I have heard the second fact used as an excuse not to tweet, blog, and otherwise communicate in Spanish, but when you do the math, that would ignore more than 20 million Americans, up to 40 million depending on the context.

I have also heard the excuse of not being located in an area where Spanish speakers live. Where, exactly are the tens of millions of Americans who speak Spanish at home? Everywhere:

Americans who speak Spanish at home, map and data via the Census Bureau.

As a result, I have made a special effort to connect with Spanish speakers at @OKFNUS on Twitter. How are we doing? Not bad. Here in August 2014, more than 100 of our 1650 Twitter followers have set their official language to Spanish, a strict test for whether they are Spanish speakers. The percentage who speak Spanish is undoubtedly higher than 6.6%, but to know for sure would be difficult, for example we might text mine our followers’ tweets.

Not bad, but I am confident we can do better with a larger, more diverse team of Ambassadors. Diversity must also be a core value in our future national chapter for Open Knowledge in the US.

Ivan Fernando Gonzalez introduces the panel at “Engaging the Invisible Americans: Science communication for Spanish speaking audiences”

Recently in my work in Open Science, I had an idea for a panel discussion on engaging Spanish speakers in the US. I could have led the event, but instead I gave the idea to an Hispanic colleague who is fluent in Spanish. He organized and moderated a much more insightful and effective discussion than I had imagined.

As a next step, we should recruit at least one fluent Spanish speaker as an Open Knowledge Ambassador in the US. Language and the cultures inherent can be a significant barrier to opening knowledge, one which partnership is essential to resolving.

Reaching Spanish speakers is just one of our many needs for greater diversity. First of all, Americans speak many languages beyond English and Spanish.

Where I live in Seattle, government documents and services are available in Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, English, Korean, Laotian, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Tigrigna, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and sometimes more. Most of the people in Seattle are from somewhere else, and the next generation is even more diverse. Students in Seattle public schools are native speakers of 120 languages, and there are 47 languages in which at least one class is taught.

The prominence of specific languages and cultures varies significantly across a country of our size. Seattle may be more diverse than many cities, but being officially multilingual is not the exception in America. It is typical for our cities and states to offer documents and services in multiple languages. That’s good and open governance.

As activists for Open Knowledge, we must aspire to be more open than the government and society we mean to improve. In a country like the US, where openness has already had so much success, the standards for being more open are then very high.

Not only that, but our Open Knowledge US Ambassadors lack diversity in many aspects, beyond language. To mention just a few: we lack for women Ambassadors entirely, we are distributed geographically but we are too few for a country of this size, and there are many aspects of, or disciplines within Open Knowledge for which we lack a dedicated Ambassador.

Open as a multimensional spectrum: multidimensional (nD) correlation plots result by displaying Open with respect to n variables. Just kidding.

I cannot say when we will have 100 Ambassadors who speak 100 languages, but take heart. “Open” is not something one is or is not. I have said before that Open is a spectrum; if that is a good metaphor, then Open is a highly multidimensional spectrum.

Open is an ideal to which we aspire.

This is not exactly the official Open Knowledge line, after all we have an official Open Definition and in cases such as policy it is important to define Open. But my personal take is: be less concerned with whether knowledge is open, and more concerned with how it can be more open.

And keep opening it. As from Wendell Berry’s essay on What are People For? —

“Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?”

That’s OKF NYC Ambassador @LaneRasberry on the right side of the cover shot, quoted saying “Wikipedia is what the world is reading” at #WikiNLM at the NIH, May 29 2013.

The video features three with whom we interacted most — @OKCon, @openscience, and above all @OKFN, and three hashtags we hit most — #openscience, #opengov, and most of all #opendata.

Also featured are a few representative tweets, but do note that our range includes #openGLAM, open access scientific publishing and Wikipedia, open source software and hardware and hackathons, data driven journalism, open education, the public domain, and still more. We cover everything @OKFN do, just with an American eye and more US-based content.

an @OKFNUS spin-off project

I had remixed source video from https://www.vizify.com/okfnus back in December, and polished it this week with some public domain media. To give the video a good home, I created a YouTube Channel, a Google account (okfnus@gmail) to eventually share management of the channel with my OKF colleagues in the US, and a Google+ Page.

I had created the account in November 2012, but only started tweeting around June 2013, so 2014 will be better!

One of the spin-off projects I began at @OKFNUS was a Twitter list for NYC area accounts. I started with 30 accounts in November and it is now over 40, see the full list and back story at http://pad.okfn.org/p/twitternyc. As in my tweet shown here, I would like that on a map, with open data, and for all cities… to be hacked upon at a hackathon?

graphic art for @OKFNUS

There are many moving parts in setting oneself up for what the pros call ‘cross channel marketing’, in social media and in concert with our web site. Creating graphic art, placing and editing code embeds, writing copy, linking each to the others; it has taken me over a week of spare time to weave the web at YouTube, Google+, et al.

Next steps include meeting with my fellow account managers, and perhaps setting up an editorial calendar or divvying up responsibilities. I’ve been the only hand at the @OKFNUS till, but not for much longer!

A key goal in setting out was to be a steady, dependable and growing voice for OKF in the US. I publish a minimum five tweets every day and eight on average, evenly spaced across the six or seven hours of American timezones, regional interest tweets timed appropriately.

I had last posted about our activity on Twitter when sending the 1,000th tweet. At the time, we had just over 500 followers. As I sent our 1,500th tweet, we had just over 750 followers. On the numbers at least, I’m steadily hitting my marks.

The voice of OKF in the US is about to become more of a chorus. I look forward to sharing the accounts with my fellow US Ambassadors!

