Open Rights Group

[tomjeatt]

I don't know if you've ever come across the Open Rights Group, but after seeing a talk by @peterbradwell at the Reading Geek Night I joined up. I think they do some very important work when it comes to public information and citizen activism, but depending on how our careers pan out once we've graduated, a lot of what they discuss in terms of copyright law, government policy etc. could have a real impact on our jobs.

I'm going to their conference tomorrow, and looking at the programme there are quite a few sessions which relate to what we're being taught here. If anyone's interested I'll post some thoughts here after the event.

[David]

Sounds interesting Tom, do report back. One imagines that these organisations are full of cranks but hopefully that's not the case here.

[tomjeatt]

Ha ha! They do sound the type to be full of cranks, but they weren't. There's a more radical hacker fringe, but in a lot of ways they're a lobbying group, trying to improve copyright law and data governance. The keynote speaker was actually very relevant to my project, spending quite a bit of time talking about Open Access. I'll write a bit more on this when I have time (i.e. after tomorrow's presentation) because there was a lot of really useful information. I think the most directly applicable talk was from someone who works at Mozilla, discussing how they're implementing Do Not Track, and why.