The event took place from 10am – 7pm so we got a lot of work done even with great food for lunch and dinner in between!

Here are members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland (OKF Ireland) giving you the lowdown of what happened at Open Data Day Dublin:

What is Open Data Day?

International Open Data Day is a community initiative to make and spread open data. 150 events world wide where participants gather online or in person to make things with and around open data. Open Data day in Ireland has been organised by and for the Irish community and anyone was invited to get involved. 70 participants in total took part in Saturday’s event and their time and expertise proved invaluable as we were able to progress greatly with their help and were able to build teams aro

und specific projects.

What did you work on?

Volunteers worked on a couple of pre-defined projects but also had a chance to work on new projects pitched on the day. The beauty of those events is that you are putting anyone with an idea or a particular problem together into a room with someone or a group of people who can help you and others solve this problem with the expertise and technology we have available today.  You’re essentially able to build teams around projects and co-create solutions.

So there were 4 main strands of projects that volunteers took part in on Saturday:

1. A book sprint to create a open license and free of charge textbook for programming in Irish schools
2. A public policy project where people could get involved in shaping Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan (Ireland committed sign up to the Open Government Partnership in 2013)
3. A data audit and analysis project with the goal to visualize for the masses what open data can do for us
4. The creation of a set of civic apps.

Did you make any progress? What are your achievements and what are the outcomes of this type of event?

Yeah, sure – we are actually quite impressed with the progress we made in the respective teams. It really shows what you can make happen when you bring people together. Sure we may not always have a finished product at the end of the day but the most important thing is to bring people together, start collaborating and establish a team over the course of the day. The web allows many of the involved and interested to continue work remotely.

So we really want to give you an insight into what we – citizens and subject matter experts – were able to do as part of each of the projects on Saturday. So here it goes:

Booksprint: Textbook in ‘Programming’ for Irish Schools

The book sprint brought together a group of people, including a number of teachers to contribute to an open license textbook on programming for inclusion as a junior cycle optional short course as announced by Minister Ruairi Quinn last year. As an open source book it will be a free of charge teaching resource to all kids and schools in Ireland. Being free of charge parents, students, and anyone else can also benefit and get started with coding following a structured curriculum at their own time. Saturday’s book sprint sparked intense collaboration with participants becoming readers, writers, editors and publishers for a day and they have formed a team that will continue to finish the book working remotely. So far the team have added content to 4 chapters of the final textbook which are laid out to contain all resources a textbook normally needs to be accepted into schools: curriculum, teacher guide and lesson materials. Once all content has been collated the open source software Booktype will help the team to upload the chapters and produce the textbook. We made a lot of headway on Saturday and appreciate that teachers lent their expertise to create something valuable that will be available and will address the growing need to teach our kids computer programming and digital literacy. Elon Musk – business magnate, investor and inventor – founder of SpaceX and Paypal and CEO of Tesla Motors attended Web Summit 2013 in Dublin last year and reiterated that in order to compete, Ireland needs to make sure to build and retain innovative talent on it’s shores. Let’s do just that.

Public Policy Project:  Ireland’s 1st OGP Action Plan

 This requires a good bit of background on this topic first: In 2013 Ireland committed to signing up as a full member to the Open Government Partnership. By participating in the OGP governments are asked to commit to an open data strategy, share information about their activities openly, increase the level of participation citizens can have in decision-making, and to use new technologies in an effort to make public data more openly available as a means of transparency and accountability. To become a full member and demonstrate commitment Ireland will need to co-create an OGP Action Plan with civil society and attempt to deliver on the commitments it outlines within a 2 year time-frame. Members of OKF Ireland have originally pushed the government commit to sign up to the OGP, have been part of the public consultations in 2013 and are now participating in a joint working group with representatives from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that is set to co-create this action plan. The Draft Plan is to be presented at the  European Open Government Partnership (OGP) conference held on May 8th & 9th at Dublin Castle. We believe that civil society and citizens now have an opportunity to shape that action plan and so we build it out as a project for citizens to participate on Saturday.

And so here is the progress we made on Saturday, and we really have to thank the interested citizens that just came in on the day, lent their expertise and are now part of a project team for making it work so well!

