Indeed it follows on in a way from what I organised with The Year Of Collaboration, which produced MCC Work For You and MP Tweets, during a regular Saturday spot.

Being a work day though, I think it’d be great to have some time allocated toward how to commercialise these projects. What is the commercial need from journalists? What would they pay either in terms of a subscription, or perhaps in terms of a one-off project fee. And how can developers then help journalists charge their end readers for the end information? Or maybe what is the commercial need from end-users directly?

I think there’s probably lots of obvious answers to these questions, but being from outside the journalism industry, I don’t know what the answers are.

Like I say this is a great event, and it will produce great results I’m sure, but if we can figure out how to make them commercially sustainable, then these type of projects could run and run, rather than be a short-term demo of what could be

If the project has commercial possibility, that’s great: we’d love to see some of the early-stage projects further developed once the day is over.

We’re hoping that by putting publishers & programmers in the room we might see some exciting new collaborations blossom.

Please visit the ScraperWiki blog (http://blog.scraperwiki.com) to see the kinds of projects that came out of the Liverpool and Birmingham events – and the data sets used.

any more questions please do get in touch
judith@scraperwiki.com

cheers

I suspect the answer to your last question depends also! There is no budget for the day itself – we are relying entirely on our sponsors to cover the costs. This is how we are able to offer the workshop at no fee to participants. We hope that for the developers, what they will get out of it is increased understanding of journalists’ needs when working on a story which in turn should feed back into how developers approach working with data in the future. The idea is for both groups to learn from each other. If developers see opportunities after that for commercial use, so be it…

A lot of effort was put into getting the Council to open up a bit, via Open Data Manchester, and I’m sure they will in time given the resources.

What data do you intend to use for these projects? Any ideas?

Will any of them be commercially orientated to help pay for the developers time?

Whingeing to me about blocking you on Twitter (which I did because you spammed me and others on there with links to your site and I have low tolerance of being spammed) neither endears you to me nor helps your cause.

As you can see, I don’t censor comments on here. If you’d exercised patience when commenting, you’d have noticed I have active moderation in place, which means nothing gets posted until I’ve checked it. And unlike the BBC, I have a staff of 1 (me) and don’t work 24/7 so comments don’t always get published straight away.

Perhaps this corporate welfare, fat cat and nepotist infested cabal ought to have massive funding cuts? After all Mark Thompson doesn’t mind claiming thousands back in public-funds for his gallivanting through Africa – why on Earth should anybody fund his and other BBC personnel’s conceited extravagances and exorbitant salaries?

You may well emulate the BBC’s glorious tradition of censorship and decline to publish this comment Louise. If so you’ll be on the same plane as BBC Online’s Dave Lee; happy to support the BBC line but making pains to swerve criticism or dissent – nobly drawing paycheques but being aloof and unaccountable to those who finance the enterprise in the first place.

Reason I visited your website is because you’d blocked me on Twitter: We’ve never met or otherwise spoke and indeed I don’t think I ever tweeted at you? Your mentality saw it fit to block my account for no reason other than a personal view that happens to contrast broadly with your support of an organization. Bit immature wouldn’t you say?

Here’s the news: Many share my disgust of the BBC and we can’t be screened off forever. Start talking.

Pete, editor at dirtygarnet (dot) com

Turning off the low graphics version without offering an alternative at the time is bad enough but replacing it with a new site that should have been WCAG compliant from the start is nothing short of disgraceful.

I’m curious to know if it’s a problem for you, mrlerone.