Tag Archives: reboot

Reboot 11: day 1 recap

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Solar bike panel folks Sebastian and Tomas showed a short “Rocket” wireless adapter, which I liked so much I had to do business with them and buy one.

2W of power consumption: best in the world. 2.5W under full load, streaming media through it.

Met Peter Ferne, of Bristol Wireless, a social enterprise to hand out wireless internet connections and really use the network. Those folks have built a hackerspace, and their meeting got so large every month that had to restructure it. “We spent so much time listening to project updates that people got fed up with it.” Now they have a more action-oriented format.

We got to talking about how presentations can aid the “consumer culture” of going to watch what the geeks built, instead of geeking out yourself.

Oh, and I have been telling people in the region, and visitors, about the 11 July event at Forskningsavdelningen, the Hack Night festival. It’ll be a blast. And quite, quite interesting.

Public[er] data! Amateur loves public data

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After typing this into a closed forum window in a section for Reboot visitors, I noted that “Many of my people’ll never read this. Better blog it.” So here I go!

After experiencing the near-mythical Pecha Kucha session (aka Guy’s 20×20 talks), I was stoked about almost every subject that had been touched.

Somehow they were all connected: the impact of the talks melded and made a lasting impression — we were just overwhelmed with ideas.

Peter Rukavina’s lightning drive through the landscape of the “data that we, the public, paid for” made me start thinking of Danish public data. I’m a Swedish person, living and working in Denmark. I began sniffing at public statistics.

[Dst.dk](http://www.dst.dk) is the Danish statistics bureau (freely translated). I noted that there was an RSS feed publishing the titles of statistics tables that had had a recent change. Like a post with a title of “Farms and area with selected crops by region (County), area with the crop and unit” with the body: “AFG2″. The title is linked to the table’s website at [Statbank.dk](http://www.statbank.dk/).

Pretty cool and abstract use of RSS – machine-friendly. “Releases” is the simple title: [http://rss.dst.dk/statbankupdates](http://rss.dst.dk/statbankupdates).

When you search the data table, you come to a result page, where you have **13 export formats to choose from**.

I’ll look into what kinds of use I can put this data to. Most of it seems to be mostly for journalists & social scientists, but there just has to be some use-value to the people in there. It’s raw numbers.

Anyway, how is the public data in your country? Any hurdles to using it? Is it hard to get to? What data would you like?

[tags]reboot, reboot8, pechakucha, publicdata, syndication[/tags]