Government is a big place, so it isn’t surprising that different departments can have conflicting agendas or not always be completely in the loop about what others are up to.
A couple of weeks ago an announcement came out of DCLG that a new wave of council openness was being hailed by Eric Pickles. A Code of Recommended Practice for council transparency is being published and “ministers are minded to make it legally binding”
“The code of practice calls on local authorities such as councils and fire and rescue services to shine a light on every part of their business, from employees’ salaries over £58,200 and details of all their contracts and tenders to details of grants to voluntary organisations, performance information and the locations of public land and building assets. It also establishes three key principles behind council transparency; timeliness, openness and mindfulness of local demand.”
I’m sure you don’t need me to point out the potential fun and games here as councils and OS discuss how open councils can be with data about their land and property holdings. No problem if you are an OS licensee under the PSMA but not so easy for the rest of us particularly the army of armchair auditors that Eric is relying upon to help highlight wastage in local government.
“Releasing this information to the public could provide a wealth of local knowledge and spark more improvements in the way services are delivered. Faster publication and easier access for the public and companies could open new possibilities for real-time analysis and response and opportunities for small businesses to enter new markets.”
Looks like we could have the mighty Mr Pickles and DCLG alongside Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office facing off the BIS and the new PDC.
This could be even more fun that Armando Ianucci’s hilarious fim.
Another day of geo starts in Nottingham. Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/
The second day of a conference always faces the challenge of the morning after syndrome, even more so after a monster bash of geonerds trying to relive their student drinking days and drain the bar dry. In my opinion it was a good thing that we were thrown out of the bar at 1.00 am, I shudder to think what mayhem might have ensued if we had been allowed to carry on! One of the great memories of this year’s conference will be Conor Smyth, Head of Geo Services at EDINA and Cameron Easton, Head of Spatial Information at the Scottish Executive holding each other up as they weaved their way back to their rooms. Enough, lest you think the whole of GeoCommunity is dedicated to having fun!
Surprisingly after a good dose of coffee most of the delegates seemed ready for the morning’s activities, still as I tweeted “Geohangovers are for geowimps”. Even so it was going to take something a bit special to kickstart the morning and we got it. I wish Danny Dorling had been teaching geography when I was at school. Danny is my kind of geographer, with an interest in applying geography in ways that matter and might make a difference and a rare talent for illuminating a jumble of data with his weird and wonderful Twisted Maps (aka cartograms).
Danny gave us a whistle stop tour of how different projections and cartographic techniques can provide insight and highlight trends in ways that shaded polygons just can’t. I think a challenge for most of us in understanding these twisted maps (Danny’s description not mine) is the extent to which geographic outlines have become iconic and are almost hard wired into the spatial part of our brains, changing our internal projection systems is not easy. If you are not sure, go have a look at OSM-GB, at the moment the very rough map is just up there as a place holder until the project starts munging and hopefully improving OSM data, you know this is GB but it just doesn’t look quite right (WGS84). Now look at this map by Ben Hennig, one of Danny’s PhD students, at Views of the World
You get the high level picture pretty quickly don’t you? It will take me a while to adapt and drill down into the detail in this view though as all of my geomemory is baffled by these unfamiliar outlines. I think it is a tribute to the GeoCommunity in this country that we have a Social and Spatial Inequalities Group at one of our universities – maybe that says more about me than anything else.
Vanessa Lawrence was the next speaker (Ordnance Survey were a Platinum Sponsor of the event, thanks guys). I don’t always agree with Vanessa and I I may have been mildly critical of OS on the odd occasion but Vanessa’s irrepressible enthusiasm and belief in the contribution that geography can make to Britain and the world, combined with her pride in the OS have to be admired. This was a very wide ranging talk that started with world wide developments in mapping (China is investing $1.5bn to turbocharge their GI industry) through to the way Ordnance Survey is adapting to an era of Open Data. Lots of good material and very upbeat. A little moment of personal pride came up when in the course of her presentation Vanessa referred to the combination of industry and practitioners across the private and public sectors as the GeoCommunity, 5 years after we launched this event and created the brand it has become common parlance as high up as the DG of OS – nice.