Below are some tales and details from the first 1,000 tweets. Going forward, expect more of the same at @OKFNUS — plus! more from other US Ambassadors and representatives of the Open Knowledge Foundation. I look forward to sharing tweeting duties as our numbers grow.

I will not get to everything interesting about @OKFNUS in this one blog post, but I hereby swear to write up a few major events. It was an eventful time, from local OKF hackdays and meetups, to a trip to the White House, DEF CON in Vegas and Wikimania in Hong Kong, and of course #OKCon in Switzerland!

We have managed to attract over 500 followers, but what has happened on the whole, over the first 1,000 tweets? Have they been like 1,000 pebbles on a path to Open Knowledge?

A brief word from the Art Department

Pebbles in a path at the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon. photo CC0, by Brian Glanz

Well if I’m going to be poetic, I might as well try poetry:

One hundred forty steps, to steps, on a path with one thousand pebbles.

One issue with that — it’s a Japanese-like poem to match a photo I snapped, shown here from a Chinese-like garden. At least it’s a bit better than the straight metaphor :)

Tweets are short and the idea is, sweet. Tweets may be easy, but good tweets take work. You need to be real and hip to the internetz, but professional and quick with research. Merciless brevity and instant, global reach require tact and sometimes poetry.

How did I get into this?

I’ve used Twitter for seven years, and have published over 20,000 tweets total at the eight accounts I manage. I am @brianglanz but most accounts I share with others. I have enjoyed being the voice of @OKFNUS, but I prefer to share!

I have volunteered with OKF in various projects, events, and working groups for over five years, and am particularly keen on open science, government, and journalism. (I started @openscience on Twitter.)

I am also an open source web developer. I have built well over 100, probably over 1,000 web sites. I have volunteered now and again to improve OKFN.org and its network, which includes us.okfn.org and I first put this site together for the US. Working on someone’s web site gets you all up in their business. It was this and of course the mission of opening knowledge that brought me closer to OKF.

I registered the @OKFNUS Twitter account in November, 2012 but did not make use of it until May, 2013. My fellow organizers and I did not want to begin acting as OKF representatives in any official regard until we had a green light!

Once we had that, I set a few standards for the account. For example, I publish at least five tweets per day, spaced fairly evenly and with an eye toward timezone-relevant content. I generally tweet during waking hours in at least one US timezone.

There are exceptions, like that I finally took one day off — yesterday! I used the time to draft this post about the first 1,000 tweets, to announce it with the 1,000th tweet. I can be particular.

Ours is a big country

In the first week I began using @OKFNUS, I was considering what to cover. I thought to myself, “covering hackdays might be nice.” OKF have brilliant code and projects, I could chime in remotely and volunteer support. In fact many US hackathons make use of OKF bits, including many I have organized, with projects from CKAN to PyBossa to the Public Domain Review.

Great idea, then! I found, however that within just the first week I was tweeting at @OKFNUS, there were more than 100 hackathons in the United States. That was a few more events than I had planned to tune into, per week, as a volunteer voice of OKF :0)

Ours is a big country. I did tune into many hackdays, though in that week and in the nearly six months since. I joined and organised some, too, including an August “Open Science Hack Night” for OKF in Seattle. I will write more about events in future posts, and about noteworthy Twitter exchanges, and how we measure impact.

One more note before closing with some pretty pictures: to wrap my head around the OKF community on Twitter, and to serve us all as well, I began a list of every official OKF account. Every account, that is except one: @OKFNUS! Because I used @OKFNUS to create the list, and one cannot list oneself, @OKFNUS is not on the list.

I call it “One list to find them… and in the open bind them.” I know…

To listen as I do, then to OKF on Twitter, tune into this one list, plus! follow us @OKFNUS. It currently includes 158 staff, projects, groups, etc. — https://twitter.com/OKFNUS/lists/okf — and I crowdsourced it. Read more at http://new.okfnpad.org/p/twitter.

Pretty pictures and happy trails

Until I write more blog posts, enjoy this data visualization with maps of our followers. The maps link to larger, legible versions. Below them is a downloadable archive of our first 999 tweets, should anyone want to kick around the #opendata << of course.

Note that for many Twitter accounts, location is unknown and distribution is highly approximate at distance. For example, we have followers in Germany but when zoomed this far out, they appear to be in London.

Ohai, London! there is a good number, there per OKF Central. We have some followers on every continent, not many but it’s a start.

Below the global map is a closer view of the US. From this global distance though, we see the Eastern and Western US follow @OKFNUS in about the same numbers. When you include Alaska and Hawai’i as Western, we have just 10 more followers in the East, out of more than 300 total that we know are in the US.

In the US map below, it’s nice to see someone in Alaska, someone in Puerto Rico, and seven people in Hawai’i. At a closer range, you would again see more even distribution than is apparent. For example, not everyone mapped to Chicago below is actually there, some of them are as far away as Ohio.

Naturally, there are more followers near major cities. Washington, DC is not actually our highest ranking metro area. The highest ranking metro area is Seattle, by just a bit and with San Francisco roughly the same. DC is third, New York City fourth.

In the West, we might have a few more followers in the Pacific Northwest than in California, with more near Seattle than Portland and more in Northern than in Southern California.

However, the San Francisco OKF meetup is by far the largest in the US, and it is nearly the largest OKF meetup in the world, second only to London. I expect San Francisco to ultimately lead US cities in Twitter followers of @OKFNUS as well.

Download our Twitter archive, here. Can a brother get a word cloud? I promise more analytics and analyses in other posts.