "NRCan KM Inspirational Video V8" on Slideshare.

TBS is moving quite quickly to support intranet Web 2.0 with policy.

Internet Web 2.0 (for the Government of Canada) is quite problematic however.  But it appears to me that you're better off taking a leadership role and just experimenting with things, and seeing the results.  I think people are afraid the policy police will come punish them, whereas it appears to me more likely that they will get an award for technology innovation.

It's still a challenging situation because unfortunately most of the Web 2.0 services are hosted in the US, and this creates privacy and control issues if you're gathering any information about Canadian citizens.  For example I use Typepad, Blogger (Google), Feedburner (Google), Google Analytics, jot.com (Google), Google Docs... hmm, it sure would be a nice start if Google Canada just set up a dedicated data centre here that they could guarantee would never be subject to US legislation...

Libraries in E-Science - Christine Borgman

A digital video of Christine L. Borgman's "Role of Libraries in E-Science" presentation at EAHIL 2008 is available. Her presentation slides are also available.

Video: Christine Borgman on the Role of Libraries in E-Science - Digital Koans - July 21st, 2008

I reviewed Borgman's book Scholarship in the Digital Age for Nature; she has a comprehensive view of the many different factors that go into scholarly communication online.

NISO Next Gen Discovery presentations up

A question in my FriendFeed prompted me to check if the presentations are up for NISO Discovery Forum 2008 and they are (well, most of them).

http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/agenda/

Presentations ranged across the library discovery space including academic bookmarking, federated searching, tagging, web services, and blogging.

You can find supplemental info for Peter Murray's presentation at http://dltj.org/article/niso-discovery-presentation-links/

(Full disclosure: I was also a presenter - I posted a small amount of supplemental info for my presentation.)

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog.  It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which  can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming".  I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast.  ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues.  (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.)  Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

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).

Building SkyNet for Science - presentation for NISO Discovery Tools Forum

My presentation is available at

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/building-skynet-for-science-discovering-new-frontiers-using-embedded-knowledge/

A lot of it is conceptual, so you may want to wait until the audio is available from the http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/ NISO site - http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/ (hopefully next week).

UPDATE 2009-04-16: I don't think audio was made available.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2008-03-28: I forgot to mention that all some of the supporting links for the presentation (will be) are available at http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008  ENDUPDATE

I thought it went well, although as first speaker up there is a disadvantage of not seeing how other people set up.  I was in a bit of a rush to get started so that I would finish on time, so I didn't do a great job of attaching my mike and I just held the wireless transmitter in my hand.  With the transmitter in one hand and my laser pointer gripped in the other for the entire 50 minutes, it's possible I looked a bit of a prat.

I usually try to remember to keep my hands free for presentations so that I can use more natural body language, anyway lesson learned.

I also forgot to say "The future is not set.  There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." before the last slide.

There are some common themes emerging from the presentations, I'm always amazed when a bunch of people develop presentations in isolation and then they actually all fit together when presented.

I've posted some photos of the presenters in my Flickr under nisodiscovery2008 (my cameraphone can upload directly to Flickr over WiFi), they also show up because of the machine tag linkage on the Upcoming page.  No pics of Chapel Hill yet as I don't have a car and it turns out while we're only about 4km from the town, the most direct route for me to get there I think would be to walk beside a six-lane divided highway, which is not too appealing.

UPDATE 2008-03-28: The carbon offset for my flights from myclimate.org (including the trip to Open Repositories) was about C$118.