5 years ago Jo Cook was almost a lone voice championing Open Source GIS, I remember her approaching me at the first GeoCommunity trying to persuade me that the AGI should be supporting Open Source (not Open Sores as John pepper described it in his Soapbox). I think I waffled about broad churches, even handed and stuff like that, shame on me. In 2011 there was an “Open” river (as opposed to a stream) running through the conference and the unconference, Open Source Geo is definitely established as part of the landscape and Mike Saunt’s debunking of the 3 myths of Open Source was a great response to those still trying to spread FUD. Jo Cook is the chair/lead/coordinator of the UK chapter of OSGeo, inadvertently she tweeted out that the chapter were bidding to bring the annual FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geo) conference to Britain in 2013, a new hashtag was born and then renamed. Just imagine how much fun it could be to back to back GeoCommunity and FOSS4G in 2013, a solid week of mapmadness and geolove in GB! The best place (at the moment) to find out more as it happens or to offer help would be to sign up here.
Part of the fun of GeoCommunity is the chance conversations that you stumble into. Over lunch with Mark Iliffe, Jo Cook, Conor Smyth we got into a conversation about enterprise in the third world, Mark had been working in Africa recently (see yesterday’s post for details of his talk) and Conor had worked in Latin America when he was younger. Conor told us about a project in the slums of the Philippines to make solar powered lights from 2 litre plastic drinks bottles, cool stuff, not very geo but just why you want to be at GeoCommunity.
A robust discussion about Open Data. Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/punchup/
Then we were back in the main auditorium for the annual debate “Open Data – what could possibly go wrong?” (title suggested by yours truly). Some of the AGI debates in the past have fallen a bit flat, some have been gentle conversations and rarely has there been a strong contrast of positions. The panel consisted of people who are all old friends, Gesche Schmidt (LGG), Bill Oates (WAG), Trevor Adams (Met police), Bob Barr and me. I though that this was a rather tired old topic and when in preparation several of the panel planned to speak in favour, I offered to take the debating position of opposing Open Data (even though I don’t really) on the basis of economics, innovation and who might be the ones holding government to account. Just for the sake of argument of course. Well that didn’t last very long, when Gesche and Bill went off on one about personal data I went mildly ballistic, when Bob started waffling on about the benefits of OpenStreetMap (which I fully agree with) trying to identify the economic benefits of releasing Open Data I lost it completely, Bob was so far off track that I almost stood up to physically drag him back “on topic”. Interestingly, what the panel illustrated was the deeply ingrained tendency for people working in the public sector to focus on the difficulties in opening up data and the reasons to say no. I say “Just say Yes” and “JFDI”
At last we got to the final plenaries. Kimberley Kowal is the Curator of Digital Mapping at the British Library, if there is a cooler job than this then please tell me about it (if KK could be persuaded to go for it I could volunteer to be her standin at the British Library until they appoint a replacement). There was a wondrous look on the faces of the assembled map geeks as images of fascinating, exquisite maps from the BL collection flashed up on the screen. My favourite was the 18th C strip map of directions from London to Paris with textual directions, small drawings of points of interest and compasses, pretty much like Google route directions today without the map. I wish I had some images from the presentation to share, maybe later but in the mean time you will have to live with a couple of the comments from the tweetstream “I’m in mapheaven” and in the vernacular of the backchannel “#mapporn“.
Gary Gale is an entertaining presenter who produces work of art zen slide decks full of humour, weaving his way through some deceptive paths to deliver you to his final message. His closing plenary was a cracker about place, context and a next generation of smarter location based capabilities (note that I am not saying apps). I am not sure whether the multiple references to “checking in” were included just to wind me up or whether Gary is still hooked on becoming a Mayor, that aside this was a funny and thoughtful presentation and a perfect counterpoint to Kimberley.
OK, it’s time for a rant! Why oh why do people skip out of an event before the final plenaries? Those of you who did missed 2 of the best speakers of the conference to get home an hour earlier. IMHO dumb.
So that’s it from me and GeoCommunity for another year. I was able to enjoy the event as a delegate rather than an organiser this year and for me it was probably the best yet although I might try not to commit to two presentations, 2 panels and 2 soapboxes next year. We launched OSM-GB and will be back next year to talk about our successes and lessons learnt. I made new friends, drank too much for a man of my age, probably inadvertently offended someone via the twitter stream, had a lot of fun and most of all realised how lucky I was to be a part of the GeoCommunity.
A big thank you to Jeremy Morley and his conference team and the remarkable, unflappable AGI core staff who achieve so much with such a small team.
Thanks to Gary, the tweet stream is here so those of you who were not there can get an irreverent flavour of the conversation around the event. These wordles from Chris over at Web-GIS are also worth a look.