1. We established a Project Team sourced from volunteers that attended this project group. So now we can continue work remotely with a couple of doughnut and coffee meet-ups in between – this is great stuff!
2. We developed a framework for analysis of the evolving draft national action plan. The framework is based on learning from other best in class OGP Action Plans both in terms of what needs to happen to really open up data and government and how it can be achieved. The framework will allow us to assess the current Irish draft and inform the joint working group, the representatives of the Government Reform unit and the wider civil society on how the Irish plan compares to what is recommended by the OGP and what is working internationally.
3. And we created a template – compared a set of best practice OGP Action Plans and developed a template that can be used to formulate commitments for the Irish Action Plan. Template will make sure that commitments are concrete, measurable, achievable and include important milestones. Will help us understand what success looks like.

And lastly we hooked up with our friends from Open Data Science Ireland (ODSI) to continue work on a pretty awesome open data audit project for Ireland.

Irish Open Data Sources – Audit and Analysis

One of the goals of OKF Ireland is to create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

At Saturday’s event we partnered up with members of Open Data Science Ireland and continued work on a data audit that was started by members of Open Data Ireland and Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland last year. This is now the most extensive list of open data sources related to Ireland with 29 APIs, 16 catalogs, and roughly 160 data sets. We were able to collect and add more information about the data sets to increase understanding of what data is available, what the quality of that data is and most importantly which type of public data is missing. Members of the ODSI have also been able to identify a number of good example data sets that can be used for a project with OKF Ireland to analyse and showcase to citizen what type of information can be extracted from the data is available and how it can help them make better informed decisions in their day to day lives.

Finally there were teams who attended the last Code for all Ireland meet-up in January and they joined and recruited volunteers for the development of some awesome civic apps.

Civic Apps Projects

There were some really good ideas out there and teams continued work on realizing those ideas vigorously! It’s great to see these apps develop over time and people putting in the effort to really make something out of an idea. One of the Apps maps the locations of defibrillators across the country and also map locations and contact details of those trained to use the equipment – if someone had a heart attack anywhere near you – would you know where to find the nearest defibrillator? We think this has a lot of potential and the great thing is that the team is going to crowd source the locations of the defibrillators with a competition where people send in selfies next to a defibrillator. A second App would list current queuing times at local public service customer service locations (eg motor tax office, passport office etc and therefore facilitate an informed choice for customers seeking to use these services. E.g. if the App says there’s an hour wait at your local motor tax office either wait till later of go elsewhere for a coffee! Finally there was a pitch to transforms successful decision making software used by Dublin City Council last into an app that can be used by anyone and help make majority decisions in an instant. All great projects and we’re happy to have teamed up with Code for all Ireland.

So that’s it – that’s what we did Saturday! It sounds a lot and it was a lot – we are really impressed with what was achieved!! Big thanks to everyone for doubling down for that one day of the year.

So you teamed up with other groups to make this event happen? How do you organize an event like that?

Yes, the event was co-organised by a number of civic minded volunteer, professional and civil society groups in Dublin highlighting that collaboration can lead to great events that bring communities together. Open Knowledge Foundation worked together with Open Data Ireland, Code for All Ireland, Open Data Science Ireland and Code for Dublin to build out the different project break-out sessions. The event was also kindly hosted and sponsored by Facebook Headquarters and Microsoft in Dublin – a huge thank you to them for making it happen.

You are happy with the outcomes of the event?

Yes, very. It was great to see everyone come together for that one day and collaborate, create and make something happen that is valuable to our society as a whole. It’s like people appreciate giving something back and we really appreciate that they take the time and put work into those type of civic projects that can help make a difference to our fellow citizens.

Anything that would have made the event even better?

Well, one of the things that we would like to see is an understanding on behalf of our government of this type of volunteer culture, hackathons, data days, civic working groups and interested citizens and how it can contribute in a meaningful way to improving services for citizens and to help address real issues that citizens care about. We would like to see a much closer relationship between the government and those groups to foster a sustainable model of citizen participation. We see this as something the government can explore as their next steps and so it would be nice to see representatives at some of our events in the future. This would enable us to talk through how government and citizens can improve services and requirements for open data together, learning from each other. But we are working on that, and we’ll keep inviting them!

Ok, please do! Last question – who makes up the OKF Ireland team – in case we want to get involved in any of the projects you’ve been working on?

