The Best of GovHack Melbourne

This post is a #FriendlyRivalry post to all the other GovHack judges and competitors (Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra, Brisbane, Gold Coast, oh yes and our favorite rival Sydney ).  As a Melburnian I’m wonderfully proud of what the Govhack competitors at Melbourne achieved, and I want to make sure you know about the following before you cast any of your national votes!  I’ll do the same, so please do re-post your top competitors.  Good luck to one and all.

As we all know the nation is about to have an election, but who should you vote for?  Are you going to let the media tell you or are you going to make your own decision based on the actual data?  Here is a quick quiz that just might get you thinking twice about what party you really belong to?

• Take the quiz here: http://govhack2013.russellsim.org/
• Vote for this team here.

The best hacks are the ones that ‘scratch an itch’.  The first day was full of frustration for the way the data was provided.  This team decided to solve a problem that every GovHack competitor will be thanking them for.  Team Unlock built a platform for unlocking data.  Unlocked transform crappy government spreadsheets, PDFs and other data formats into nice clean CSV & JSON and then automatically builds a profile over the data to show how it can be used as different graphs and spreadsheets.  Oh yes and they built a faceted search engine atop – tpo that.

• Check out how this system works here: http://youtu.be/z11hqoNhNxU
• If you think Government should be using this platform to open up their data, vote for the team here.

Are you thinking of moving to the no.1 city in the world? Of course you are, but Melbourne is really a bunch of communities packed together – which community might you best belong to – are you a hipster, a wealthy retiree, a hick from the sticks…  its not as easy as you might think to decide which part of Melbourne and environs you will personally best fit.  Here is an interactive data map that will help you decide just that:

• Play with the interactive map here: http://yuri.io/census
• If you enjoyed finding out where the hipsters and old people live, vote for this team here.

This is just data journalism at its best: giving you the power to see a whole world of immigration data in one visualisation.  Watch this before you listen to any more news which covers just a single story about asylum seekers.

• Watch this amazing visualisation here: http://youtu.be/C2URyBfJ4Ug
• If you like data journalism based on facts, vote for this team.

Ever wanted to turn your data into a ring, earrings or a dog tag (maybe now, but now you will want to!). This tool enables you to print your data into one of these objects using a 3D printer!!!  How many companies are going to want one of these to replace business cards?!

• Be amazed at the power of custom printed data here: http://youtu.be/qgK2h7orqzI
• If this blows your mind, vote for this team here.

This is a beautiful expression of Australian life and death (if only there would have been more time to show each branch as a state/territory, and different leaf colors as different ages).  None the less, I find it peaceful to watch a metaphor of life in this way:

• Find serenity here: http://die4art.com/hackgov/index.html
• If this brings you some peace in a hectic world, vote for this team here.

An infographics that children of all ages will love, check out the wales around Australia, see them swim and hear their sounds, educational and fun!

• Who doesn’t love wales, listen and watch them in the waters of Australia now: http://youtu.be/37vGQUd72iM?t=40s
• If you enjoyed this and like wales, vote for this team here!

Want to hear what data about urban growth sounds like?! Here is your chance.  A wonderful creative way to think about code and data as art (note: music starts at 2m28s):

• Listen to data as you never have before: http://vimeo.com/67485781
• If you think this is creatively inspired, vote for this team here!

For any radio station out there (are you listening TripleJ), see this map app which shows where people in Australia can actually listen to your radio:

• See radio waves in a way that only hackers can create: http://koordinates.com/maps/hack/#/maps/hack/layers/
• If this data is useful, vote for the team here.

Melburnians do you know if your public transport links are crap?! Well now you can know so you can show your local authority how they can make things better!  Check out this infographic of where the best public transport links are.

• Understand your public transport links here: http://youtu.be/nUVZavhGego
• If you want your public transport to be better, vote for them here.

As someone who has just moved to Melbourne (and fallen in love with this city) this infographic of the Yarra River is truly beautiful as it tells a story about Melbourne is a way that only data from nature can.  Every Melburnian should take the time to scroll over the dot points on the graph and see how our beloved Yarra changes as it flows into our beloved city.

• Appreciate the Yarra in a new way here: http://yarravis.herokuapp.com/
• If you are love Melbourne, vote for this team here.

