I attended the Open Knowledge Conference yesterday in London. It was a excellent day of talks about Open Data and the work different people and organisations are doing.
Some of my favourites talks included:
- The Post-Analogue World, Glyn Moody, opendotdot – This was a fast paced talk which only made the topic even more interesting and exciting. I do hope Glyn writes about this, as there were some excellent examples of how the music industry could change its business models!
- Making the Physical from the Digital, Ben O’Steen – An excellent talk on converting digital data to physical data, printing a book on one continuous till receipt was quite thought provoking. The MP’s expenses receipts, service not included, was a good idea – this area still leaves a nasty taste though.
- The Straight Choice, Richard Pope – An amazing idea, store all of those election flyers. Richard’s synopsis of the bad, and some good leaflet was eye opening. Interested to see what sub-projects are spawned from this site.
- Where does my money go, not sure on the presenters. This was an interesting presentation. Only the day before I was sent the link to the prototype visualisation and upon seeing it I was amazed at how they have represented such a huge amount of data in a clear and concise manner, and also that they had managed to “crunch/clean/process” this data to enable the visualisation. The talk made it very apparent the amount of work, effort and I am sure frustration that was put into getting, processing and undersanding the data…. And it is only 27,000 rows of data from a database of 27 million (if I remember correctly). Absolutely brilliant job.
All the of the talks I attended were brilliant, in fact I wanted to go to others but they overlapped.
Really enjoyed the day, big thank you to the organisers and presenters.