Sure, no problem. Anyone who considers themselves an interested citizen we are interested to talk to and hear their opinion on what we are doing in the public eye. We particularly want to learn what our ordinary citizens think but also appreciate any insights or contributions from businesses, interest groups, subject matter experts, other organisations because we know citizen participation is limited and so we’d like to harness those views and use at the forums that we participate in. So our team is: Denis Parfenov, Flora Fleischer, Eugene Eichelberger, Salua Nassabay, Ingo Keck. All our contact details are on our Local OKFN Group Profile. Please feel free to contact anyone on any of the project mentioned. We are all open and share all our information!

Thanks again and great Open Data Day 2014!

Media Coverage:

Newstalk – Innovators to write Irish schools’ first coding and programming textbook today

TheJournal.ie  – A coding textbook for Irish secondary schools could be written in one day

Links:

https://twitter.com/OKFirl

http://OKFirl.org/

Open Data Day 2014 Storified

What will it look like you ask? – Some pictures from an Open Data Hackathon we held last September. This Feb. 22nd Open Knowledge Foundation are organizing a book sprint to create an open source and free to use textbook for schools that will help kids get coding and computing. A skill we all know they’ll need now and to build the future. Anyone can take part, we need lots of good souls who want to collaborate and contribute to this awesome project!

In collaboration with @codeforall_ire who have kindly organised the venue and will be making sure food & drinks encourage you to stay for the day! They will also continue work on their app projects if you want to jump on one of their teams.

We are also teaming up with Open Data Science Ireland (@ODSIrl) in order to hack on open data sets and create meaningful stories from data that can highlight the benefit of open data to the mainstream public, average Joe and public service. We are looking for both people who have problems and questions and people who can make sense of data to answer exactly those. Sign-up or contact either OKFirl or @ODSIrl

Community groups, hosted by Facebook, will be involved in the all-day sprint on 22 February, to create the first release. Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland, Code for All Ireland, Open Data Science group, Code for Dublin, and several school teachers will lend their expertise. These individuals — who are government officials, elected politicians, entrepreneurs and civic activists — are using technology to contribute to making Ireland’s schools more transparent and accountable. Using local technical experts who volunteer their time to bring technology into the classroom with the aim to expand opportunities for all children.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has pioneered this new technique for rapidly developing learning resources. The OKF recently released the Open Education Handbook, without license, in the public domain. The OKF believes that through community collaboration, we can all help spread educational materials to everyone, globally, not just to those who can afford it. A large proportion of schools are publically funded, so it seems only reasonable that tools used by the schools be released into the public domain.

OKF Ireland welcomes the progressive reforms announced by Mr. Ruairi Quinn, Minister for Education and Skills. Particularly, the optional Junior Cycle courses in computer programming and digital literacy, and hopes that the freely available textbook on Programming and Coding becomes a resource for continuous professional development. Both the technology community and school teachers are welcoming these new courses and looks forward in supporting our schools.

Members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland, ActiveCitizen, Digital Rights Ireland, An Taisce, TASC/TI Ireland and one unaffiliated citizen have met with DPER and will take part in a series of working group meetings with representatives DPER to co-create Ireland’s 1^st OGP Action Plan over the next 3 months.

During the 1st meeting of the members of the working group set out the process of how DPER is going to work together with the civil society group and vice versa and created a list of actionable next steps to agree on the commitments the government should make in the 1^st Irish OGP Action Plan. The list is below and has kindly been provided by Evelyn from the government Reform Unit.

In 2013 the government awarded a 12 week contract to TI Ireland to lead a set of public consultation meetings which produced the a report outlining 62 requested commitments + 10 separate submissions. Those were categorised to address the four core principles of open government as recommended by the Open Government Partnership: transparency, citizen participation, accountability, and technology and innovation. But in an initial meeting in October 2013 DPER concluded that the result was not focussed enough and commitments now needed to be prioritized. From experience good OGP Action Plans contain 8-10 actionable and achievable commitments and the aim of the working group is to now co-create such a sound OGP Action Plan.

At the meeting Denis Parfenov, founder of ActiveCitizen and  Ambassador of The Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland reiterated that involving the wider civil society in the development of the national Action Plan is a critical step in improving the dialogue between citizens, civil society and government. This in turn is one of the primary aims of OGP and is an important enabler for a more open government and citizen participation in policy making. With regards to the traditional way of public consultations Denis dittoed that we have a great opportunity to do things differently this time by engaging the public and advertising widely, have an open and transparent process of co-creating Ireland’s first OGP Action Plan and allow for unorganised participation through available online tools.