So another GeoCommunity has been and gone, the format has evolved, the new venue at Nottingham is a big improvement and I have to admit to a slight sense of paternal pride that successive conference teams bring fresh energy and ideas. This was my second year as a plain participant, well a presenter participant rather than an organiser or conference chair – no responsibilities, no worries, just the opportunity to sit back and enjoy which I certainly did.
Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelingman/
Despite the cuts in the public sector and the pressures on the commercial participants, attendance held up very well and the mood of the delegates seemed to be pretty positive. About 450 delegates were here to talk geo, meet old friends and make new ones (hiya @markiliffe) learn stuff and enjoy parties, soapboxes, quizzes and of course the twitter backchannel.
Day one opened with a changed pair of plenary speakers as both of the advertised candidates had to drop out at short notice and what a great pair of standins we got, no second besters here! Cheryl Miller (on behalf of Sir Ian Magee, Chair of the GI Group) gave a confident and spirited presentation on the role of the GI panel in representing government as the customer of the PSMA in its relationship with Ordnance Survey. There was an almost audible gasp when the phrase “hold Ordnance Survey to account” appeared on a slide and the backchannel went into feverish overload with mental images of two geodames slugging it out.
Next up was Jamie Justham of Dotted Eyes who was talking about the creation of the new parliamentary constituency by the Boundary Commission. I was surprised that the team had chosen this for a plenary, I thought it was going to be a dry and rather geeky topic. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Jamie Justham’s almost schoolboy like enthusiasm for his subject combined with his almost encyclopaedic knowledge made this presentation absolutely rivetting. If Jamie ever gives up geo he could replace Peter Snow and the Swingometer. Dotted Eyes have released a dataset of the proposed boundaries as OpenData for anyone who wants to investigate and contribute to the consultation, well done guys.
The final keynote from Amanda Turner of ESRI UK (one of the Platinum Sponsors) was an interesting review of the challenges facing our community from a newcomer’s perspective. When she questioned the complex and varied language that we use to describe what we do (GIS, Geography, Location, Spatial, GI) I think many agreed with her.
A quick mention of the food at the East Midlands Conference Centre which was exceptionally good and a massive improvement on the old venue. Culinary delights at a geoconference – unheard of.
Collect all 6 stickers and win a prize
For a day and a half I had been stickering everything that moved in a guerilla marketing campaign for the launch of the OSM-GB project that I have been working on with CGS at Nottingham and 1Spatial. This was to ensure that I had a full room for my session on “How authoritative can the crowd be?” which mused on what constitutes authority in geodata and what might be done to increase trust and confidence in OSM to encourage public sector to use OSM, become contributors helping to increase coverage and attribution and identify use cases for an alternative (not a replacement) to other base maps. You can read my paper on the OSM-GB blog and the slide deck is here.
The response was very encouraging and you will be hearing more from me about this as we get our researcher in place and start.
I also did a soapbox that gave a quick preview of the project, slides are here if you want them. Day one finished with a superb presentation by Mark Iliffe, a PhD student at UoN who looks to have a great future. Mark talked about mapping in the slums of Africa, it was a massive reality check for many of the audience, he was immensely quotable and my favourite was describing toilet trenches as “Open Defecation Areas with tag=’land use’ value=’shit’”. Not surprisingly he got one of the biggest rounds of applause at the end of it and subsequently won the delegates vote and award for the best paper at the conference.
The Soapbox has become an established feature at the end of day 1 of GeoCommunity. It is a combination of georant and geostandup comedy in 5 minute blurts to an autotimed slide deck. Not easy at the best of times but when the beer is flowing (courtesy of Star Apic) and the audience are barracking and throwing virtual rotten tomatoes via twitter this is a tough place to be. Not satisfied with standing up for OSM-GB I managed to be persuaded by Ken Field (who is now based at ESRI in California) to do a second transatlantic soapbox where he prepared the soapbox and I did the chat bit (unseen!). Stupid? Yes, but persuading Gary Gale to join me in a chaotic double act was the only smart thing I can claim about this fiasco. You can judge for yourself with a warning about the occasional profanity for those of a sensitive disposition.
Thanks to Ken for the slide deck and a great idea and a big thanks to Gary for standing up with me on this. The undoubted champion of this year’s soapbox following in the footsteps of previous winners Ian Painter and Thierry Gregorius was Mike Saunt of Astun Technology debunking some of the myths of Open Source Geo with a great surprise about 90 seconds into the video.
