Presentation at Open Power System Data Workshop in July 2017

Outreach
1

The Open Power System Data project is hosting their 4th workshop on Monday 10th July 2017:

and they have asked me to give a 10 minute presentation on Openmod.

Following Robbie’s good example with the poster and presentation on Openmod for the Brussels Energy Modelling Platform — Europe:

this thread was started so that people can chime in with any comments/suggestions or if they’re unhappy about the representation of Openmod.

I’ll try to post draft slides here at least a month before the event to collect comments. They’ll probably be based on Robbie’s slides with a few extra slides showing the wiki, forum, mailing list and advertising the next workshop.

2

It’s now three weeks until the OPSD workshop, so I’ve written some draft slides for the 10-minute talk on Openmod. See the attached compiled PDF and the following github repository for the source graphics and TeX:

All comments and feedback are welcome, either here or as a pull request.

openmod-opsd-170710.pdf (737.0 KB)

3

Hi Tom / looks good / some suggestions follow with the changes italicized here for emphasis rather than on the presentation / thanks for adding my name, that was unexpected

Slide 2: an affiliation is not required for openmod

  • grass roots community of open energy modellers from universities, research institutions, and the interested public

Slide 3: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) freedom zero covers usage and freedom three covers distribution / also lets be symmetrical about data and include it under the four freedoms too (moreover “freely available” arguably covers web publication under standard copyright and that is far from sufficient for our purposes)

  • Open refers to model source code and energy system datasets that can be freely used, studied, improved, and distributed.1
  • CC 4.0 BY → CC BY 4.0

Slide 4:

  • … is essential given the increasing complexity of the energy system
  • the leading dots don’t add much

Slide 11:

  • helping data owners understand the merits of openness
  • improved research computing skills

In addition:

  • you may consider placing the license notice on slide one, it makes it easier for people to find, particularly when sifting thru a pile of documents
  • personally I don’t add a “th” to dates, but that is merely a matter of style

Footnotes

1 A technical issue regarding the FSF freedom one to change is that code improvements can be readily assessed by running the program. Whereas data “improvements” need to have the reasons logged, in other words provenance is vital. In addition, data modifications may (unintentionally) damage the reputation of third parties in ways that code changes can never do.

4

Hi Robbie, thanks for your feedback! I will implement all of your suggestions. I’ll just wait a few days to gather any other feedback anyone has before updating the slides. It seemed fair to include you at the front and the copyright given that I copied many of the bullet points from your presentation.

5

I’ve incorporated all the feedback I received about the slides (from @robbie.morrison and @frauke). In addition, I added a footnote link to @stefan.pfenninger’s Nature article on slide 4. You can see the github diff for all the changes.

Here’s the new version of the slides:

openmod-opsd-170710.pdf (763.1 KB)

6

Final version as presented on Monday 10th July 2017:
openmod-opsd-170710.pdf (762.5 KB)