At 18:54 +0000 18/3/07, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 17/03/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Did anyone go?
Yup. Didn't see you there - at least, don't think I did - but I spotted Gordon (and the back of my head's in his photos...). A couple of Wikimedians of various stripes were talking, though I'm not sure they read the lists - Goatchurch's talk on UN documents was pretty interesting.
I saw the open media and science sections (1400-1800) which were both interesting. A general theme seemed to be increasing access to free information: better search engines, awareness, taking it to the public, sharing, &c. BBC's failings when it comes to the Creative Archive were expounded.
As were the failings of Creative Commons! I rather like the comments about "just another brand", which is a problem I've vaguely sensed before but never seen stated as such, and it's a very interesting summary of a lot of the problems with it.
Science was particularly good (but then, I'm a scientist) - discussed importance of free science. Both increasing access to already free materials and freeing currently non-free things (journals) were brought up. Pharmaceutical patents were mentioned. The power of the semantic web was brought in (in reference to the annotated human genome, chemistry).
Plus the (IMO somewhat unjustified) session of beating up the poor guy from OPSI - apparently spending effort on making sure that government documents are published in a way that makes them usable is a great waste of time, and we should just throw everything online in a web 2.0 sort of way and Trust To The Internet to solve it.
On the plus side, I cornered him afterwards and managed to find out that a project I've been preparing for (and resigned to starting myself!) for some time will be going ahead, which is excellent news.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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It was a good day overall, and very good value at 10 quid! The guy from OPSI often confessed to "speaking above his pay grade"!
Some impressions from my day can be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/loopzilla/tags/ok10/
Gordon