Australians often talk about how much of Australians minerals get exported to China, but do you want to see what that would actually look like on a map, well here you go (enjoy!):

• See what the data really says about exporting our mineral land: http://youtu.be/anNvHQ0ZnB8?t=1m28s
• If this infographic made you think again about Australian natural resources, vote for this team here.

This is a tool that every journalist should be thanking this team for creating – a custom glossary of what politicians say.  A great tool for anyone in politics, journalism or even researchers needing a great study tool:

• A tool you’ll want to use later: http://youtu.be/9g0Tt3syInI
• If you think this tool is darn useful, vote for this team here.

Here is a map you’ll want to print up and ad to your personal art collection at your home (I know I will!), this looks to be the first in an iteration of this map that will end up being absolutely stunning.  It is already on its way, check it out here:

• An artwork for your home: http://youtu.be/yRLypcIxtpk
• If you want this team to continue designing this map, vote for them here.

This app is wonderfully simple and practical as the team that made this actually solved their own problem.  Perhaps the team that came the furthest to compete, from the UK and needing a way to find out about stuff they made this location aware app:

• http://youtu.be/W22bjvB6WeE
• If it made you smile, vote for them here.

Great to see ‘good honest questions being asked of government’ supported by data:

• http://youtu.be/Bqrlu9liE4s
• If this team got you thinking, vote for them here.

Some great coding to bring the data together to help tourists know when they should visits different places in Australia:

• http://youtu.be/T0OxVlRj4_Y
• If you’d like to see further work on this app, vote for the team here.

Love the idea this team had, just a shame that time ran out on them.

• http://youtu.be/4skFDRIEedQ
• If you want to see them finish it off anyways, vote for them here.

A idea to help you in thinking about ‘what is the gap’.

• http://youtu.be/dVgexlvZBtA
• If this got you thinking, vote for this team here.

All pictures provided by the fantastic photographing fabulous Fiona!  See more pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67400170@N05/sets/

Should the Australian Government be Using OpenStack?

@PiaWaugh asked me to facilitate a panel discussion on OpenStack and Government. Naturally, I decided to turn it into a ‘Jerry Springer’ style debate on “Why isn’t government using OpenStack in Australia?”. Interestingly enough, the audience was swayed in what they believed from the start versus the finish (we held a vote for/against at the start and end of the debate). You’ll have to watch the video to see which way the audience (of about 50ppl) voted

Flanders’ rants

Disclaimer:

This page on my blog is intended to act as a repository for rants. I’ll be the first to admit that these rants (by their very nature) are *not* well thought out and intended more as a place for me to vent about what frustrates me. The point in posting these rants is that at some stage (once I am a bit calmer), I can come back to view these rants in a more methodical and mindful way. The value in these rants is therefore not in the intellectual ideas, but rather in the emotional ideas that provoked their ‘knee jerk’ reaction.  I hope to learn from these rants by posting them publicly, and  (hopefully) through my friends and colleagues I can separate the emotional from my ideological responses.

Below in the comments you’ll find these rants, to receive these rants you’ll need to leave a comment and then tick the “Notify me of follow-up comments via email” box.

NB The other reason for having this page on my blog, is my perception that twitter is increasingly becoming a failed space for having short topical debates that often get kicked off on twitter and usually erode after three or more people join in the discussion.

Slideshare analytics

I’d almost written-off Slideshare[1], until I got the below email from them reminding me of past presentations and the ‘long tail’ readership that presentations can have (note: are the 3819 views on ‘Agile Prototyping in Academia’ actual human readership?):

OkCapital: Lost your job – want to find the city that meets ALL your needs?

11 months ago, 21 slides, 1766 views, 7 downloads

Cultural Victoria: Linked Open Data and Libraries.

1 year ago, 8 slides, 656 views

The Past, Present and Future of Archives for Universities: The Archives Forum at The National Archives – 02 March 2011

2 years ago, 40 slides, 1988 views, 5 download

s

What should be at data.ac.uk ? –  a briefing paper

2 years ago, 11 pages, 373 views

What is Rapid Innovation?

2 years ago, 21 slides, 1114 views, 10 downloads

Introduction to the Day: The ’Deposit Tool Show And Tell’ Meeting

3 years ago, 11 slides, 1107 views, 1 download

Agile Prototyping in Academia

3 years ago, 28 slides, 3819 views, 6 comments, 30 downloads

Web 2.0 use in the Public Sector

3 years ago, 62 slides, 802 views, 2 downloads

CRM4UNI Project Introduction

4 years ago, 8 slides, 740 views, 7 downloads

Turning the Pages: transforming the British Libraries 3D virtual book collection into a social learning platform

4 years ago, 11 slides, 946 views, 2 downloads

Birkbeck College, University of London: So we have a repository what next?

