In the Advisory Committee of OpenRefine

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.

💎 Let’s clean up some messy data! 💎

Mentor i Hack for Sweden

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.

Code for all lightning talk

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.

The link to the presentation that has the links to all examples and resources: https://bit.ly/wikidatacivictech.

Building a Govdirectory

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.

My talk at Open Source Summit India 2021

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.

My talk, starting 3:58:58.

Here are the slides I used.

My talk at FOSS-north

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.

The slides I used is available here.

Intervjuad av Trevlig mjukvara

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.

Avsnittet blev S07E04 Trevlig Intervju – Jan Ainali.

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.)

Spel om styrning av mjukvaruutveckling

Jag har gillat att spela spel sedan jag var liten och det har ju synts på denna blog från min kurs i speldesign till mitt experiment när jag lärde mig lite PHP. Så när jag på mitt nya jobb på Foundation for Public Code fick möjligheten att utveckla ett spel var det med glädje jag tog mig an den uppgiften. Nyss publicerade vi ett blogginlägg om hur det har gått med det arbetet och du kan läsa mer här:
A look at our Codebase Governance Game

Planning FOSDEM 2020

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.

Saturday

10.00 – 10.50 How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government
11.00 – 11.50 DEBATE: Should FOSS licenses be enforced at all?
12.00 – 12.25 A dozen more things you didn’t know Nextcloud could do
13.30 – 13.45 On the road to sustainable research software
Watch later: 13.30 – 13.55 COLLAB: The optics of the policy
Watch later: 15.00 – 15.50 DEBATE: Should licenses be designed to advance general social goals?
15.00 – 16.00 A best practices guide for FLOSS community managers
16.00 – 16.50 DEBATE: Does FOSS need sustainability?
Watch later: 18.00 – 18.30 The Journal of Open Source Software
17.30 – 19.00 Creating Sustainable Public Sector Open Source Communities

Sunday

Watch later: 9.00 – 9.15 Jitsi: video conferencing for the privacy minded
9.05 – 9.30 Applying Open Culture Practices across Distributed Teams
9.35 – 10.00 Organizing Open Source for Cities
10.05 – 10.30 The next generation of contributors is not on IRC
11.55 – 12.20 Cognitive biases, blindspots and inclusion
13.20 – 13.45 Be The Leader You Need in Open Source
13.50 – 14.10 Building Community for your Company’s OSS Projects
Watch later: 13.55 – 14.15 Nextcloud Talk
Watch later: 14.00 – 14.50 United Nations Technology and Innovation Labs
14.15 – 14.40 Lessons Learned from Cultivating Open Source Projects and Communities
14.45 – 15.10 Free software in education
16.40 – 17.00 Building a thriving community in company-led open source projects

En standard för offentlig kod

Jag började ju nyligen jobbaFoundation 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!