I particularly like the concept of the “software tax” I bet that Ian painter and others will be back soon to respond to Mike’s thoughts. I think he is spot on.
The least said about the evening’s festivities is probably the better, more food, a free bar, scalextric, a surfboard thing to fall off, loads of new people to meet and quite a bit of whisky.
24 hours later I am starting to feel the strain, so this will be Part 1 and some thoughts on the second day’s speakers and the overall event will follow in a couple of days (some proper work to be done tomorrow)
For the 2nd year AGI’s GeoCommunity kicked off with an informal preconference unconference day, W3G. I had a lot of fun at this event last year but this one topped it.
Jonathan Raper starts W3G. Why do they call him the Mad Professor?
The morning started with a small panic as @MadProf (aka Jonathan Raper) had not appeared by 9.45, Gary Gale and Rollo Home are starting to reorganise the schedule when Jonathan strolls in wearing full evening dress and muttering about people thinking he was on his way home on the tube at 4.45 this morning. The guy has style (or a busy social life and an appointment at a black tie dinner in the evening).
Jonathan started off the day with an outstanding overview of the current state of the Open Data movement in the UK laced with humour (almost obligatory at an unconference) and laden with outrageous quotes including “we are a nation of data huggers”, “I’ve burnt my academic career”, ”I’m not a complete raving lunatic” and “Boris Johnson has his own lexicon he described TfL is a Hittite sect” and more. Hopefully you can get the flavour from the tweetdoc.
After people had recovered from the early morning shock jock of OpenData we moved into the unconference sessions. To be honest I think a few people had cheated and prepared quite intensively for these “unplanned” sessions.
The room I was in featured Rich Rombouts of Snowflake talking about areoGML or something like that. It was witty, technical stuff about the use of XML schemas within flight control with lots of side jokes about French ATC being on strike lightening a serious talk. At the end there was an interesting conversation about why we and the aviation industry still consider paper charts to be an essential safety backstop (it could be because computers fail and rebooting an aircraft might not be a good idea, aerogeeks will pile in here “you don’t know what your talking about” – of course I don’t , that’s why I trust paper). Last year Rich had one of the best slides of the day with porn and cheese (don’t ask, I can’t remember) and he may have bettered that with this year’s gem simulating a heads up display incorporating aeroGML:
Woops, I think we need to change runways
Brian Norman followed up with a brilliant talk about building cross platform mobile web applications. This was really simple advice, well presented. It’s amazing how much you can learn in 20 or 30 minutes.
Finally Ed Boiling came on talking about talking about Dinosaurs, Concorde and web interfaces. You have to love a presenter who works for ESRI and opens by saying that “I bat for the dinosaurs”. This was a really well thought through talk about the perils of trying to replicate familiar desktop interfaces in web applications, you had to be there to understand how Concorde and the space shuttle got in there.
For me the event had kicked off the night before hand with a long overdue catch up dinner with Gary Gale, who has created this event and placed his unique humorous and insightful stamp upon it. I somehow allowed myself to be talked into to dropping the short talk I had prepped and sprinting through my History of Web Mapping in 40 minutes after lunch. When part way through my drastically abbreviated talk I suggested that the MapInfo and ESRI had missed a massive opportunity before Google launched their Maps API and subsequently added that some people’s business models had gone down the toilet, Andy Coote (formerly a director of ESRI UK) leapt up to argue with me that I was talking rubbish. I like a bit of controversy and at least he was listening, anyway I still think those were fair comments.
All in all a great day that finished up with a fireside chat (without the fire) between Gary, Ed Boiling, Matt Toon and me about whether geo was a business or a feature and the convergence of enterprise and consumer mapping.
One moan from me, this was a free day, full of great content (ignoring my bit) with excellent food and geobeers. Why oh why geopeeps weren’t there more of you there? Maybe next year?
Rock and a hard place - thanks to Shemp 65 http://www.flickr.com/photos/shemp65/
On Tuesday I went to the Google Geospatial Summit at the Science Museum with the guys from geo.me who had a booth at the event.
It's a long way down there from the rear stalls, thanks to Stuart Grant of www.geo.me for the pic
The event was pretty plush with the background of the Science Museum and the auditorium was the IMax cinema which was impressive, particularly if you were sitting high up!
