A non-digital service example of working in the open

Matt has recently been blogging and speaking about "working in the open" in public service roles. Giles has written a lot about working in the open too, most recently collecting examples of teams who are doing open for different purposes, e.g. for remembering and thinking out loud. I've worked in the open on software and … Continue reading A non-digital service example of working in the open →

Design organisations not licences

There's an article in the Register this week about Bruce Perens' "Post-Open Zero Cost Licence". In brief, Perens is aiming to try to fix one problem that some people have with open source. Specifically finding a way for maintainers to get paid to continue to develop software. I'm being careful not to write "fix open … Continue reading Design organisations not licences →

A basis for better definitions of “open”

There's been a lot of discussion around what is means to be "open" recently. I think this has largely been driven by issues and concerns around the development and deployment of Large Language Models and claims for at least some of those models to be "open". What does it mean for an LL or other … Continue reading A basis for better definitions of “open” →

OSM Queries

For the past month I've been working on a small side project which I'm pleased to launch for Open Data Day 2021. I've long been a fan of OpenStreetMap. I've contributed to the map, coordinated a local crowd-mapping project and used OSM tiles to help build web based maps. But I've only done a small … Continue reading OSM Queries →

What is collaborative maintenance of data? A short talk at the Royal Society

Following the publication of their report on data governance in the 21st century, the Royal Society are running a number of workshops to explore data governance in different sectors. In October 2019 year they ran one exploring data governance in the auto insurance sector. Last week they held a workshop looking at data governance in … Continue reading What is collaborative maintenance of data? A short talk at the Royal Society →

A key difference between open data and open source

In "left-pad and the data commons" I tried to identify some lessons for the open data community based on recent events in the Javascript/NPM world. Open source, open science and open data are all parts of the same endeavor of creating the commons. There's a lot of fertile territory to be explored by looking at how those respective communities are … Continue reading A key difference between open data and open source →