New online cloud forum to host public meeting

A new forum, which hopes to discuss the future of community-led data in Orkney, is set to hold its first public meeting, next Wednesday, February 28.

Orkney Cloud Forum, which is being coordinated by Duncan Clarke at Aquatera Ltd. and Laura Watts at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who has spent the last decade working in the islands, is a community forum where the needs and novel ideas for an Orkney Cloud service are to be discussed and developed.

Funded by a Mozilla Research Grant, the forum is open to anyone in Orkney who wants to contribute, with the first meeting set to take place on Wednesday at 1.30pm in the St Magnus Centre, Kirkwall. Mozilla is dedicated to keeping the web open, healthy and accessible for everyone and also known for its Firefox web browser. This venture is part of a project to explore how Orkney could be a living laboratory for places at the internet edge, where the data network might be ‘thin’ but close-working social networks are ‘thick’ – and the environmental resource that could power data processing is huge.

Organisers believe that communities located at the edge of the internet, such as in Orkney, need to manage and process data. For example, collecting data from remote sensors in the sea, or transmitting energy usage information. They feel that a local cloud service could support socialising, sharing, and distributing the storing and processing of this data around the islands, rather than relying on distant and centralised cloud services. This could also open up opportunities for local organisations to become owners and participants in different parts of the data infrastructure, just as people have become participants in the local energy infrastructure.
“We believe that the self-determined approach Orkney has already taken in community energy, could lead to innovative ideas for community data services,” explained Laura.

“We see the cloud as a social and technical system, that requires a social and technical solution. The Orkney Cloud Forum is a place for everyone who has expertise and inspiration to imagine something different for data services, something that could work well, here, at the edge.”

For more information about Orkney Cloud Forum, you can contact duncan@orkneycloud.org