5 years ago, 23 slides, 930 views, 7 downloads

The SOURCE Project (Sharring Objects Under Repository Control with Everyone): A bulk migration tool for repository scholarly objects.

5 years ago, 16 slides, 1565 views, 4 downloads

 

[1]= I currently use GoogleDocs presentations, in fact most of these were produced as GDocs and then spat out as PPT.

 

I wonder what would be more effective in terms of dissemination, a.) publishing presentations (like my previous post on ‘ResBaz: a new model for research community tools & services) or b.) publishing out to Slideshare to see what GoogleJuice they generate?  <– I suppose this also depends on how easy it is to read and view via mobile devices, sharing to twitter, etc.

A new model for Research IT services

Over the past year I’ve been privileged to work with Dr. Steven Manos, who is the Director of Research IT Services at the University of Melbourne.  The reason this has been a privelage (other than MelbU being the no.1 University in Australia) is because Dr. Manos is one of the few Senior Managers who has a clear understanding for how to engage researchers[1].  The reason I know this is because I’ve watched the model he is proposing (below) work for the past year.   Why experiment with a different model for providing Research IT Services, well consider these population numbers for the University of Melbourne:

The following is a simplified version of the model that Dr. Manos is experimenting with to cope with this continually changing population; so that Researchers are not disfranchised from the technology they use (and most importantly the support they need in using those tools).

We’ve called this new model for engaging researchers: The Research Bazaar model (or #ResBaz for short):

There are four parts to our presentation, which can be summed up as: we want to tell you about our new model which is made up of two essential parts a.) researchers are becoming more and more dependent upon tools to do their work, b.) they like to learn about these tools from one another.  To help explain this new model we present some examples of events we’ve done the past year to bring researcher together in the same room around the same tool.  Finally, we would really love it if others could start sharing how they are engaging researchers using a similar models of ‘peer to peer’ & ‘face to face’ activities to engage researchers and their problems.

So why are we proposing a new model for how IT should be engaging researchers?  In short, because “computer says no”.

University IT helpdesks usually do not have the best reputation with the researchers they serve.  This is not to blame the current helpdesk model, as it is functional for doing basic IT support.  However,  IT helpdesks will never be a good option for engaging researchers given the complexity of problems that researchers face.

We know that researchers don’t like ticket based helpdesks, and we know that researchers aren’t willing to all get on bookface and talk about their problems to the world; where is the happy middle ground?  How can we create a social situation where we do support researchers and the bespoke solutions they require?  What is a good way to organise researchers so they get good IT support?!

It’s sometimes hard to imagine a different social solution for organising researchers together than our current faculty based system.  However, faculties were not the original ‘organising principle’ of the University.  In fact, ‘Nationality’ was the original organising principle at the University of Bologna when it was first established in 1088A.D.  It wasn’t until 1254A.D that The University of Paris started experimenting with the organisation of the University via “Faculties” .  Even then the composition of those faculties around subject, discipline, etc. took hundreds of years to spread to other Universities.  Is it time that we used a new organising principle for bringing researchers together?

So don’t get me wrong, we are not suggesting that we should decamp all the faculty offices and make all the researchers move to a building that shares common toolsets, e.g. The College of R, The College of Matematica, The College of SPSS, etc.  However, we are suggesting that all researchers can be grouped by the tools they are utilising to do their research.  And better yet, the Web give us an incredible organising tool to bring researchers together around their favorite tools.  But please remember, that while we feel the Web is a great tool, we do not believe it is sufficient to enable researchers to share their ideas – it is only via face-to-face means that true sharing (and support) of research ideas and tools can effectively occur.

This new model is very easy for you to attempt at your institution.  All it takes is the awareness of what tools that researchers are using across various disciplines, and second it requires that you bring these people together to improve their skills in that tool.  Though, once you’ve done that you’ll realise how different each of those activities can be, ergo, what kind of quality IT Research service are you providing through these activities?!

This is where our new model gets tricky.  We have had some success for bringing researchers together this past year around the tools they use, however we want more evidence that this is a model worth pursuing (and one that can be justified to the Provost, e.g. the helpdesk can post an annual report metric for ‘numbers of tickets resolved’; our model needs a similar established number across the sector alongside other interdependently validated evidence <– this is where we need U!).

