This is a longer version of the talk I gave at TWG, with slides.

The darkness in the video is cleared up at the 3:50 marker.

Progress on the book is slow but steady — which is exactly how it should be. I have been interviewing smart people in several countries while assembling a voluminous corpus of articles, stories and supporting information.

In the meantime, I have been speaking regularly about Open Data and Data Literacy. There are two upcoming opportunities to see what I have to say:

July 23, 2010: good people drinking wine and talking to each other in Toronto, ON

Pete believes that Open Data isn't just for geeks and economists anymore, and that Data Literacy for all would change the world. He's writing a future Oprah's Book Club title about how to get rich, expose corruption and win the Order of Canada using just Excel, some rope and a stick of gum.

August 14, 2010: FOSSLC 2010 in Ottawa, ON

The Open Data movement is picking up steam in a big way. Some government or NGO seems to announce plans for full transparency every week. Then you've got a guy like Rob McEwen creating billions of dollars of wealth when he decided to open source his gold mining company's geological data. Still, data today is like the web was in 1995... all over the place.

We need a data commons: a place for people to discover, consume, contribute, discuss and purchase data. This talk discusses how such an infrastructure could work, and how we must bring tools for working with data to non-technical individuals.

You can sign up to FOSSLC here.