Update for last month: Shuttleworth, BL, MySociety and more

I have been silent for the last month because I have been very busy. I hope to blog more in the next few days.
The main activities have been

• The twice-yearly Gathering of Shuttleworth fellows (this time in Malta). My first time (March) was great, but this was fantastic. I have so much in common with so many of the past and current Fellows. I’ve a huge todo list to see how we can work together.
• An application to the Shuttleworth Foundation for re-funding for a further year. I’ll take you through this in detail in the next posts.
• Running ContentMining workshops (at EBI on 2014-10-06) and (Jenny Molloy and Puneet Kishor) in Delhi last weekend (2014-11-02). We have now ironed out most of the problems and feel confident about delivering a range of workshops.
• Preparing for the launch of our mining activities (RRSN, promise!). Will blog in next day or two
• Preparing for trip to US and doing workshops in Chicago, Washington (OpenCon) and visiting Penn State).
• Attending Open Access Button launch 2014-10-21. OA_Button is massive because at least there is some true energy and anger. I gave a 30 sec tribute where I said it was massive and that we hadn’t seen nothing yet. I think OA_Button will change the world. Young people are sick of the broken values of academia. (I shall expand on this at OpenCon).
• Cobi Smith (who is currently with Francois Grey in CERN) gave an excellent talk at Open Research Cambridge in the Panton Arms on crowdsourcing/crafting for disasters.
• Met with all the Cambridge University Librarians to say farewell to Peter Morgan, retiring, who has helped me get off the ground in Library and Informatics research. Peter’s been a huge contributor to new ideas and practices and we’ll miss him. Good opportunity to talk with the library and know they are supportive of my ContentMining research.
• Interesting meeting on Big Data in science in Cambridge. Great talk by Florian Markowetz (Cancer Genomics) debunking the hype (Big Data is sliding down the curve into trough of disillusion). He demolished the “lets throw all our data into Machine Learning and wonderful things will automatically emerge” syndrome. I completely agree – Machine Learning has its place – e.g. OCR – but leads to no understanding and no transferability. I am largely renouncing it.
• British Library Labs on “Big Data” in Arts and Humantities. Massively Wonderful. Wonderful speakers and projects. The BL runs its labs on a shoestring (Mainly Mahendra and Ben) and IMO is a world leader in innovative use of library resources. I’m certainly planning to see if they’ll host a workshop on ContentMining.
• MySociety – ran a great meeting yesterday evening in Cambridge and asked me to present TheContentMine. I had some help – see http://instagram.com/p/u_NrqxIFTz/

More later…