To try and encourage you to attempt this model yourself, we’ve come up with some patterns for the activities we have used the past year. We would love it if you would share your experience as well:

1. R2R: Researchers don’t consume services, they consume collaborations
2. Rich in Rooms: getting rooms at a University are cheap (if not free) and so there is very bureaucratic barrier to experiment with this model.  Rooms are also a great barter tool for getting outside groups (companies, entrepreneurs, etc) to come along and provide their help in exchange for the room.
3. Know thy talent: it is often postgraduates and early carreer researchers who are most engaged as they are the ones usually doing the hard graff of the research (usually while the professor is off bidding for more research funding).  Accordingly, cater for this audience – you would be amazed how much extra time these people are willing to put in because you have given them pizza and beer
4. Don’t be a tool: some disciplines will have hundreds of tools (e.g. our neuroscience department at last glance has over sixty tools they are using in various work).  Realise you’ll never be able to hire enough staff to support all these tools, so embrace this (don’t constrain because the tool isn’t ‘officially supported’).
5. Tools as lingua franca academica: a growing trend is the use of common tools that cross discipline boundaries.  Tools like R, Matematica, Google Fusion Tables and many more are enabling new collaborations with researchers.  Don’t be afraid to bring a Historian and a Scientist into the same room with one another if they are using the same tool!
6. Trade trust: Being IT, you should expect to have reistence at first as IT are often seen as ‘enforcers’ – this can only be changed by showing how you can help and that you are actually a ‘collaborator’.
7. The porous University: community groups and events allow anyone to participate, not just inclusive of world class researchers & their post-grads but those entrepreneurs, business and other industries around the University.
8. Learning is social: the model we are proposing is not actually a new one, the heyday of Universities (in the 1920-30) was filled with social clubs, dinners, discussions and all kinds of activities that many in the University sector would see as too “informal”.  Yet, for researchers to work with one another they require a close trusted relationship with one another.  The activities we are suggesting enable this relation to be created.
9. Scale: You’ll recall the numbers at the start of this presentation and how many researchers that the research IT service must support?  This model has enabled us to start several communities which are then taken forward by other researchers, and further branched off.  The simple value of establishing this model so that anyone can support one another around tools is viral and can spread to much larger numbers than any single helpdesk.

Ok, so we’ve told you some of the reasons why we think this ‘new’ model works.  Now we want to get you to go away and try it on your own.  To help you do this are a list of activities we’ve undertaken this past year as well as some future activities we plan on doing.

The following list is only a sample of the events we have done, please feel free to use the tags (denoted by the “#” symbol) to search for more information.

• Activity no.1: Emerging Technology Forums – This is our “home base” monthly event where we ask researchers whom we’ve newly met (from the below activities) to come and present the tool they are utilising.  In this way we can gauge if there is greater interest to put on a further event around tool we were not previously aware of being used.
• Activity no.2: Cloud Dojos (#nadojo #uberdojo) – These events are based on ‘problem based learning’ where the researcher brings their tools+data into a room of developers and other experts to try and solve the problem together, while at the same time learning about a new tool.
• Activity no.3: Stories about people – This is a promotional event where we are able to video record a real human story about a researcher and the tools they are using so that we can show how the community is more than just technology – people make food, have babies, tell jokes and genuinely want to share their experiences beyond ‘just the data’.
• Activity no.4: Build Parties (#pif3dau #pif3d) – new technologies like 3D Printers offer an incredible opportunity to engage researchers who are looking for new opportunities to experiment with how their research could be extended.  These build parties bring together a vast array of different cross disciplinary researchers.
• Activity no.5: Celebrity Lectures (#TBLDownUnder) – Having Sir Tim Berners-Lee give a public lecture brought in over a thousand people, of which many are returning to our events to learn more about the collaborative opportunities we provide.
• Activity no.6: Data Newsroom (#DataHack) – Engaging with organisations like The Age newspaper enable us to get reserch out to the wider world that would otherwise we stuck in the Academic silo.  In addition, this participation with people outside of Academia further increases our reputation as well as provides new commercialisation opporunities.
• Activity no.7: GPU Seminars: Groups often spin off of previous events we have done and all we need to do is provide a room and help promote the event, the rest is taken care of by the researcher who want to tell other researchers about the tool they are using and its success.

