opencontentlawyer.com

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking on open data, law, and licensing at State of the Map on 12-13 July in Limerick, Ireland. State of the Map is the annual conference for Open Street Map.

Registration is now open.

Open Access and Research Conference 2008

Stamford Plaza Hotel, Brisbane, Queensland 24-25 September 2008

Conference site: http://www.oar2008.qut.edu.au/

This conference will, among other things, cover open data, and looks really interesting. Please check it out…

The inaugural meeting of the London area Open Knowledge London meetup will be on Wednesday, 30 April from 19:00 to 21:00 at the London Knowledge Lab on 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. The event will be informal — just a way for interested people to meet and discuss open knowledge issues.

Full details at the Open Knowledge Foundation site - OK London local group.

Quick note that I will be posting more regularly now that I’m back in the UK and online. Thanks for everyone’s patience while I was away and while I get back up to speed.

The Society for Computers and the Law (SCL) is having a conference on 1 May on information governance:

Information Governance Conference 2008

Information governance has rapidly become an integral part of organisational strategy in both the public and private sector. Organisations of all types and size are generating ever greater volumes of sensitive data and that data must be handled lawfully to avoid damaged reputations and unnecessary costs. Breaches of the law can result in enforcement notices, fines and even criminal convictions for directors and managers.

The SCL Information Governance Conference tackles this fastmoving subject to provide authoritative, practical advice for advisers and their clients. The panel of expert speakers will give an insider’s view of the challenges facing organisations and distil that collective experience into practical know how on information governance.

Of particular interest to readers (and myself) is a session on Creative Commons concepts and personal data:

15:55 – 16:35
Application of DRM/Creative Commons Concepts to Confidential/Personal Information
Roger Bickerstaff, Bird & Bird

* The need for individual control over data usage
* How can DRM work for non-corporate information?
* Can the Creative Commons concept be applied to non-copyright information?
* Enforcement/jurisdiction/monitoring

Several people have either approached me directly or mentioned on various sites the application of the tools we are developing for open data at Open Data Commons to be applied in the personal data space. I think that there are some distinctly different issues involved as privacy issues have a different set of rules than straight IP issues, as well as of course a distinct set of different concerns (privacy). It will be great to get such a distinguished perspective on some of the issues. More of course, after the event.

I am back and plowing through email, and wanted to flag up some follow up OKCon details:

### Post-Event Information

We’re pleased to announce that audio, images and slides from OKCon 2008 are now available at the Post-Event Information page:

http://okfn.org/okcon/2008/after

If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll link to it. We are also able to host any further documentation in our repository.

### Open Knowledge Local Groups

We’ve now set up a wiki page for local Open Knowledge groups - to arrange meetups, forums and other activities:

http://okfn.org/wiki/LocalGroups/

In addition to the Cambridge group, which has been around for a few years, we are in the process of creating groups in London and Oxford. If you’d like to get involved in any of these, or you’d like to set up your own local group - don’t hesitate to get in touch!

And of course your participation is needed to make everything happen:

### Get Involved

If you’d like to get involved in any of the OKF’s projects or
activities, please see our participate page:

http://okfn.org/participate

Our projects rely on volunteers for their development - from CKAN and KForge to Open Shakespeare, Open Economics and Open Text Book. Whether you’re interested in research, communications or technical work, whether you have a few minutes or a few hours to spare, we’d love to hear from you!

While OKF projects may be available without financial cost to you, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any costs:

### Support the Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. All our services and software are provided openly and for free. Running and developing projects costs both time and money (for example, our hosting costs alone run to around a €1000 (£700/$1500) a year). Your support
helps the Foundation to continue and expand its work. For more information, please see:

http://okfn.org/support/

Just a quick note that the Copyright History conference and launch event of the new online resource will take place tomorrow at Stationers’ Hall. More events up on the site - copyrighthistory. I’ll be there tomorrow, but not Thursday — feel free to grab me for a chat if you are attending.

Just to highlight for opencontentlawyer.com readers, that we released the final version of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence over at Open Data Commons this past weekend. I will post more about the process and the final result when I return to full posting strength in April.

Quick note — the COMMUNIA project is having an academic conference on the public domain from 30 June to 1 July in Belgium. The call for papers is up and proposals are due on 30 March.

Conference homepage: COMMUNIA conference on Public Domain in the Digital Age.

Call for papers.

I’m a little late in posting this, but the Open Definition now has an advisory council, and at Rufus Pollock’s very kind suggestion, I’ve accepted the role of Chair of the Council.

The members are:

Paul Jacobson, iCommons
Paul Miller, Talis
Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
Rob Styles, Talis
Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
John Wilbanks, Science Commons

Peter Murray-Rust’s announcement | OKFN announcement