The next Facebook Developer Garage is on Wednesday February 9th in Gateway House, Dublin from 5pm-7pm. If you are interested in speaking, please contact web2ireland.editor@gmail.com
Some of the hot topics which we can expect to hear about include:
Facebook Places
Facebook Credits
Gaming
fCommerce
If you have interest in any aspect of where Facebook is going, you should attend. It is free but you must register over on Eventbrite.
The Gateway House venue at 133 Capel Street (top of Mary Street and just left) is very interesting too. It is the former tram station:
The aim of Gateway House is to provide a dynamic environment for established companies in the area of online activities. We will build clusters of like-minded people and initiatives who will build synergies with Gateway Ireland. Together we aim to be part of a movement to innovate and reinvigorate Ireland. A number of relevant companies have already committed to joining us in Gateway House.
Hope to see you there. If there is anything specific you’d like to hear about on the day, leave a comment below.
We have moved this blog over to Digital Mines and it is now running beautifully (and quickly!) on an Irish AWS instance. Getting setup on Digital Mines was a doddle.
The process to get WordPress going was extremely straightforward and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for more welly than a shared host can provide.
Full deployment instructions over on my geek blog. When I get a chance I’ll do it as a script so it becomes a single-ish click install.
Le Web 2010 – what it meant for Ireland (part 7)
This is 7th in a series of audio interviews about Le Web 2010…
The aim is to examine the experience & value of Le Web 2010 from the point of view of those who went from Ireland.
Paul O’Mahony interviewed those who went to Le Web with Enterprise Ireland. The seventh person he interviewed was Ronan Skehill (who went with Ian Rice to Paris)
As anyone who has followed my writing over the years on various blogs knows, I have a particular bee in my bonnet about Government APIs and freeing all public sector data. Unless there is some absolute secrecy requirement on that data, it should be made available to the Irish people, to do with what they will.
But I have lost lots of hair and gained lots of pounds waiting for it to happen here. I watch in despair as the UK and US race ahead and we sit here without even a bloody working postcode system. Just look at data.gov.uk in the UK or CodeForAmerica in the US.
So do we just sit and wait or do private sector companies and tech communities take the lead and show the Public Sector how it’s done? Do we lead by example rather than just brow-beating?
We’ve already seen it happen, most notably with KildareStreet but also with Loc8 postcodes. People and businesses sick of waiting, solve the problems themselves by taking whatever poor public data there is already and doing something useful with it and on top of it.
There has also been a recent community initiative with opendata.ie to collect together available datasets but it doesn’t seem to have gained much momentum.
So where else can we leverage exisiting datasets and groupings to benefit the country and those elsewhere who care deeply about Ireland?
I think we should look again at the idea I mentioned way back around the diaspora and genealogy. At the moment we have:
Irish/UK/US historical census data
National Library records
Church records
Geni data
Ellis Island data
Mormon Data
Family Tree DNA Testing
Facebook
Twitter
The living Irish Diaspora and their knowledge of their families
Ordnance Survey Map data
OpenStreetMap Data
Phonebook data
Irish emigrant groups around the world
Irish-Americans working in thousands of tech companies
Would it be possible to build an API around this data, starting simply and iterating out? Enabling people to search and mashup by names, dates, locations and Y chromosome? Think of the platforms that such a thing would enable? Now wire that into the social graph!
If there was one co-ordinating organisation concerned with building the relationships needed to get this data and providing the APIs but letting people build any app they want, wouldn’t that be incredibly powerful?
Such an org could co-ordinate with churches to have parishioners transcribe all of records that are still in paper form. They would have the clout to get access to currently-non-public government data. They could then help Government departments and state/semi-state bodies build good APIs on their data.
They could also co-ordinate with all the emigrant groupings in UK, USA and elsewhere to fill in missing holes in records. Colleges could get involved. What about all the Alumni data?
One or two simple but powerful example apps could be built to show what’s possible.
31st of January 2011 by Paul O'Mahony
& Daire Hickey 
25th of 
