Our tamed computer programmer, ‘The Julian’, recently gave a rare appearance at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin (if you want an appearance pay us or ask us!). The spectacle of such scraping royalty drew more people than the room could accommodate (‘The Julian’ is not related to any royals living or deceased). As such I have included the slides here:

[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”a/scraperwiki.com/present/embed” query=”id=dcfvj9d_360fd4wwzc8″ width=”410″ height=”342″ /]

We were honoured to be amongst an outstanding line-up of speakers. We also ran a workshop the week of the conference and you can see the German data we scraped into ScraperWiki on the OKCon2011 tag.

What was most interesting about the workshop is that we see the same types of data needed for similar projects wherever we go. Tobias Escher wants to do something similar to AlphaGov for Germany called Meine Demokratie. A lot of very simple little scrapers can go a long way and if there’s anyone looking to play around with scraping and ScraperWiki, or who would like to lend a coding hand to a worthy cause please to click the above link.

‘The Julian’ was also looking for a scraping challenge and the workshop gnomes found Berlin schools data. I showed those in attendance one of my favourite sites made from scrapers:  Schooloscope. So Julian is scraping the data for Berlin schools in various stages and the hope is to get all the data for schools in Germany to make a German schooloscope.

We have one lovely lady very interested in getting this project on its way so if you are willing, if you speak German and if you know where to find them maybe you can scrape German schools data.

So watch out useful things to know in Germany including schools – you’re being ScraperWikied!

(As ScraperWiki is being used for better and better things, this will just get harder for me…)