Tag: Substance Consortium

Coko’s Efforts getting Out ‘n About

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 🙂

Building Alliances

Over the last so-many years, I’ve worked to put together many alliances and consortia, starting with the Open Source Streaming Alliance I co-founded in Amsterdam in 2000 or so with Drazen Pantic, Robert Geus, Jaromil and others, through to helping establish the Substance Consortium recently.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m involved in a new initiative to develop a new group, this time around open source and open science. The group is called The Open Source Alliance for Open Science. It was previously called ‘Open Source Super Friends’, which I preferred, but you win some and you lose some.

We are putting on a first event in Portland in May. It is invitation-only but you can request an invite here. We also have $ to sponsor travel.

The alliance is put together to help form a network of good-faith practitioners who wish to learn from each other to build a healthy ecosystem of tools and approaches to solving all the crazy problems in open science. My interest is in the ‘publishing’ (sharing) side of this, but when you get down to it, open science is, at its core, really a sharing issue. Open science is, in a sense, a publishing (small ‘p’) issue.

So if this is of interest to you, please apply. If you get turned down, it is probably because we consider you to be from an organisation that is not a good-faith actor in this sector. All proprietary projects fit that description, but also there are some open source projects out there that fit that description. If you are an open source project and get turned down, then I recommend you look deep inside your soul… you are being kept out for a reason.