Lyon 2019 on Paul Walk's Website

Cognitive Sovereignty

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By the third stage, the syndrome is fully manifested. The person has abandoned their own cognitive sovereignty: the capacity for independent judgment and the ability to develop and defend ideas without outsourcing core thinking. They can no longer distinguish between what they think and what the machine has generated for them.[...]They have reorganized their mental life around the capabilities of the machine.

Marvin Starominski-Uehara: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2026/3/genai-and-creeping-cognitive-displacement-syndrome

This is the first time I have come across the phrase "cognitive sovereignty". The idea that people may be suffering from a self-inflicted Creeping Cognitive Displacement Syndrome is a worrying one. The evidence provided here is anecdotal - but it is offered by a practicing teacher who describes what he has observed in students:

The most disturbing cases of this cognitive hollowing that I have encountered involve students who are aware of their dependence on AI tools yet feel unable to stop relying on them. They describe the experience of trying to write without AI assistance as physically uncomfortable, cognitively exhausting, and emotionally intolerable. One student shared that they feel "stupid" when they try to draft text themselves, as though their own thinking is inadequate compared to the fluency of the machine.

In my own working life, I have several times heard professional acquaintances say something like "I only use AI to create a quick draft, so I don't have to start from scratch. Then I take it from there, rewriting and editing. It's my own work.". When I hear this, it sounds a little self-delusional to me. It's a pretence that the process of editing is where the real "value" is added. Editing is important - sure - but if it were primary, then we would recognise and celebrate editors more than authors.

For what it's worth, I'm actively trying to protect my cognitive sovereignty, by practicing Generative AI Vegetarianism.

Opening Up the Land Registry

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, in their ambitious new Land Use Framework for England, the Government announced that they would be opening up the Land Registry.

Guy Shrubsole: Revealing Who Owns England Just Became Government Policy

Guy Shrubsole has campaigned for this for years - he deserves recognition for his efforts to reclaim access to land in England.

This is a big deal I think. The current UK (Labour) government is quietly doing some big and potentially consequential reforms like this. UK mainstream media fails to report on this, except when it attacks it. There is also the recently opened England Coast Path, a project which was begun by the previous Labour government. This was only made possible by the the The Marine and Coastal Access Bill, also passed by that government in 2009, which among other things improved "rights of access to land near the English coast".

There is (slow) progress being made on reclaiming the original “commons” - the land beneath us - and establishing our shared "right to roam".

I’m feeling encouraged by something the government is doing for once! :-)

Experimenting with `human.json`

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Alan Levine (AKA Cogdog) I added a human.json to this website:

{  
  "version": "0.1.1",  
  "url": "https://www.paulwalk.net",  
  "vouches": [  
    {  
      "url": "https://cogdogblog.com/",  
      "vouched-at": "2026-03-23"  
    }  
  ]  
}

This is a machine-readable file designed to indicate to the world that the content here (all of it!) is written by a human - me - and not generated by a so-called "AI" system.

Beto Dealmeida, the creator of this new protocol, says:

One of the problems with the internet today is that a lot of the content is AI generated. There's no way to know for sure if a site is maintained by a real human or if it's just slop. The only way to know for sure is by getting to know the authors, which usually takes time and requires developing a relationship with them through other channels, like email or social media. But what if we could expand that trust by building a web of vouches between sites?

Beto Dealmeida: The human.json Protocol

This idea feels very "web-like" to me - in the sense that it works as the web was designed to work in the beginning. Indeed, it has something in common with older initiatives such as as blog-rolls and web-rings.

Since I learned about this via Alan's blog, it seemed only polite to make his blog the first that I "vouch" for in my human.json file.

This protocol is very new, and the author is inviting feedback. In fact, I already found a small issue with the protocol: it requires me to assert the canonical identifier (URL) for my website in the form of a prefix - allowing anything with that prefix to be covered by this assertion. So, the prefix I would like to use for this site is https://paulwalk.net, which is what I would consider to be the canonical URL for this website. However, the URL https://www.paulwalk.net is the one most likely to be used by others, and my website generator software (Hugo) is configured to use this - so this is the one I have used in my human.json file.

