I am so Excited about the Open revolution

Written on a plane from Seattle toSF Arcturus

I haven’t blogged for a while but there is just so much going on that I haven’t had a moment. I’m now in a plane (Alaska Air) with free wifi. (Unfortunately it’s only a promo for 2 weeks)

But Thank Seattle for free wifi at airport. It makes so much difference. It’s worth it. You get kudos. Whereas with all the money graspers in most places I feel a lower class organism. It’s the sort of thing that makes me tell people to come to Seattle.

So here is a simple a list of things that are exploding in my head and I’ll hope to expound later;

• Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn.org). It’s unstoppable. I think Open Knowledge will become the “Wikipedia” of the 2010’s.
  
• Open Data. Panton Principles are being translated into Russian. Thank you everybody. When you come to Cambridge, look us up in Pantonia.
  
• Open Bibliography and Open Citations. This has the chance to change the world of academic scholarship. It’s liberation informatics (I’ll talk more later). We can reclaim our scholarship
  
• Open Science (Summit). I’m so excited to be invited to the Open Science Summit in Berkeley at the end of the month. It’s the sixties reborn for Openness. I’ll be waving a flower.
  
• Microsoft. A fantastic Research Summit. Microsoft Research are making the transition to an Open supporter of science. They’ve got the vision. Yes, you’ll still have to pay for Word, etc. But they are working towards interoperability.
  
• Chem4Word. This is now robust. Expect a V1 release ASAP. Chem4Word is Open. Joe Townsend, and Alex Wade (and the rest of us) have done a fantastic job. It’s a platform for Open science.
  
• Visualisation. I have had my head blown away by displays that can cover several orders of magnitude.
  
• Interactivity, user interfaces. The word of Natural User interfaces is coming
  
• Data everywhere. 5 years ago Open Data was never mentioned. Now it’s coming out of the walls. The closed empires will fall
  
• JISC. It’s great to work with them. They breed collaboration.
  
• Scifoo. I’m honoured to be re-invited. I hope I can survive the excitement.
  
• Citizen science, citizen innovation, citizen democracy. We have the tools and can create them. Let’s use them to liberate our world. The barriers between scientists and everyone are falling down. It’s arrogant to pretend your area is not accessible to others. Galaxy Zoo has shown that.
  
• The timescale of innovation has collapsed. 5 years ago I wouldn’t have contemplated doing computer vision. I see OpenCV will be at Scifoo – can’t wait. NLP works. Speech recognition works. Mashups with all sorts of Linked open Data. It’s starting to stream out of the woodwork.
  
• Science Online (London) Sept. Come.
  

If you haven’t visited OKF (okfn.org) you should. There is so much going on. Rufus is a pan-dimension hyperbeing to keep it all afloat. Seriously there’s lot of others and the critical mass and organization is awesome. Join the open-science and open-bibliography lists and you’ll see more contributions from me (which is why the blog has been a bit quiet).

And special thanks to publishers and libraries who have supported our JISCorama in various projects

• Int. Union of Crystallography
  
• PLoS
  
• BMC
  
• RSC
  
• BL
  
• Cambridge UL