Some of the future activities we have planned, include (please get in contact if you would like to participate so we can share expertise):

• Software Carpentry – see: http://software-carpentry.org/about/90seconds.html
• Data Carpentry – same as above but about what can be done with the data, e.g. statistical analysis via R or geospatial mapping via TileMill
• GovHack – another event that enables researchers to work with a wider audience as well as find new research opportunities via the large amount of government data becoming available.
• Art Galleries (#ArtsHack) – Turning research into art is a very powerful way to enable resarchers to socialise with one another.   This builds trust and gets people out of the formalness of the Lab, Lecture or Learned society.
• Jerry Springer-esque Academic Debates – Why not have a bit of fun while debating new topics, best of all these kinds of exciting events get people partiicpating and talking in a topic that they might otherwise dismiss as outside of their research remit.
• Silent Auctions – There are opportunities to get Alumni involved as well as interested in the investment opportunities of new research ideas.
• Accelerator Week –  Getting research ‘accelerated’ into a product that can be presented to Venture and Angel investors is a whole new way of making research commercial.
• etc.

To sum up the above activities, it is important to note that we are still exploring how to best make these activities work so that we can actually make the valid claim that research is better because of our support.  We still don’t have the evidence we need to demonstrate that this is the way that all Universities should be approaching the support of researchers in the modern day digital tool world.

So why change the current model for Research IT Services?  Because the world has changed because of technology and there are better ways to engage people in using technology.  We know this because we’ve started to see this same model we are recommending appear in the Open Source community as well as the Venture Capital & Startup communities.  These new models for working don’t tell us explicitly how to adapt a new model, but they do give us a guiding light so that we can support research in the modern digital era.

In addition to the theoretical foundations of the model we are proposing, is the practical advice.  We feel that some of the best advice we could share with one another (via posting using the #ResBaz tag) would include advice and tips on how the Web can bring researchers together into P2P+F2F+Tool communities):

So what do you think, is this new model worth exploring?  Is it something your institution could ‘have a go’?  How can we help you try it out?  Please do tweet us or leave a comment below.  We’ll be monitoring any mention of the tag #ResBaz so please do help continue the conversation.

Please click this link for the full version of the above slideshow presentation.

 

[1]= To qualify this comment, I’d also cite Dr. Nigel Ward, David Groenewegen, Glen Maloney and several others who have been key in supporting this work.  Not to mention former UK colleagues such as Rachel Bruce, Neil Jacobs, Paul Walk (and, well many more… you know who you are, and I thank you!)

Data storytelling will get more citations for researchers?

I spent the weekend creating the following infographic (a version of soon to appear in JISCs #mobile1st report). What struck me as interesting during this process was the fact that I was working with very reputable data, and yet my methods for visualizing this data were very focused on the storytelling aspects of this chart (see below for the various drafts I iterated through to get to this version).

Increase of international student tuition fees (vs national student tuition) in the UK per year and student enrollment.

What strikes me as a bit awkward in the coming scholarly revolution is how easy it is to manipulate data in the visual. Will we not see researchers employing similar data storytelling skills (in the form of infographics like the above ‘bubbles’ atop a bar chart?) for the purpose of getting more people to click, link and download their paper based on what they see on the first page (abstract + image)?

NB I’d highly recommend you read the JISC/OCLC report on Gen Y researcher reading habits: “Bouncing, Chunking and Squirrelling”. To grossly paraphrase this report: the researcher who puts a map or infographic on the first page of their research article, significantly improves their chance of their research being ‘squirrelled’ away by readers, which leads to more citations, which leads to increased researcher reputation.

My question to you is: do these types of hybrid-(info)graphs undermine the scholarly process? Perhaps even employing marketing techniques to the data so it is more appealing to the reader?

On the other side of the coin, is this article where journalists are feeling they are losing their creative storytelling abilities because of ‘data journalism’: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/31/data-is-not-killing-creativity-its-just-changing-how-we-tell-stories/

Some other attempts at various infographics of the same data as the chart at the top of this post:

This one (as opposed to the one at the top of this post) doesn’t use logarithmic data but does place the trends in proportion to one another…

The question I asked The Inventor of the Web

I owe a massive thanks to Dr. Steven Manos (who in managing TBL coming to Melbourne University) gave me the honor of asking the final question at TBL’s public lecture.  I began the question by asking all the researchers in the audience to raise their hand, naturally well over half the audience did so.  I then asked Sir Tim:

“To the researchers who have just raised their hands what would be your advice to them be for sharing their research data?”