The main focus of the event was to launch Google Earth Builder in the UK. GEB follows on from Google Earth Enterprise to offer organisations with large volumes of imagery and vector data the oportunity to upload their data to the Google cloud and then manage secured or public access via the Maps API, the Earth desktop application or browser plugin or the mobile versions of those tools.
At the moment the functionality seems to be limited to viewing data but as a scalable distribution platform for corporate spatial data delivered through highly familiar and intuitive interfaces I can see how this would appeal to organisations with massive volumes of potential occasional users. I have been saying for a while that Google could pose a difficult challenge to the established GI tech companies because of the incursion into their market of it’s free products. Now Google are offering massive cloud infrastructure and scalability in a reasonably secure environment (the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are apparently among the first customers). If the pricing is reasonable, GEB has to have the potential to eat into some of the lighter implementations of your favourite GIS vendor.
I was sharing some thoughts with a few folk at the event and on the twittersphere and one friend who works at a big GI company commented
“..rumours of the untimely demise of GI giants are greatly exaggerated.. ”
I agree. Buuuuut and it is a big but, Google’s push into the enterprise market must prompt some changes from the existing players – commercial models, ease of use, performance, scalability and innovation to name a few.
I was struck by the size and composition of the audience at the event. There were industry people from ESRI, Intergraph, bing, PBBI MapInfo, Ordnance Survey, Blom plus a load of consultants. On the customer side, there were delegates from local and central government plus a range of corporates some of whom I remember as clients from my MapInfo days and others who we never got close to. The “Customer Success” panel (see pic above) featured Shell talking about the app that geo.me developed for them (got to get the plug in), Rightmove who have some pretty neat functionality in their app, the Space Reconnaissance Center of the UAE Armed Forces who already use GEB and the Met talking about their public crime mapping application. Trevor Adams of the Met in response to a question about usability said (not verbatim)
“I can do this at home, why can’t I do it at work?”
Which for me sums up the challenge to some of the plugin dependent, GI centric applications that many of us have grown up with. Who after all uses ArcGIS or MapInfo Pro as their tool of choice at home?
I recall a conversation with the boss of a big GI tech vendor who while recognising the encroachment of new entrants into the consumer space and simple visualisation in the professional space maintained that his company’s strength was their dominance in the “heavy lifting”. I also recall several presentations from Ed Parsons in the past where he reassured the audience that they would still need traditional GI tools for the “heavy lifting”. Now “heavy lifting” may mean different things to different people but I lost count of the number of times that the Google presenters talked about “leaving the heavy lifting to Google” or “stand on our shoulders”. There is a definite change of tone from Google and based on the steely grins on the faces of some of the industry people attending, I think they recognised it.
When I got home I glanced at the feed from the FOSS4G conference. I have written quite a bit about the opportunity for Open Source recently and how adoption is growing within the public sector. Webmap servers and spatial databases are becoming commodities, the ecosystem around OSGeo is evolving and it will become increasingly difficult to make a good case for paying license fees to proprietary vendors for technology components that are robust, proven and free (and yes I know that open source is not free, neither is proprietary after you have paid the initial license fee). I haven’t used a desktop GIS for ages (fortunately) but I was massively impressed by the capabilities of QGIS which is not only free but also runs on my Mac which not much other GI software does. No way is this a replacement for MI Pro let alone ArcInfo but it certainly will satisfy users who underutilise the massive functionality of those products.
Open Source on the left and Google on the right (or vice versa depending on your politics) and you might think that our old favourites are between a rock and a hard place.
As most readers will or at least should know, the Cabinet Office are consulting at the moment for views on “Making Open Data Real” and “Data Policy for a Public Data Corporation“. I started out by setting out what I thought were the key points of these two interlinked consultations trying to be as neutral as I could, this short slide deck hopefully provides a good start for anyone who hasn’t read the full documents. Jonathan followed with his own perspectives of how the thinking re OpenData and the PDC was flawed by a lack of vision of the long term infrastructure investment needed around OpenData, his slides are here.
I think we both agreed that opening up as much non personal government data as possible is a good thing. Me, because of the potential democratic gain that comes from transparency and accountability and Jonathan, because he sees a great opportunity for new information services and businesses to flourish on the back of this flood of data. My skepticism on the size of the new economy generated via startups and Open Data is well known and does not need repeating here, suffice it to say that the Treasury appears to share my doubts and that grains of evidence to support Jonathan’s view have been difficult to find (I look forward to being proved wrong on this).
Jonathan wants to extend the free release of financial, performance, transport and other non personal departmental data derived from operations to include the data created by the Trading Funds that are being considered for inclusion in the Public Data Corporation. I am uncertain that the lost revenue from making the data free would be offset by either some significant further democratic gain or the new business opportunities.
It is a shame that the two consultations have been interlinked because the good stuff in the Open Data consultation may well be tarnished and confused by the flawed consultation on “data policy” (a euphemism for pricing and licensing) for the PDC. The PDC consultation looks to me as if the decisions have already been taken and it is going to be pretty much “same old same old”. OS, Land Registry and Met Office will be merged into a holding company with policies on pricing and licensing harmonised as much as possible across the three (which will be quite challenging because as businesses and data providers they have very different profiles). The big opportunities to consider radical change such as restricting them to collecting and supplying raw data only, moving towards a utility model, outsourcing major parts of their function or creating a custodianship franchise that is retendered every 7-10 years were all excluded from the consultation. Why? Because the PDC has to capable of “attracting external investment” (another euphemism for full or partial privatisation). On the plus side the PDC consultation does talk about a continuous process of releasing more data from the PDC businesses as Open Data, I wonder whether that will fall by the wayside in the name of attracting external investment.
In contrast, the Open Data consultation has some very good stuff on an enhanced right to access data, the use of machine readable formats and open standards and releasing dirty and early rather than spending time and money on trying to get perfect data out there. The bit that worries me is the section on innovation and economic growth
“Open Data can be a driver of economic growth. A new market for public service information will thrive if data is freely available in a standardised format for use and re-use, particularly in the life sciences; population data mining and risk profiling; consumer technologies; and media sectors. At present the market for information on public services is highly underdeveloped. Open Data across government and public services would allow a market in comparative analytics, information presentation and service improvement to flourish. This new market will attract talented entrepreneurs and skilled employees, creating high value-added services for citizens, communities, third sector organisations and public service providers, developing auxiliary jobs and driving demand for skills.”
This seems to be a triumph of optimism over evidence with only some rather loose examples of current best practice cited. In the case of the GI industry and the AGI report quoted, I don’t think that any of the growth in the market size that was predicted was dependent upon the release of OS OpenData or any other government Open Data. I am aware that OS recently commissioned a study on the economic benefits of releasing of OS OpenData, to date that study has not been published nor has it been referenced within the best practice section of the consultation. Hopefully we will get to see the results soon, after all under the principles of transparency espoused by the government we ought to be considering all of the available evidence in this process of consultation.
The consultation goes on to ask the question:
“Innovation with Open Data: to what extent is there a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of Open Data?”
Elsewhere the consultation seeks opinions on whether government has a role in stimulating or supporting innovation. My answer to both of these questions is “No, No, No!”
Surely by now we have learnt that government does not do business or innovation very well. Who remembers the telephone service when it was run as part of the Post Office? That was government doing business in the technology sector. For all of its faults, BT is a vastly better business for being freed from the constraints and culture of the Civil Service. Surely a Tory government gets that? What are they thinking of?
“It is possible that investment will be required to equip PDC organisations with the infrastructure and resources to make accessing its data easy and cost-effective forusers. The business model for the PDC will need to consider the most effective way of meeting those investment needs, within the broader objectives for a PDC”
I am stunned to find myself, an old soft liberal lefty type, saying this but the Government needs to pay a bit more attention to its Tea Party wing on this topic not invest more money in building the infrastructure that the private sector will build if it really believes that the market exists for adding value to government information. Just release the data in the rawest form possible and at the lowest possible cost and let the market get on with it. Michael Cross wrote an excellent piece on this theme in yesterday’s Telegraph
“The consultation enthuses about the opportunities the corporation will have for developing “new, innovative ways of making data and information available”. Perhaps. But monolithic Whitehall-created corporations do not have a strong track record of innovation, and creating one seems an anomalous step by a Conservative government committed to localism.
If we’re serious about the potential of open data, let’s do it properly. Central government could enforce the new philosophy on existing public bodies without establishing new ones. The funding gap could be filled by central funds, user charges (for example property developers paying for changes to maps) and by doing fewer things to start with.
This means getting out of the commercial sector entirely. After all, the state no longer tries to earn revenues by building telephones and ships: what makes it think it can do so at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy?”