I notes that someone else had raised this issue, and that the next version of the protocol will support adding multiple canonical URLs to solve this problem.

A Library is a Civic Statement

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A library is a civic statement: that knowledge is a commons, that stewardship matters, that quiet matters, that you can wander without being sold to. In an age of synthetic text, it may become even more important as a site of provenance – of “where did this come from?” – and of human guidance that is not optimised for engagement.

Shaun Bell: Making breakfast on a burning planet: a parent’s perspective on a GenAI future – Education Express

This idea that a library is a civic statement really resonates with me. I began my working life in a public library many years ago and I have never shaken the feeling that the public library is a hallmark of the kind of society I want for the world. In a world where our information is increasingly polluted with misinformation, disinformation and AI "slop", libraries might yet be seen for the treasures of civilisation that they are.

Dropbox Ignore Rules - At last!

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Update: This no longer seems to work. Although I enjoyed a few days of Rust compilation artefacts under */target/debug/ not being synchronised, I am now seeing these files synchronising as before :-(

Update2: This started working again. I guess it's just buggy :-(

Dropbox has finally introduced the equivalent of .gitignore . Go to your Dropbox Preferences settings and find the "Sync" section: in here you may (depending on your version of Dropbox) find a "Set ignore rules" command.
This command will create a file called rules.dropboxignore in your root Dropbox folder (unlike .gitignore, this file only works at the root of your Dropbox folders).
The syntax for rules in this file is explained in comments in the file itself - although I have found that it is possible to use wild cards in slightly more sophisticated ways than are explained in the file.
One problem this solves for me with Dropbox is that it was difficult to prevent Dropbox from synchronising incidental files generated by software compilation processes, such as the files under tmp/cache/* in a Rails project, or those under target/* in a Rust project. The following snippet successfully prevents these from being needlessly shared with Dropbox, at any level of your file-system:

**/target/debug/
**/target/release/
**/target/bench/
**/tmp/cache/

Figshare's OAI-PMH Interface is Broken

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:08:16 +0000

Figshare, a repository hosting service, implements OAI-PMH... kinda.

Repositories hosted on Figshare are forced to use the same OAI-PMH Base URL. As far as I can tell, Figshare uses OAI-PMH sets to differentiate between metadata records belonging to particular repositories. So, to use an example documented on the Figshare site, this is how you might harvest some OAI_DC formatted records from a particular repository:

https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=portal_63

It seems logical to guess that "portal_63" represents a repository hosted on Figshare. However, I have no idea how you would determine the correct set to use for a given repository, or vice versa, how you would determine the repository for a given set. I could find nothing in the documentation about this.

This means that OAI-PMH's Identify verb is now useless in terms of being able to convey any information about a particular repository hosted on Figshare. Identify on the Figshare BaseURL does work properly:

https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=Identify

However, passing a set parameter is illegal in the OAI-PMH specification when combined with the Identify verb:

https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=Identify&set=portal_63

And, indeed, this gives an error on Figshare.

The Identify verb is an important part of the specification. It is commonly used not only to gather some basic information about a repository - such as its name & contact details, but also simply to check that the repository's OAI-PMH interface is functioning. For example, the International Repositories Directory (IRD) automatically checks that repositories have a working OAI-PMH interface by sending a verb=Identify request. This will currently fail for all Figshare hosted repositories.

This could have been avoided by making the "portal_63" component part of the OAI-PMH Base URL path for each repository, instead of over-loading the OAI-PMH sets feature, something like:

https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai/portal_63?verb=Identify

Generation Augmented Retrieval

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:18:56 +0000

It just occurred to me how even the term "RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)" is a product of the AI-bullshit-marketing hype machine.

