A couple of weeks back, I joined the Advisory Committee of OpenRefine. I have been a user of OpenRefine for a while, mainly for its superb reconciliation capabilities to Wikidata.
While the name suggests a passive role, the Advisory Committee acts more like a board of trustees in other organizations. As mentioned in the blog post linked above, I hope that my experience from non-profits and grant applications, my recent experience as a codebase steward in the Foundation for Public Code combined by also being an end user might bring something valuable to the table.
Hack for Sweden är ett nationellt hackathon, drivet av svenska myndigheter. Sedan några år tillbaka är det DIGG som har ansvaret för att genomföra den. 2015 var jag med som dataägare från Wikimedia Sverige, 2016 var jag med och hackade själv och 2017 hjälpte jag igen till som dataägare, men från Riksantikvarieämbetets sida.
I årets upplaga av Hack for Sweden deltar jag i en ny roll, nämligen som mentor för öppen källkod. Jag hoppas att jag kan bistå med hjälp hur man jobbar med det. Jag misstänker att eventuella frågor kommer att fokusera på licenser, men jag ska försöka fokusera att lyfta blicken från att bara vara öppen på pappret till att anamma ett arbetssätt som genomsyras av principerna bakom öppen källkod. Det är ju trots allt det jag gör till vardags på Foundation for Public Code.
Today at the Code for all 2021 Summit, I had the honor to present a lightning talk about the Govdirectory together with Albin Larsson. You can watch the talk below.
Which Swedish municipalities have YouTube accounts?
Sometime in 2016 I got the idea of building a website that would display all the social media channels for all Swedish public agencies. The idea popped in my mind as I was learning the flexibility and power of Wikidata. But my confidence in the more advanced tooling to edit it was low, so I put this in the backlog to revisit later since it felt like a huge task.
Unlocking the idea
Five years, almost 50 live streams of editing Wikidata, a won contest, and about 70 Wikidata meetups later, when the announcement of the Unlock accelerator by Wikimedia Deutschland flew into my Twitter feed, not only did I feel more confident, I also had a potential collaborator. So I pitched the idea to Albin Larsson, my co-host of the live streams, but this time on a global scale, not only for Sweden. The idea at this stage was bold and simple:
a global directory of all government agencies and their online presences
We now also knew that by using Wikidata, we could show even more information than only social media. The accelerator program is unusual in that it doesn’t aim to create a startup and make a profit, instead it aims to enable a social impact on the world. The theme this year, (Re)building trust in the digital age, felt really fitting. We worked on an application and short thereafter we were accepted and in a sprint. The first sprint was really great, with the help of our coach Fabian Gampp we took our somewhat technical idea into a purpose driven project by forming a vision and a mission that extended way beyond the technology. Even though we had some ideas of what this could be used for when writing the application, it was still somewhat fleeting in our minds. Our ambitions became these:
Vision
Our vision is a world where people are empowered to engage with their government to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.
Mission
We will enable a community powered directory where the online presence of every public organization is easily findable, queryable and trustworthy.
Early days
We are still in the midst of the accelerator program, and just published the midterm report. If you want to give us feedback on our early version at govdirectory.org it would be valuable to us. If you would like to help us even further, check our contributing file on GitHub for improvements on the website and our project page on Wikidata for improving the data displayed in it.
A couple of weeks ago I had the honor to give at talk at Open Source Summit India 2021. I titled it Real world collaboration through the Standard for Public Code and it was a lightning talk about just that.
This Tuesday I had the honor to be a speaker at the FOSS-north conference. My talk was titled Helping public organizations collectively develop and maintain public code and was of course referring to our work at the Foundation for Public Code. You can watch my talk below.
Inför konferensen FOSS North där jag ska tala intervjuade podcasten Trevlig mjukvara mig. Det var ett trevligt samtal om potentialen som finns om organisationer i offentlig sektor samarbetar med varandra och använder öppen källkod.
Det är för övrigt en väldigt trevlig podd och den enda jag känner till som pratar om öppen källkod på svenska. Om det är i ditt intresse kan du prenumerera på en gång. (Och har du andra liknande tips får du gärna tipsa mig.)
This will be my second FOSDEM. But unlike last year, now I am better prepared (and a bit more hyped). So far my schedule looks like below, but of course it is due to change thanks to interesting conversations and chance hallway meetings. If there is anything you would like to chat about, feel free to ping me on Mastodon or Twitter.
Jag började ju nyligen jobba på Foundation for Public Code och det har varit en fantastisk start i en härligt idédriven organisation. På många sätt påminner det om min tid i Wikimedia Sverige, bland annat genom en stor transparens. Vi har inget intranät, utan publicerar alla våra processer publikt på en webbplats, och det mesta av arbetet sker på Github.
En av de sakerna vi gör är en standard för offentlig kod. Det är en samling minimikrav på vad man egentligen behöver göra för att det du gör som öppen källkod ska vara återanvändningsbart inte bara i teorin, utan även i praktiken. Standarden själv är såklart licensierad CC 0.
Idag släppte vi version 0.1.4 och även om det bara var en mindre förbättring så var det stort för mig, för nu finns jag med bland medförfattarna!