I think that the fundamental principles behind the Open Data policy are pretty good, even if this government may be doing the right things for the wrong reasons. We need to encourage government to open the door a bit further and to keep out of the added value chain that it believes will generate economic growth through innovation. We won’t do that by burning energy and enthusiasm trying to prise the Trading Funds’ data out of the PDC, leave that battle for another day.
Whatever your opinion, if you care about this stuff you should take time to read the docs and respond to the consultations.
I went to the Museum of London yesterday to have a look at the small display of hand drawn maps in the entrance area, if you are anywhere nearby this is well worth a short visit.
Brixton as a tree by Liam Roberts via www.londonist.com
Each of the maps gives a very personal view of a part of London, the author’s experiences and perhaps a comment on the way a much loved part of our city has changed. They reminded me that in contrast to all of our concerns for accuracy, authority and technology, maps offer a very human way of communicating about place. Not original, I know but still a useful reality check after days of waffling on about openness and authority and stuff like that.
You can find links to a selection of these hand drawn maps (loads more than at the London Museum) here. This was one of my favourites
Loos of London by Paula Simoes via www.londonist.com
Paula Simoes said about her map
“As a native Londoner, it is sometimes difficult to see the city in a new light. I’ve also lived in various areas throughout the years so I don’t particularly feel as though I belong to one single neighbourhood. As a result of this, I decided to focus on an often overlooked aspect of London instead, namely its practical and often quirky loos! Quite a large area is covered here and the river acts as a good reference point to all the selected loos. I wanted my map to be useful yet fun. And let’s face it, we all need loos – whether we find ourselves living in London or just passing through.”
I am thinking about what my personal view of North London might be, I guess it would include the Heath, our favourite walks and views across the city and of course the old and new Arsenal Stadiums. What about you?
Posted: August 26th, 2011 | Author:steven | Filed under:Business, Value | Comments Off
Smart (thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/michiganmoves/)
I was reading some blurb from a big GI vendor which included a mention of “thick clients”, my initial response was to wonder whether they meant that their customers were stupid. You might be so cynical (more than me even) that you would respond “if the customers continue to buy those old style heavy footprint desktop applications then they are “thick clients””
The thin/thick terminology is perhaps unfortunate but it does illustrate an apparent miscomprehension in the GI software world. There was a view that if you want to do really powerful things with GI then you need a substantial application running on the desktop but not any more. Increasingly smart customers are recognising that they can do some pretty heavy lifting on a server (cloud or on premise) via a browser interface.
What is probably still the case is that those “power users” (another misleading term) who want to carry out ad hoc processing or analysis will still prefer to use one of their favourite desktop applications (ArcSomething, MapWhatever, GeoThingmy) a.k.a. a “thick client“. Of course that could be because the complex interfaces and range of functions are so impenetrable that they perpetuate the specialist (man in a white coat) image of the user – resisting the growing recognition that spatial isn’t special.
It seems to me that the ratio of “thick clients” to total (let alone potential) users is diminishing rapidly, even the largest of organisations probably only need a handful. That could be threatening if your business is substantially based on “thick client” offerings. The smart customer will be looking carefully at how many “thick clients” they really need.
Some nifty footwork may be needed to avoid these... Thanks to Bods http://www.flickr.com/photos/bods/
At the beginning of 2010 I was involved in editing the AGI Foresight Study and focussed on changing business models and the challenges that we foresaw for the UK industry. My personal take on this evolved into a presentation that I gave a few times entitled Cocktails on the Titanic. My final slide asked the audience whether they felt they were facing a threat or an opportunity, implying that the impact of change could be determined by their response.
Following on from that I had a spirited debate with Ian Painter on Open Source vs Proprietary software in which I think we both agreed that the whole life cost of a solution was much more than simple license costs, I blogged my position on that here which prompted some lengthy comments from Ian and Mike Cooper of ESRI UK. Back then I said
“Now that I have just about closed out my thinking on this, I consider the key elements to be that
Free API’s are going to dominate simple web presentation because they incorporate good quality free data, are highly performant and scalable and offer slick intuitive interfaces. The traditional GI industry can and is responding by moving to the cloud but they will face some fierce competition from an advertising funded business model with massive resources.
Open Source software is increasingly recognised as a cost effective alternative to proprietary software, particularly for web mapping applications where the functionality is quite well established and becoming commoditised through open standards interfaces. Open Source is not free but it is potentially a very cost effective alternative to traditional license models, particularly if hosted in the cloud.”
