On 17/03/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)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(a)dunelm.org.uk
_
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: