"Friday lunchtime lectures", open lectures on data

Every Friday the Open Data Institute, ODI, provides tea, coffee and an interesting talk. Every Friday, at 1 p.m., there is a date with data. A date with #ODIFridays, a model of open free lectures every Friday at lunchtime that the famous ODI provides at its headquarters in London with experts in the field.

Open data in a "post-truth" world. What is the future of open culture? Could open data transform our galleries, libraries, archives and museums? The transformation of donations to charity with open data. Can technology help us control our personal data? ... The talks are varied and address various issues against the background of open data, technology and society.

The "Friday lunchtime lectures" are broadcast online, and are publicized on the social network Twitter to encourage participation half an hour before they start: "Do you have a question for Tim Mohun of the Francis Crick Institute?". This is a medical research centre that recently led one of these talks: how open data can help us understand the causes of birth defects.

Two weeks ago, on Friday, May 5, in his talk "Mapping the open source landscape", software developer Ben Nickolls highlighted some of the problems related to software development, distribution and packaging and explained that libraries.io is a free utility that helps developers and maintainers to make more informed decisions about the software they use. This is but one example of many.

In his case, Tom Orrell, an expert on public data and experience as a consultant for UNICEF, presented the project "Joined-Up Data Standards" which is researching linked or joined-up data and semantic confusion. In this lecture, Orrell explained how to outline policy solutions at the international level as a result of data interoperability in order to improve decision-making and accountability.

Tomorrow Friday May 19, the #ODIFridays talk will address offensive language and curse words. "What makes words rude?"  will be given by Peter Wells, head of ODI policy. 

Some of the talks on the following Fridays in May will be about how joined-up data can be used in decision-making, how to verify data sources and explore related datasets, as well as a London Tech Week special on Open Data and the White House,

The talks are also available on the Youtube channel of the Open Data Institute .

All set for #odifridays.