For the 1st Open Data Ireland Meetup in 2014 (Meetup #12) which took place last Thursday 23rd January the OKF Ireland Team traveled to Cork, sparking the first Open Data Ireland Event outside Dublin. The event took place at University College Cork which kindly offered to host the meetup where everyone had a chance to catch up with with what’s happening in their jurisdictions. And we had 4 great speakers on the evening:

• Joonas Mäkinen (Finnish Maths Book Sprint)
• Marieke Guy (Open Knowledge Foundation)
• Darius Whelan (Creative Commons Ireland)
• Denis Parfenov (Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland, Ambassador)

The theme of this meetup was “Open Education”.

Tweets from the meetup have been storified at http://storify.com/OKFirl/open-data-ireland-meetup-12-open-education. Before we forget, please add your comments, tips, ideas for how we can drive open education in Ireland in the comments below.

Denis Parfenov started off our first meetup in 2014 by recalling what the OKF network does, what the local group does in Ireland, why we need an Open Data Movement in Ireland and how you can get involved and support that movement (last slides). You can access these slides by clicking on the picture below.

This was followed by an inspiring story by Joonas Mäkinen of how a group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students wrote an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a weekend book sprint. Click the picture to follow the link to the life size video conversation we had with Joonas.

Following that  Marieke Guy shared her expertise about working on the LinkedUp project which is all about pushing for public, open data to be be used and exploited by educational institutions. Marieke had some great insights on how to use open data for educational needs.

Finally it was good to learn from Darius how open education and open publishing ties in with with the objective of Creative Commons that the local group is promoting in Ireland. Mainly a Creative Commons license “helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world” by choosing the right licence that meets your goals but also enables re-use and thereby “maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” This is how Finnish student in Finland are now able to use an open source mathematics book and free of charge.

Darius recommended to look up the below mentioned 30 min video to learn more about this.

We finished up with conversations and discussions around open education and how to overcome obstacles to it in Ireland getting some great ideas and thoughts for our Open Education Hackathon in February.  The general consensus was that it was great to see that there is a demand for Open Education both outside and inside of Ireland and it was great to learn from Joonas and Marieke how they organised book sprints and open education projects in Finland, the UK & Germany.

Next up for OKF Ireland, Open Data Ireland and Open Education: 

Our next event will take place on 22nd February, 2014 in Facebook and we will stage the first Irish book sprint for an easy to follow course book ‘An Introduction to Computer Science” that is looking to prepare our secondary students for the future – details available on the  Open Data Day Dublin registration page.

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated, to Flora Fleischer, Shawn Day and Denis Parfenov for making the event happen. Many thanks to Joonas Mäkinen, Marieke Guy, Denis Parfenov and Darius Whelen for sharing their valuable insights and expertise. Very special thanks to Gavin Russell in the Computer Science Department of UCC for sponsoring the venue and being invaluable in setting up technology for us!

NOW: Stay up to date and share ideas by tweeting:

Tweet #OpenEdIRL

Tweets about “#OpenEdIRL OR #okfIRL OR #opendataIRL OR from:@OKFirl”

Ask Open Education Questions Now – receive answers on Jan 23rd

In order to be prepared to offer this new course, and introduce hundreds if not thousands of students to coding, schools need our help. Let’s crowdsource the best minds; and the best course materials; and volunteer to assist with implementing digital technologies in the classroom. Let’s make it an “open” process. Together we can build high-quality lessons with pedagogically sound underpinnings. We can aggregate the best on-line training resources into a world-class teaching guide. We can use the power of the Internet to connect school teachers to the vast experience of the community. Together this course can be the vanguard for open teacher resource. Introducing a level of collaboration to enhance and ease the way our teachers source material. Opening the process to allow for constant improvement. On 22 February, in conjunction with Open Data Ireland, Code For Ireland, and International Open Data Day, we will be gathering to build open educational resource, freely accessible, openly licensed resources to support this new course. This is your invitation, through collaboration with school teachers and industry experts can we build a truly useful resource. The community needs your help in ensuring that your local school is prepared to offer these new technologies. This is your chance to help.

Your are needed to source the best on-line resources. This include many successful introductory courses from around the world. We’ll be building from the best examples and utilizing state-of-the-art collaboration software, hosted by Open Knowledge Foundation. School teachers and industry professionals have been invited to ensure practicality and flexibility are built-in.

