Publishing Innovator. Surfer. Ponderer. NZer.
We had a pretty awesome day today at the Open Source Alliance for Open Science in Portland. We spent many sessions talking about comment issues that face us all, and also a lot of time working out what the purpose of the group will be, moving forward. There will be more news on this soon!
Some pics of the day’s events below!
So many times I go to a coffee shop and order a Machiatto (in the states I have to say Espresso Macchiato to avoid getting a ‘milkshake’)…and I just get some soupy milky thing. A Macchiato is not a small cappuccino…but that is what most fancy cafes seem to think it is…Its even true of the pretentious San Francisco and Portland cafes (sadly, you get a better Espresso Machiatto from Starbucks than most fancy cafes – but make sure you order a dry Espresso Machiatto…then they almost always do it right) . I once even was told by a barrister in San Francisco that he wouldn’t make a Machiatto with just foam on top…when I meekly complained he said to me point black “I don’t care what you think”…sigh…I guess my beard was not long enough to validate my opinion…for those that would like to know the difference, the site below is the best guide I found to explain… a Macchiato, for those that are interested, has no milk mixed into the espresso shot. Sigh….
Cappuccino vs Latte vs Macchiato vs Mocha: What’s The Difference?
It seems the Coko meme is getting out there. Just these last few weeks we have seen the following:
Stenci.la – we put some money into assisting ‘, including flying the founder Nokome over to San Francisco and introducing him to funders. The result is that Nokome just landed a very nice grant from the Sloan Foundation. We don’t lay any claim to Nokome’s great work, but it’s good to see that our help was instrumental in helping this great project along the way.
HTML Typescript – Recently (last week) Wendell Piez, who we work with for Docx to HTML file conversion, presented at the well known JATSCon about his work with Coko. The preliminary proceedings are available online for Wendell’s talk and I hear the video will be available soon too.
Texture – if one slot at JATSCon wasn’t enough… Texture was also presented. It is an online JATS editor produced by the Substance Consortium which we co-founded. Proceedings here.
Penguicon, Carnegie Mellon – I recently presented Coko at these two events and upcoming we will be presenting Coko and various projects at SSP, AUP, Open Source Lisbon, Wikicite, OSEHRA, Open Source Albania and more!
March for Science – Coko CoFounder Kristen Ratan was lead organiser for the San Francisco March for Science. I couldn’t be there (was in the desert) but it apparently was a wonderful event.
Open Source Alliance for Open Science – we have 28 open source projects for open science coming to join in a day working out how to work together. Starts tomorrow in Portland!
Lots happening 🙂
Now off to Portland for the Open Source Alliance for Open Science meeting. It’s going to be a one-day event (which I’ll facilitate). The day is aimed at creating a network of good faith actors that wish to work together to help open science through open source. First, we must establish group ownership of the idea. It should be a great day!
Today I went on a short tour around Detroit to look at some of the infamous ‘ruins of Detroit’. It was pretty fascinating. What struck me most was not so much the ‘big spaces’ (a church, school & factory) we visited but how many suburban houses were completely derelict. It was astonishing. On some streets, up to 80% of the houses were not just empty, but decayed to ruin… its really unbelievable. These were beautiful big homes that stand silently side by side in decay. Street after street, suburb after suburb.
The process of decay is apparently helped by scavengers that rip out any valuable resources – mainly copper wire and plumbing. The next thing to go is the roof and/or windows and once the weather can get in its all over.
In addition to the pics I already posted, we visited an abandoned broadcasting school – WDTR. They used to broadcast both radio (FM) and television from these premises. I used to manage radio stations in New Zealand and have a long history of working in radio (and started a TV station in NZ too) so I was really fascinated to see this. The building was only relatively recently abandoned, and apparently, the scavengers have only just started to tear it apart, so there was some amazing stuff left in the building… it was a really incredible afternoon… sobering and fascinating. It reminded me also of ex-Soviet Union ruins I had explored in Latvia (eg. RT32) and gave me some time to reflect on how no society is impervious to massive decay.
Included are some photos of the announcer studios, old school TV cameras, video mixers, reel to reel 32 track tapes and much more…including a couple of old photos we found on the floor of the days when the radio station was operational.
After presenting last night I got up early and did a tour of some Detroit ruins. We stopped at a factory, a school, a church and a broadcasting school. Here is a sample. I’ll post more photos later.
I just did my first presentation of the Cabbage Tree Method and Coko at an Open Source conf…very nice conf and the people attending my talk were awesome. I asked for feedback and got some great comments. Jotting down the feedback here so I don’t forget!
All my slides are kept at slides.com. They provide a great service, all slides are HTML, and they maintain the open source reveal.js library.
These are the slides I will present tonight at Penguicon.
Nokome Bentley from Stenci.la is now being supported by Sloan with a substantial grant. Very well deserved! Can’t wait to see Nokome at the Open Source Alliance for Open Science meeting on Monday (Portland) to congratulate him in person. Whoot!
I have just been invited to present a keynote at Open Source Lisbon (Portugal) in September, and another at OSERHA in June (Maryland, USA).
Off tomorrow to present Coko and the Cabbage Tree Method at Penguicon in Detroit!