As Sir Tim’s lecture had primarily been on the ‘New Momentum for Open‘, and as TBL invented the Web while at a research organisation (CERN), I felt we might get some nice insight.

David F. Flanders asks Sir Tim, “what would be your advice to those in the audience for sharing their research data?”, Dr. Steven Manos (Director of Research IT at Melbourne Uni in the background)

The only trouble with Sir Tim’s insight is that he has obviously thought about this at a level that most of will not yet have encountered.  Accordingly, I want to take TBL’s answer, break it down (paraphrasing) it for any researcher who won’t have found his technical-literal answer easy to understand (NB I’ve also included some related quotes from the main lecture):

[paraphrasing Sir Tim Berners Lee, bold-italics are mine]

“Researchers should use the tools they are use to using in their day-to-day so they can continue to produce their datasets and resulting research as they always have done so…

…those tools should be Open Source where available (easier to adapt to open research), but regardless of, researchers must get on with their research and use the tools they want to use…

…However, in using those tools researchers should actively be working with one another in their discipline and subject communities to create other simple tools/scripts/agents [NB note TBL called these 'software shims'], that can monitor the tools & data they work with day-to-day…

…As these tools {s/w shims] monitor the work of the researcher they can also begin to collect, back-up and organise the data & research on behalf of the researcher…

…In this way, the ‘software shims’ can act as a lab assistant to the researcher making it easier for them to mange their data.  These ‘software shims’ can also then enable the data to be published with an embargo timeline, e.g. once the research has been published and the accolades been awarded the data can then better support the research by being opened up…

…the way we enable this data to be shared is for the ‘software shims’ to use a lightweight data format like RDFaLite or one of the other easy ways to make sure data is self-describing…

…Key groups that need to be involved in helping manage this data must be the library (data archivists) and developer communities who can write these ‘software shims’ and then provided a trusted service that won’t release the data until the researcher is ready to do so…

…the library (as part of the University and as part of the wider global scholarly community, e.g. Arxiv for Physics) can make the data available on the Web…”

To state it lightly, TBL dropped a ‘knowledge bomb’ on the audience, giving a level of detail that demonstrated how deeply he has thought about this exact question.

For those researcher not versed in the politics of open or the technology of linked data, I’d like to quickly break down the above sentiments that TBL expressed in this Q&A session by highlighting how we are starting to do exactly what Sir Tim is suggesting here in Australia:

How is Australia making TBL’s vision for Research Data a reality?

1. The National Research Cloud as provided by the NeCTAR Digital Infrastructure project (as lead by the first node at the University of Melbourne) provides the first real world opportunity to build ‘software shims’ over the most common software that researchers use, e.g. there is a host of tools that researchers are utilising on the nine beam-lines at the Australian Syncrotron, the ‘software shim’ built atop these beam-lines is a tool called MyTardis which does exactly what Sir Tim describes above.  Also, worth mentioning is a tool called R which is becoming increasingly used in everything from mathematics & statistics and is seeing more use in economics (QuantMod), Social Sciences and other qualitative & quantitative data collection fields.  Because this tool can now be used in the Cloud (as opposed to being downloaded onto a local laptop) it is easy for us to build a ‘software shim’ over any and all research groups utilising R. 
2. In addition, are projects like AARNET which is starting to experiment with tools like OwnCloud which provide DropBox like functionality to researchers so that it is easy to dump their Excel files up into folder for sharing and long term archiving.  Again, the shared Cloud functionality will enable ‘software shims’ to be added atop the file folders so that these data files can be saved in the long term.
3. Finally, are infrastructure projects like ANDS which are engaging at the political and institutional levels to assure that librarians, developers, senior research scientists and other influential budget holders are recognising the need for long term funding to assure that whenever a ‘software shim’ (aka data capture tool) is built there will be an inherent trust associated with the tool.  Again, it is essential that the researcher trust that the data will not be released before the researcher is ready to have her data as part of the scholarly record.

In short, for me The Inventor of the Web has validated the work we are striving to do as we continue to establish the digital infrastructure necessary to make TBL’s advice come true for all Australian researchers.  We just need to roll these infrastructure tools out to more developers working with researchers!  More anon, as always…