We’re calling it a Booksprint. But, it is a book unlike any textbook seen in school today. Built using collaboration software, using open source tools, in order to crowdsource from an unlimited pool of resources. We’ll be using a number of very cool technologies to facilitate real-time collaboration. Many of these tools have been used successfully to engage children and adults. You’ll walk away knowing how to engage a large audience, where to find help, and to quickly build teaching materials.

Please join us at the Februrary meetup being hosted by Facebook and organized in conjunction with Code for Ireland and Open Data Ireland.

In the meantime stay up to date and share ideas by tweeting:

Tweet #OpenEdIRL

Tweets about “#OpenEdIRL OR #okfIRL OR #opendataIRL OR from:@OKFirl”

You’ll learn more about our exciting projects that encourage communities to get involved in the worldwide Open Data Movement as well as participating in the civil society aspect of Open Government. Open Data Ireland, with the support of Open Knowledge Foundation, seeks to build projects and regional hubs, sustained by volunteers and, through our regular meetups, hackathons and community-led projects, work to create a sustainable infrastructure within Ireland to promote the values of openness, sector by sector.

Open Data Ireland’s January Meetup in Cork will provide the opportunity to discuss current global trends towards ‘Open Education’. On the day, we’ll have an opportunity to break into work groups and collaborate with others. If possible, please bring your laptop or tablet so you can gain practical experience building and encouraging online collaboration.

This meetup will lead to a hands-on ‘booksprint’ on Saturday, 22nd February (register now), where we aim to create a or, as the name suggests, print a book!

‘Booksprint’ is a rapid and dramatic innovation in getting resources developed by experts through an open and crowd-sourced process. The Open Knowledge Foundation has held two foundation Booksprint to create an Open Education Handbook to be distributed to educators interested in incorporating resources and influencing the way their education system sources learning materials. We look for teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium already in the public domain (‘open’) and work together (‘crowd-sourcing’) to collate the information into a usable format for the general public, or in this case, teachers and educators. Truly an important lesson in civics!

Recently, a group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students wrote a senior cycle secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on a Friday evening and the book was read out on Sunday evening. The result is published with an open CC-BY-license. As far as we are aware, this is the first time a course textbook was written in a three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used before, mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. To follow the progress, visit the repository at Github or the Facebook page (the conversation is mainly in Finnish, but you are welcome to comment and they will gladly answer in English).

This Booksprint is a great place to start contributing and networking with others who seek to accelerate technology in the classroom. Anyone can join!

If you’re new to Open Data Ireland, you’re welcome to just turn up and we’ll introduce you to everyone. With or without a laptop, we’ll introduce you to enough practical information to get you started straight away. Together, we build the community and resources needed to assist students, teachers, and national curricula. We’re hoping to create primary level maths books accessible by anyone, free of charge.

Meetup Details

GitHub: https://github.com/OKFirl/booksprint

Grab a ticket! — At this meet-up we are going to discuss and and begin practical work on collaborative open education projects for Ireland.

Topics include:

• Open Educational Resources, teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium already in the public domain.

• Booksprint: Guidebook for Computing (Primary) and Computer Science (Secondary) Handbook

• Continuing Booksprint on the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Education Handbook

• Overview of how a group of Finnish teachers wrote an open maths textbook in just one weekend.

• Updating opendata.ie and Ireland’s Open Data repository CKAN (Data.OpenData.ie)

• Junior Cert reform and opportunities for Booksprint deliverables to get NCCA approval and reform Ireland’s secondary education system.

Tickets: https://tito.io/open-data-ireland/meetup-12

Bring: Laptop

When: 23 / 01 / 2014 @ 18:00

Where: UCC Cork, Ireland

Who: A number of notable representatives will be joining the discussion including:

• OKF Ambassador for Ireland

• OKF OpenGLAM Ambassador for Ireland

“We are encouraging rigorous Computer Science courses. Although individual technologies change day by day, they are underpinned by foundational concepts and principles that have endured for decades. Long after today, pupils leave school and enter the workplace, long after the technologies they used at school are obsolete, the principles learnt in Computer Science will still hold true.”   -Michael Gove, gov.uk, Department for Education, 11 January 2012

Written by Eugene Eichelberger