This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

UnFestival BEFORE THE FESTIVAL

## Facilitator Contact Details

...

## OKunFestival

http://sched.co/1pxgbmP

## Your session hashtag

@OKunFestival
#OKunFestival

## Participants: pre-event, to get in touch with each other (feel free to add your Twitter handle)


## Agenda + pre-festival materials, resources, instructions

This year’s OKFestival will play host to many new ideas, and this is one of them. We’ve created a space which allows “serendipity” to get to work, in contrast with the rest of the Festival; the largest, most complex and most meticulously organized event in the open knowledge community.
We’re talking about a track that we’ve named “unFestival” (as in ‘unconference’) and which will run on both the Wednesday and Thursday (July 16 & 17). Along with the OKFestival Team, we wanted to give all the fabulous ideas which couldn’t fit into the Festival’s very tight schedule a place to shine, and at the same time, create a feedback space where people could elaborate on ideas and inspiration they’d had in reaction to various OKFestival sessions. This year, the OKFestival vision is to translate “Open Minds to Open Action“ and we think that this space will help us make that transition by giving a platform to anyone with a great idea, and encouraging them to share it.

Things will run similarly to how they would at a BarCamp; attendees can propose sessions throughout the morning (both online and at dedicated places around the venue), curation will take place during lunch and sessions will run throughout the afternoon offering two parallel spaces with a capacity of around 100 people. Every session will be transcribed and shared on OKFestival’s website, and we welcome volunteers who want to help with either note taking and/or general facilitation – please let us know if you’re interested.

- See more at: http://blog.okfn.org/2014/06/05/lets-try-something-new-unfestival/


AT THE FESTIVAL
 
## Participants - name, contact (if you want to leave it), number of attendees

## Notes from the session

Poplus session at the OkFest UnFestival, 16.00 17 July 2014

Tom Steinberg from mySociety explained that Poplus is a new international network of developers and organisations that are trying to build technologies that can save us all time and money by re-using each other’s work. The resulting software are called Poplus Components. They are open source and are available for anyone to use for free. More info here: http://poplus.org/about/

One of session participants asked what the hosting options are when using Poplus components.

A couple of the Poplus members said that it depends on the component - they're required to be open source in order to be a Poplus component, so they can be hosted by anyone. 

However, with some components (e.g. PopIt and SayIt) mySociety offer hosted versions. To save setup time, it’s recommended to create a new PopIt or SayIt instance on the hosted service.

A participant asked about scaling of hosted components; Tom said that this hadn't been an issue so far, except with MapIt where we added an extra server and load-balance between the two. It's early days for many of the other components and that would be the good kind of problem to have. 

Another participant asked about integration between components and synchronicity of data from one component to another. This is possible, but it’s necessary to decide the authoritative source of data.

Poplus is in the very early stages, so it’s still unclear if components will end up saving developers and organisations time and money; but this is the end goal. 

At the moment, it’s great having developers from all over the world work together to solve issues and share their experiences. 

There are more questions than answers about Poplus at the moment as project is still in its infancy – that’s why we should work together to help solve questions.

Another participant asked what makes a Poplus component a Poplus component. James explained that at the Poplus conference in April 2014, the 7 criteria of a Poplus component were decided, these are:-

1.       Code helps Civic/Democratic websites
2.       It solves a Single Problem
3.       It is Composable with other Poplus Components
4.       It's Platform Agnostic
5.       It's Country Agnostic
6.       It's Free/Open Source software
7.       It has a stable, documented API

The Popolo standard is used by many Poplus components so that they are able to speak to each other.

The V-Card standard didn’t solve all problems, so it was combined into the Popolo common standard.

Deciding what standard to use is a common problem for civic hackers, who are trying to solve it separately around the world – this is why we should work together collectively to save time and draw on each other’s’ experiences.

Question from participant: How stable is PopIt? Tom said it’s still in alpha, but should be out of beta by end of this year. 

Developers don’t want to waste time unravelling someone else’s code that doesn’t work well immediately – that’s why Poplus components should have stable APIs.

No breaking changes will be introduced to the API without changing the API version number; people may add to the API without changing the version number, however.

Someone asked what the current Poplus components are, they are:

-          PopIt = A tool to make it easy to make and maintain lists of politicians and their basic biographical information as structured data, without requiring technical skills.
 
-          WriteIt = A tool to write and send messages to public figures
 
-          BillIt = Document storage tool currently used in Argentina
 
-          Represent = Matches a supporter's postal code or geocoded address to the correct elected officials and returns administrative boundaries. 
 
-          VoteIt = A store for parliamentary votes / divisions
 
-          MapIt = Given a postcode or coordinate, it returns all administrative boundaries and areas around that point
 
-          SayIt = tool for making transcripts really easy to store, read, search, share and link to.
 
One of the participants, who works for Oxfam, asked how Poplus and civil society organisations could work together. The global community has specific needs, which would be good to share with Poplus developers so components could be developed to solve these.

It was suggested that she joins the Poplus Google group and writes a post about what needs the communities she works with have – to see if any components could help. The idea of setting up a catalogue of software components was also suggested.

Question from participant: Is the data being used by components being collected collectively? By Poplus?

Response: No. Components are not supposed to be like Wikipedia – more like a Tumblr or Twitter.

PopIt has lots of instances from countries who have verified databases of politicians, but it should be much easier to contact the people who put up these good data sets, in order to get in touch with them.

Tom asked the group if they had any ideas of what other components would be good to develop.

Ideas for new components:-

-          A component that sends emails to users when their topic of interest is mentioned in parliament/congress etc. Mark and Evan have discussed working on this recently.
 
-          A component that allows users to find out who their representative is by inputting geographical location. (There are plans to add pluggable geocoding and area lookup to PopIt - also Represent already does this).
 
-          A component that follows where government/corporations’ money goes to. OKF have been working on international standards for this under the AIT initiative (?), so no standard debate would need to happen amongst Poplus, as it has already been done.
 
-          A component that allows users to see which politicians have made which decisions (e.g. why they stop benefits, why they decide to go to war, etc). A session about Decisions APIs took place on Day 1 of OkFest 2014 so it would be good to connect with the leaders of this session.

Tom remarked how useful it is to get together in person like this session, to discuss ideas and share experiences. What upcoming events are taking place where further Poplus sessions like this could take place?


Fabrizio from DATA Uruguay suggested that a way to create value is needed – and suggested small experiments are run to test components. 

There is no point creating components if the rest of the world doesn’t benefit. When are Poplus models actually making a difference?

Tom confirmed that over the coming months, mySociety and Ciudadano Inteligente will be looking for groups who want to launch projects who could use Poplus components, as a way of testing components. There are also already existing models of how Poplus components are being used, e.g. the People's Assembly in South Africa use SayIt to publish the South African parliament's written record, and the Malaysian reporting website Aduanku uses MapIt. See more examples here: https://docs.google.com/a/mysociety.org/spreadsheets/d/1O8-2uwUufcigjwxymcDaSJ25GpXfh1is63PUnhFgmhw/edit#gid=0 

The participant from Codeando Mexico said that it would be good to increase the documentation of components, to increase usage by coders. Could take power from CKAN API. He suggested that every component has a library in each coding language and he is happy to help with this.

There was also another suggestion that the front page of each component's documentation should clearly list the language bindings.



AFTER THE FESTIVAL

## What did you learn and/or make?

## How/what could you teach others?