Ubucon Europe 2019 - Why there is no open data for culture, and how we are building it.
Channel: Ubucon Europe
Date: 2019-10-28

This session happened during Ubucon Sintra 2019 - Sintra - Portugal
https://sintra2019.ubucon.org/

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»Why there is no open data for culture, and how we are building it.«
by: Ksenia Ashrafullina, Elena Kolevska (Invisible city)

This is a story of how cultural communication is broken, and how open data for culture in a tight embrace with an elegant API can try to fix it. 

We'll talk about how we've built our API to be a collaborative tool serving culture lovers, data enthusiasts and emerging artists.

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There is this disturbing, untold truth: the only open data for culture that has ever existed was created by Facebook, as it unified the information about cultural events and made it machine readable through its events API. After Cambridge Analytica, Facebook closed its events API, and the world of culture plunged back into the dark ages of scattered, isolated websites, local apps and paper agendas.

At the same time, culture is central for the politicians of all levels, from Brussels to any local town hall. The European Commission alone, through its Creative Europe programme, provides 308 million of culture budget every year. With all this investment and good will to support the arts, why is it still so frustrating to figure out what music, theatre and dance is happening in our cities?

At Invisible City we have seen both worlds: the shutdown of Facebook events API, which was our source of data, and the endless sessions in Brussels - from which we received some of our funding -  where we observed bureaucrats from all sorts of cultural departments discuss how to communicate culture. We realised a simple, yet surprisingly obscure fact: there is no open data for culture. So we decided to build it.

We started with designing our own data-entry system and ended up building our own API. We realised that the way the audience consumes cultural data deeply affects the way cultural managers and scrapers should write data into the system, and, consequently, how the resulting API is built. 

We needed to think long and hard about user types, user permissions and data consistency. In this talk we're going to explain how open data, open source and Ubuntu servers became part of our business strategy, and what technical solutions we have found to make it happen.

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Ksenia Ashrafullina is a polyglot and a culture-tech enthusiast. She speaks eight languages while constantly learning new ones in the quest to adopt new thinking patterns and read poetry in the original.

Being a self-proclaimed culture geek, she has created a minimalist, privacy-first app called Invisible City that helps people get offline for some art and culture. Currently she is expanding Invisible City to become a platform where artists can find and book venues for their gigs easily, perform more and get paid fairl She loves flamenco and practices its steps every day before breakfast.

Elena Kolevska is a software engineer and CTO with over 10 years of experience in the world of tech startups and a fascination for systems, both technological and human, which she sees as living organisms.

She likes to hang out and participate in the online tech community, but we’ve repeatedly heard her say that she values time spent AFK equally. Her love of passing knowledge to others, is expressed in her international speaking career, mentoring, blogging and workshops.

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Ubucon Europe 2019 was sponsored by:

# Diamond Sponsor #
Ubuntu - https://ubuntu.com/

# Gold Sponsors #
ANSOL - https://ansol.org/
Angulo Solido - http://angulosolido.pt/
Libretrend - https://libretrend.com/

# Silver Sponsor #
MySQL - https://www.mysql.com/

# Partners #
Câmara Municipal de Sintra - https://cm-sintra.pt/
Chalet12 - https://chalet12.pt/
Bar Saloon - https://www.facebook.com/barsaloon.cintra/
TAP Portugal - https://www.flytap.com/
NerdZoom.de - https://nerdzoom.de/ 
DeltaQ - https://mydeltaq.com/

Ubucon Europe 2019 on local news by SAPO Tek:
https://tek.sapo.pt/noticias/computadores/artigos/ubucon-europe-o-que-faz-a-comunidade-ubuntu-em-sintra-partilha-conhecimento-tecnico-e-estreita-ligacoes