Who Left the Lights On? A Workshop on the Web, Open Data and Electricity

This morning at Robertson Library I gave a workshop, titled “Who Left the Lights on?”, to members of ARMA Prince Edward Island Chapter. The workshop focused on the work I’ve been doing in open data and electricity for the past 12 years.

Most of the 29 people who attended were provincial public servants working in records management and other data-intensive aspects of the government.

The workshop ran from 9:30 to 11:45 with a brief break; it was held in the Modern Languages Lab at Robertson Library, a venue chosen for its fleet of iMac computers (and the capable staff that maintain them) and its SMART board.

My goal for the presentation was to give the attendees a feel of what open data looks like from the data-consuming side of the equation: to get there I provided a brief introduction into electricity measurement, and to HTML, CSS and JavaScript (the “three pillars of the modern web”) and then talked about some of my open data advocacy and development.

Slides from the workshop are available in a variety of formats, and can be distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

• View HTML (viewable right now in your browser, with audio and video)
• Download HTML (download, unzip the file, load the index.html in a web browser; includes audio and video)
• Apple Keynote (requires Keynote version 6 to view; includes audio and video)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (download, unzip the file; includes audio and video)
• PDF (slides only; no audio nor video)

There are 172 slides in all. Many slides include web links that lead to example or other resources. It won’t be possible to understand the complete workshop from the slides along, but you can take a stab at it.

Thanks must go to Simon Lloyd for the invitation, Mark Demone facilitating, and to Melissa Belvadi, Don Moses, Alkarim Bhalesha and Jerrad Gilbert at Robertson Library for reacting quickly and pleasantly to my requests for software installation on lab workstations.