It ought to be "GAR (Generation Augmented Retrieval) since the indispensable part of the operation is the "retrieval", not the "generation"....

But no - accurate search which works properly is somehow "augmenting" the natural language processor part...

Throwing Muses, Electric Ballroom, Camden

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Wed, 28 May 2025 09:36:22 +0000

I went to see Throwing Muses play the Electric Ballroom in Camden last night.

This is the third time I have seen them play (I have also seen Kristin Hersh play solo gigs a couple of times). So I guess you could say I'm a fan.

I first saw Throwing Muses at the Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1989. I'm startled to realise this is thirty six years ago. Fast forward to last night, I assumed the crowd would be ageing indie-kids of my generation, and I was mostly right. But standing next to me, as we waited for the band to come on, were a couple of much younger lads. I told them I had been roughly their age when I first saw the band. It turned out 1989 was a dozen years before they were even born! They had been introduced to Throwing Muses by an uncle, so I guess the band is still finding new audiences after all this time.

It was great to see the band again, even if three-quarters of its members have changed (the lineup has always been quite fluid). The heart of Throwing Muses is, and has always been, Kristin Hersh. She is a mesmerising performer - perhaps because she doesn't overtly perform so much as just share her weird, intricate, fascinating songs with us. She is also a great and original guitarist. Her son, Dylan, played bass (he's really good!) and I guess he too wasn't even born in 1989....

I didn't plan to go into this gig thinking about the passing of time, but those were the thoughts that somehow crept up on me. The songs of Throwing Muses and Kristin Hersh have been a constant for me since my mid-teens. It was weird to hear Soap and Water - introduced by Kristin last night as "an old song, and kind of a stupid one!". I can vividly remember hearing that for the first time, in the bedroom of a friend, who had just bought an early EP called The Fat Skier. That EP grabbed my attention like few records have ever done - I think I knew straightaway that I had discovered something special.

Anyway - a great gig, covering decades of songs from a prolific songwriter. Many just sounded great on the night, especially the higher energy songs - Sunray Venus near the start, Slippershell, and Bright Yellow Gun as the perfect final encore. Other songs had a more personal impact - I actually had a little shiver when I recognised the opening of Colder, a song I used to play over and over the summer I bought the vinyl of House Tornado. And similarly - hearing Bea played live and remembering that one from the 1989 gig.

It makes me happy to realise that there are some young folk discovering this music for the first time and, like me nearly forty years ago, realising that its something special.

Here's the crowd-sourced set-list in case you're interested.

Supreme Court backs wild camping on Dartmoor

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Wed, 21 May 2025 12:16:59 +0000

The legal right to wild camp on Dartmoor has been upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision that is likely to reignite the debate over public access to land in England.

Judges unanimously rejected an appeal by landowners Alexander and Diana Darwall who said people should not be able to camp without permission from landowners.

Miles Davis & Jonathan Morris: Supreme Court backs wild camping on Dartmoor

Some good news for a change - we have been waiting for this decision for months. For once, the decision went in favour of the common people, and against the acquisitive billionaires.

(I was always going to continue wild camping on Dartmoor anyway 😊)

This is a good result for England!

Using CloudFlare Turnstile to protect certain pages on a Rails app

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

https://bibwild.wordpress.com/2025/01/16/using-cloudflare-turnstile-to-protect-certain-pages-on-a-rails-app/

There is a growing problem of so-called "bots" harvesting content from repositories in an aggressive manner. They are often poorly designed and have no care for the bandwidth or processing capacity they demand from the repository as they attempt to "hoover" up all available content (increasingly to use for AI training purposes). The result of this is to impact - sometimes severely - on the performance of the repository.

This piece by Jonathan Rochkind describes approaches to mitigating this problem. In particular, it describes an interesting approach to blocking only certain resources - e.g the search function - from machine processes, while leaving content resources freely available for machine processes to access.

