Last Saturday I was amongst a group of enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers getting stuck in to the ‘Doing our bit’ project at the Mosman Library. The Build-a-thon was the first stage in creating a new online resource documenting the experiences of World War I service people related to the Mosman area. We’re trying to make the whole process as open as possible, so the Build-a-thon was a way of exploring resources, issues, interfaces and ideas before we lay down too much code. You can read more on the project blog.

To provide some context for our labours, I gave a series of short talks:

• ‘Small stories in a big data world’ [video] [links]
• ‘A digital history toolkit’ [video] [links]
• ‘Telling stories and building interfaces’ [video] [links]
• ‘Connections and contexts through Linked Open Data’ [links]

You can see how the day unfolded on Storify, and view the participants hard at work on Flickr.