Open Science Finland Group kikcstarted in Tuusula Feb 2012.

Open Science Finland working group was kickstarted at the OKF Finland Convention in Tuusula 8-9.2.2013. The intense Round Table session attracted 15 open science enthusiasts despite being the last session of the evening and competing against the parallel sauna session! The working group was subsequently officially established under Open Knowledge Finland association (ry.).

Finland has already seen activity in promoting open access. The Finnish open access group FinnOA, for instance, promotes openess across the whole spectrum of scientific knowledge production. Publicly funded “Tutkimuksen tietoaineistot” (Research Data Resources) project supports more open science policy and building of the necessary open research data infrastructure.

A wider cultural change in the academic community is needed, however, to establish open practices as part of standard research practices. While many researchers favour open practices in science, truly coordinated efforts are still lacking at the national level. We believe that the strengthening the social networks through the open science network will facilitate the movement. Therefore, instead of focusing our limited resources to direct lobbying, we focus on community-driven activities and community building: we have established a (rather vibrant!) Facebook group for discussions and Kippt -linklist for sharing Open Science related links, and the group has rapidly grown to connect nearly 100 people.

Some of our current key activities include preparation of Finnish teaching material on open research, research-oriented software libraries, and mapping of the scattered national activities around the topic. If you’re involved in research, working in Finland and/or just interested in the topic, don’t hesitate to join us!

List of government related apps contests

By now we’ve seen many apps contests, in many forms, all around world. In a way, this continuous sprawl is a success in itself. On the other hand, critique related to the lack of sustainability of the apps contests is growing. There is a demand and a need to learn from each other and design better and more sustainable models for boosting the innovation around open data.

If you are interested in making better apps contests or have other new ideas on how to boost the innovation around open data – feel free to join the discussion at the appsforx -email list. The list was established after a international Apps Contest Organizers meetup which was organized during the Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in Helsinki (see also the meeting memo).

Right now I am compiling a topic report with working title: “Innovation Contests for Open Data Re-use”. I would appreciate all in populating the listing of Apps contests, you can add missing details and contests or share the link to people who might know about other apps contests http://bit.ly/apps_contests_list.

List of Apps Contest

If you notice missing detail, please add those directly to the Google spreadsheet of Government-related Apps Contests, or comment on this blog post. Further questions to Antti Poikola antti.poikola [a] gmail.com / Twitter @apoikola

Apps Contests Survey

If you have been involved in organizing one or many of the Open Government Data Apps Contests, please fill-in the survey ( http://bit.ly/apps_contest_survey ) . We (me and Frank Kresin from the Waag Society) will go trough the survey answers on November 15th 2012, so please answer before that.

Christer Bengs / Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu -lehden uusin numero 2012:2

Kuva: Mike Fleming (Flickr)

Tämä näkökulma tuntuu kovin usein unohtuvan tyystin, kun päivitellään asuntojen kalleutta kaupunkikeskustoissa. Rakennuttajat toki muistuttavat siitä, kuinka kallista on rakennusoikeus ja ikäviä ja kalliita velvoitteita ja säädöksiä rakentajille langetetaan muun muassa esteettömyyden suhteen. Kuitenkin, vaikka maa lahjoitettaisiin ilmaiseksi grynderille, eikä mitään säädöksiä olisi, niin tuskin hän myisi rakentamiaan asuntoja juurikaan halvemmalla, kuin mikä on alueen käypä hintataso.

Tuore yhdyskuntasuunnittelun seuran lehti käsittelee kokonaisuudessaan rakentamisen monopoleja, asuntojen hintoja, kuntien maan hankintaa ja muuta mielenkiintoista. Suosittelen lämpimästi, että käytte vaikkapa kirjastossa lukemassa lehden.

Suomen asuntotuotanto on OECD-maihin verrattuna erittäin keskittynyttä ja tämä suurien rakennusyhtiöiden oligopoli vaikuttaa jatkuvasti ja epäsuotuisasti myös yhdyskuntarakenteeseen.

Bengsin neuvo: “Jos itse saisin päättää, niin uuden yleiskaavan lähtökohdaksi otettaisiin perusteellinen analyysi rakennusalan markkinoiden kilpailurajoituksista ja vaihtoehtoisista rakennuttamismalleista”.

• Pienempiä tontinluovutuksia ei missään tapauksessa aluerakennussopimuksia
• Tontinluovutuksia heterogeenisemmalle toimijajoukolle mukaanlukien ryhmärakennuttajat

Jyväskylässä on meneillään yleiskaavan uudistaminen, työtä on tehty kolmisen vuotta ja valmista pitäisi olla ensivuoden puolella. Selvityksiä on lähes 50, itse en ole ehtinyt vielä perehtymään (katso aikaisempi pintaraapaisu blogipostaukseni yleiskaavasta), kuinka hyvin rakennusalan markkinoiden kilpailurajoituksia on Jyväskylän kaavoituksessa pohdittu vai onko.

Jos jaksoit tänne asti, niin sinua varmasti kiinnostaa taannoinen A-Studio, joka kertoi mukavan tiiviisti Turun toriparkin taustoista ja siitä, millaiset päätöksentekijöiden kytkökset saattoivat päätöksiin vaikuttaa. Oheisen linkin TV-ohjelmassa ensimmäiset 11 minuuttia. Näkyy vielä jonkin aikaa Areenassa. http://areena.yle.fi/tv/1662352

The Statistics Finland (national statistics authority) have started to share open source code in github! I met the developer Jussi Arpalahti who works for the statistics authority and he explained to me that the idea is to share code that facilitates the usage of already open statistical data. Statistics Finland is supporting this years Apps4Finland innovation contest. With published open source code examples and other tools they want to support the participants of the Apps4Finland as well as all other users of statistical data – says Arpalahti.

As far as I know this is the first time that some Finnish public sector body sets up a github repository and starts building a open source community. I would love to see more this kind of activity. It is not only about publishing open data, but also helping the people to put the data into action (see the theme of the OKfest – Open Knowledge in Action )

The first published python code anables easy access to the data resources that have been published and lisenced openly by Statistics Finland. At the moment those data sets are available only in PX -format, but soon there will be XDF (XML based standard for statistical information) and CSV -formats available. Available Data sets are also linked to the fi.datahub.org catalogue.

Futere plans are to enter more open code examples that use statistical data to the github repository. For example code that would do searches on the statistical data would certainly be useful. Arpalahti says: “I will provide some examples, but I would be happy to collaborate with others who are interested in using statistical data – the data is saved in multidimensional tables (multidimensional observation matrix) which are slightly more complex to handle”.

Links:

• Statistics Finland code repository in GitHub: https://github.com/statfi/opendata
• Statistics Finland Open Data resources: http://www.stat.fi/org/lainsaadanto/avoin_data_en.html
• Meta data at the fi.datahub -catalogue: http://fi.thedatahub.org/dataset/statfin-tilastotietokanta
• Material from the Stats4Finland workshop: http://apps4finland.fi/tapahtumat/stas4finland-tyopaja/