Cool URIs for FAIR Knowledge Graphs

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This guide is for everyone who seeks advice for creating stable, secure, and persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in order to publish their data in accordance to the FAIR principles. The use case does not matter. It could range from publishing the results of a small research project to a large knowledge graph at a big corporation. The FAIR principles apply equally and this is why it is important to put extra thought into the URI selection process. The title aims to extend the tradition of "Cool URIs don't change" and "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web". Much has changed since the publication of these works and we would like to revisit some of the principles. Many still hold today, some had to be reworked, and we could also identify new ones

Andreas Thalhammer: Cool URIs for FAIR Knowledge Graphs

Refreshing my knowledge/memory of some of these (sometimes contested) issues with URL management. I’m still more sceptical than the author about how well Content Negotiation works in practice, but this is useful nonetheless

Should repositories participate in the Fediverse?

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I only just got back from the excellent Open Repositories 2024 conference in Gothenburg. Lots of interesting work being described and met some great new people. I was involved in several sessions there. One talk I gave was a rapid "lightning" talk (max 7 minutes, max 24 slides) called Should repositories participate in the Fediverse?.

It seems to me that there are some parallels between the distributed nature of our open-access repositories and the distributed-by-design paradigm of the "fediverse". In referencing a blog-post by Björn Brembs, The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore, I discovered a related paper by Brembs and others, Mastodon over Mammon: towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge, which proposes a model for federated scholarly infrastructure, incorporating repositories.

I'm not yet entirely convinced that repositories have a role to play in the fediverse, but I think it's worth exploring. Earlier attempts to connect repositories with the previous generation of social media networks have not really taken off. However, the times they are a changin' and we are starting to see adoption of the COAR Notify protocol in connecting repositories with services using the same base standards as the fediverse.

Some people have asked me to post my slides, so here they are.

Adding Icons To Obsidian's File Explorer

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There are plugins available for adding icons to the Obsidian file-explorer, but I decided not to use them for two reasons:

I'm trying to maintain a "plugin diet", on the grounds that the more plugins I add to Obsidian, the more likely I will hit problems related to incompatibility and performance
The plugins I tried, although mostly functional, were nonetheless buggy.

Instead, it is possible to decorate the file-explorer with plugins using nothing other than CSS, via the Obsidian CSS "snippets" feature, and the standard set of Unicode emoji characters. This appeals to me because it avoids the need for a plugin just for what is largely a cosmetic concern.

There are two ways to add emoji to files:

Adding icons to explicitly named files/folders

The image shows files and folders in the root of my Obsidian vault, followed by the CSS needed to decorate them with emoji.

/*ALL FILES AND FOLDERS*/  
.nav-folder-title-content::before, .nav-file-title-content::before {margin-right: 3px;}

/*SPECIFIC FILES AND FOLDERS*/  
.nav-file-title[data-path = "Dashboard.md"] .nav-file-title-content::before {content: '📋';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Inbox"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '⬇️';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Clippings"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '📰';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Diary"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '📆';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Work"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '👨🏼‍💻';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Home"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '🏠️';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Personal"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '👤';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path $= "Reference"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '🗄️';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Zettelkasten"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '🧠';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Blog"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '🌍';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "Indexes"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '📜️';}  
.nav-folder-title[data-path = "config"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '⚙️';}

Adding icons to files/folders by pattern

It is also possible to decorate file/folder names in the Obsidian file-explorer using CSS selectors, like this:

/* FILES AND FOLDER PATTERNS*/  
.nav-folder-title[data-path $= "archive"] .nav-folder-title-content::before {content: '️🏛️';}
.nav-file-title[data-path $= "Tasks.md"] .nav-file-title-content::before {content: '️☑️';}

The first CSS rule decorates any folder path that ends with ('$=') the word "archive", while the second decorates any file which ends with "Tasks.md". These rules apply to any matching folder/file, at any level in the vault.

This is actually quite useful - I generally add a note to my project folders called "Tasks" - and having an icon automatically added to the filename makes it easier to immediately locate in a potentially long list of files.

