July summary: an incredible month: ContentMine, OKFest, Shuttleworth, Hargreaves, Wikimania

I haven’t blogged for over a month because I have been busier than I have ever been in my life. This is because the opportunities and the challenges of the Digital Century appear daily. It’s also because our ContentMine (http://contentmine.org) project has progressed more rapdily, more broadly and more successfully than I could have imagined.
Shuttleworth fund me/us to change the world. And because of the incredible support that they give – meetings twice a week, advice, contacts, reassurance, wisdom we are changing the world already. I have a wonderful team who I trust to do the right thing almost by instinct – like a real soccer team – each anticipates what is required when.
It’s getting very complex and hectic as we are active on several fronts (details in later posts and at Wikimania)

• workshops. We offer workshops on ContentMining, agree dates and place and then have to deliver. Deadlines cannot slip. A workshop on new technology is a huge amount of effort. When we succeed we know we have something that not only works, but is wanted.  It’s very close to the OpenSource and OpenNotebook Science where everything is  made available to the whole world. That’s very ambitious and we are having to build the …
• technology. This has developed very rapidly, but is also incredibly ambitious –  the overall aim is to have Open technology for reading and understanding and reusing the factual scientific literature. This can only happen with a high quiality generic modular architecture and
• community. Our project relies on getting committed democratic meritocratic volunteers (like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Mozilla, etc.). We haven’t invited them but they are starting to approach us and we have an excellent core in RichardSmith-Unna’s quickscrape (https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape/).
• sociopoliticolegal. The STM publishers have increased their effort to require licences for content mining. There is no justification for this and no benefit (except to publishers income and control). We have to challenge this and we’ve written blogs and a seminal paper and…

Here’s a brief calendar …

• 2014-06-04-> 06 FWF talk, workshop, OK hackday in Vienna
• 2014-06-19->20 Workshop in Edinburgh oriented to libraries.
• 2014-07-07->12 Software presented at BOSC (Boston)
• 2014-07-14 Memorial for Jean-Claude Bradley and promotion of OpenNotebookScience
• 2014-07-15 Presentation at CSVConf Berlin
• 2014-07-16->19 OKFest at Berlin – 2 workshops and 2 presentations
• 2014-07-22->23 Mozilla Sprint – Incredibly valuable for developing quickscrape and community
• 2014-07-24 Plenary lecture to NLDTD (e-Theses and Dissertations) Leicester
• 2014-07-25->27 Crystallography and Chemistry hack at Cambridge (especially liberating crystallographic data and images)
• 2014-07-28->29 Visit of Karien Bezuidenhout from Shuttlworth – massive contribution
• 2014-08-01 Development of PhyloTreeAnalyzer and visit to Bath to synchronise software
• 2014-08-02 DNADigest hack Cambridge – great role that ContentMine can play in discovery of datasets

 
Sleep?
No

• preparing for Featured Speaker at Wikimania on 2014-08-08 where I’ll present the idea that Wikipedia is central to understanding science. I’ll blog initial thought later today

http://contentmine.org