Rendering Images with Hugo

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This website is served as static HTML, compiled with a really capable "static-site-generator" called Hugo. I had a problem to solve with rendering images here: sometimes I wanted an image which is local to a particular blog post to also show up in the homepage, which serves the most recent posts. The problem is that the relative URL for the image is different when that content is served on the homepage. I don't want to hard-code absolute URLs, but I do want to use the sources of the webpage in different parts of the website. Therefore, I needed Hugo to somehow intelligently re-write those URLs when compiling the website.

This is where Hugo's relatively new Markdown render hooks come in. I've added the following code to a partial under layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html

{{ $url := urls.Parse .Destination }}
{{ if or (eq $url.IsAbs true) (hasPrefix .Destination "/") }}
    <img src="{{ .Destination }}" title="{{ .Title }}" alt="{{ .Title }}"/>
{{ else }}
    <img src="{{ .Page.Permalink }}/{{ .Destination }}" title="{{ .Title }}" alt="{{ .Title }}"/>
{{ end }}

This has the effect of prepending the page's absolute URL to the image path at compile time. It is invoked every time a Markdown image element is encountered in the sources. If the image is not local to the page, then the image HTML tag is rendered with the URL unchanged (e.g for external images, or for images served from a folder relative to the webroot, rather than the current page's folder.)

Hugo's render hooks are an interesting and useful addition. As well as images, you can specify render hooks for:

image
link
heading
codeblock

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect was coined by the late Michael Crichton in a talk entitled Why Speculate, given to the International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, in 2002. Below is an excerpt from that talk:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

I think this has become worse in recent years. Much of the mainstream press and TV news seems to dwell in the realm of speculation, more than dry, objective reportage. The important lesson is, frankly, to doubt everything you read in the news unless you have reason to trust the source. This is exhausting, and makes the whole business of actually reading "speculative" news reporting somewhat pointless.

As Crichton said, introducing the transcript of the talk on his website:

In recent years, media has increasingly turned away from reporting what has happened to focus on speculation about what may happen in the future. Paying attention to modern media is thus a waste of time.

In recent months I have successfully weaned myself off daily news consumption. I pick up bits and pieces, here and there, but I no longer intentionally go to news sources. At the weekend, I catch up with digests from a few, trusted sources. I do not think this has significantly impaired my awareness of current affairs, while it has certainly saved me from wasting a lot of time!

Folder Indexes With Obsidian and Dataview

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Using the excellent Dataview Obsidian plugin, inserting this snippet (below) into the note will create a table listing:

all notes in the same folder as the note, and in all sub-folders, recursively
all notes which link to the note
all notes linked to by the note

Particularly when used in a "folder note" (a note which serves as the key note in any given folder), this is a simple way to create a kind of "section index" for that part of the folder hierarchy.

```dataview
TABLE rows.file.link AS Pages
WHERE
	contains(file.folder, this.file.folder)
	OR contains(file.inlinks, this.file.link)
	OR contains(file.outlinks, this.file.link)
	AND file != this.file
GROUP BY file.folder AS Folder
```

Open and Engaged Conference 2023

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I attended the British Library's annual Open and Engaged conference on 2023-10-30, held in their conference centre in St Pancras, London. At the time, the British Library had just discovered that they had been subjected to a cyber attack (this is ongoing at the time of writing). Despite the ensuing disruption, with BL staff being unable to access their email or documents, and with the BL's internet access being offline, the staff there managed the remarkable feat of hosting the event with little evidence of the chaos in the background. I found the day interesting, and made the following notes from the various speakers' presentations.

Keynote from Monica Westin

Monica (Internet Archive) gave an entertaining talk on new ownership models for cultural heritage institutions. From this I learned about two interesting initiatives:

Internet Archive Scholar

This was conceived as an archiving solution, but then evolved to become a search service.

This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
https://scholar.archive.org

OJS - Beacon

This is a function in the open-source OJS platform to report usage statistics back to a central collection, to aid in ongoing product design and marketing.

GLOBAL USAGE OF OJS
More than 8 million items have been published with Open Journal Systems, our open-source publishing software trusted by more than a million scholars in almost every country on the planet.
Global Usage of OJS - Public Knowledge Project

Mia Ridge, Living with Machines

Mia (British Library) described the Living with Machines project.

Living with Machines is both a research project, and a bold proposal for a new research paradigm. In this ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL, King’s College), historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, and curators have been brought together to examine the human impact of industrial revolution.
https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/about/

Douglas McCarthy, This is not IP I'm familiar with

Douglas (Delft University of Technology) talked about "the strange afterlife and untapped potential of public domain content in GLAM institutions". This was an excellent talk on different perceptions of copyright in the GLAM sector. There was a startling contrast between UK and non-UK institutions in their respective treatment of Digital surrogates of The Rake’s Progress, with UK institutions largely avoiding using public Domain licensing and claiming copyright instead. True to his topic, Douglas has made his slides available here and they are well worth viewing. I particularly liked his use of the "Drake meme" and have been using this in my own work - mostly recently presenting to a workshop in Nigeria.

Emma Karoune, The Turing Way

Emma (The Alan Turing Institute) spoke about Community-led Resources for Open Research and Data Science. Her team has assembled a rich set of resources to support data-science communities.

The Turing Way project is open source, open collaboration, and community-driven. We involve and support a diverse community of contributors to make data science accessible, comprehensible and effective for everyone. Our goal is to provide all the information that researchers and data scientists in academia, industry and the public sector need to ensure that the projects they work on are easy to reproduce and reuse.
Welcome — The Turing Way

I have made a note to examine more closely the Community Handbook they have produced - not only for its content, but also for the way in which they have produced it.

Iryna Kuchma, Collective action for driving open science agenda in Africa and Europe

Iryna (EIFL) spoke remotely on this LIBSENSE initiative.

EIFL, WACREN and AJOL will collaborate on a new three-year project to support no-fee open access (OA) publishing in Africa (diamond OA) that launches in November 2023 to empower African diamond OA community of practice and offer cost-efficient, open, public, shared publishing infrastructures.
https://libsense.ren.africa/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LIBSENSE-Collaboration-for-sustainable-open-access-publishing-in-Africa.pptx.pdf

I was interested in this because I have been doing some work with LIBSENSE and am developing an awareness of open-science in Africa more generally.

Presentation on Notify project to the Samvera Virtual Connect meeting

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This was a short, relatively technical introduction to the COAR Notify project for the Samvera Virtual Connect meeting.

See more (including slides as downloadable PDF)

Five Prerequisites for a Sustainable Knowledge Commons

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I very much like this infographic from COAR. I've been working with COAR on the Next Generation Repositories Working Group and we have been gradually building a picture of a technological future for repository systems. As this work has progressed over the last year or so, it has gradually become clear that there is an opportunity to describe a sustainable knowledge commons. While the Next Generation Repository group is gradually assembling a picture of the technical components and protocols which can make this work, this infographic covers some other, non-technical aspects which will also be required.

I recommend taking a look at the document from which I have taken this image - it adds some useful context.

My New Venture

paul@paulwalk.net (Paul Walk) — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today is my final day at EDINA. Rather than stepping into a new role in another institution, I'm taking a bit of a leap into the unknown. I have started my own consultancy business, Antleaf, a vehicle which allows me to take on new, challenging and rewarding work.

I'm pleased to say that, through Antleaf, I have a contract to act as the Managing Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), and I'm negotiating a contract with an institute in Japan to help with an exciting development there, so Antleaf seems to be off to a good start!

If you need the help of an information professional with both development and management experience, please do get in touch.

It feels like a fresh start for me, which is always an invigorating - if slightly nerve-wracking feeling!