Step forward a year and Mike Saunt of Astun (an Open Source focussed business) points me to this blog by Chris McCartney of PBBI (I used to work for PBBI up to 2008, Chris used to report to me) entitled Open Source is not as free as you might think it is. You can read the post and form your own judgement, I have not changed my views from the post that I quote from above however I think the best possible response comes from Paul Ramsey who has pretty much done a word replace substituting “Proprietary Software” wherever Chris used “Open Source” to show how much of the opinions expressed in Chris’ piece can be applied to his own company’s software as well as Open Source. So for example when Chris says
“I’ve already seen firsthand, organisations that have tried and given up on building a sustainable product to sell based entirely on open source, and organisations do a complete U-turn on their own bespoke open source project because of spiralling costs and concerns over maintenance.”
Paul responds
“I’ve already seen firsthand, organizations that have tried and given up on building a sustainable product to sell based entirely on proprietary software, and organizations do a complete U-turn on what they were told were “off-the-shelf” systems because of spiralling costs and concerns over maintenance.”
This is not a religious war and I am not an Open Source zealot or fundamentalist, it is simply down to answering the question “what get’s the job done most economically (considering whole life cost), fastest and with best performance/scalability/fulfillment of clients’ real needs”. If that is ESRI, MapInfo or MapServer or QGIS, who cares?
I was puzzled why a PBBI employee felt the need to post this kind of competition bashing stuff about Open Source which seemed to be a rehash of some fairly out of date and largely debunked FUD (that’s Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) so I reached out to friends in the geotwittersphere and got back a few observations:
3 current or former MapInfo partners in the UK have either wholly or partially switched to Open Source
Public sector users in Australia and France are switching to Open Source for web applications
At least one client is switching from MI Pro desktop to QGIS (I doubt many “Power Users” will find that to be a satisfactory alternative)
Korem who are, I believe, PBBI MapInfo’s largest partner are sponsoring FOSS4G this year and say on their web site
“Recent years have seen substantial changes in the geospatial industry. One of those changes has been the growth in maturity and adoption of free and open source solutions.
At Korem, we use a mixture of open and closed source solutions. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all option, we carefully explore our customers’ business challenges and requirements. We craft a solution that fits today and scales into the future.”
So maybe someone in the cockpit of the good ship PBBI has just spotted the icebergs ahead and is yelling out “Oh Sh1t! Spin the wheel, that looks like an f’ing big iceberg ahead!” It looks to me as if they view Open Source as a Challenge rather than an Opportunity to their business.
Perhaps someone from PBBI would like to have a georant off or an impromptu debate with me on this topic at GeoCommunity?
“If you use Twitter then you will have noticed that the service encourages people to geocode their tweets, that is, to record their physical location at the moment of tweeting. What particular purpose this may serve is another point altogether, but let’s not get into that.”
Well I do want to “get into that”
With so called smartphones it is easy to add an x,y to almost everything, photos, tweets, checkins, blogposts. For many of us it is easier to leave geotagging on rather than dive into the deep settings to switch on/off selectively – Warning extensive use of GPS may run down your battery.
I have been wondering what is the point of geotagging tweets? Some of you may have seen some early thoughts on this from last year’s W3G Conference/Unconference and nearly a year on I have yet to find any convincing uses of geotagged tweets.
Several academics have looked into the topic and to the best of my knowledge no one has come up with any meaningful relationships between the content of a tweet and the location from which it is tweeted. It seems to me that the best that we can get from geotagged tweets is the locations and times of activity of people with mobile devices who use twitter, probably corresponds to a digi/socialmedia/techy demographic and largely urban.
This demo from geo.me let’s you search for any hashtag or term on twitter (select tweet mapping) and this one from the last election shows political boundaries so you can see if you can find any political trends in the tweets that your search returns. Maybe someone will spot a significant correlation.
My friends at GeoIQ have done some pretty awesome stuff using a sentiment analysis engine on the twitter feed from this year’s Oscars to visualise the content, see Sean Gorman’s blog post and the visualisation. Sean acknowledges some of the limitations of the analysis
A second challenge with location based sentiment analysis is how meaningful are the results. I think one of the things we miss are margin of error calculations for sentiment analysis. Once we’ve aggregated data we have a sample size for that geography that we can calculate a margine of error against.
This is the best that I have seen so far, but does it really provide much in the way of insight? I am not sure.
Anyway for the moment the “locate my tweets” feature is switched off, it’s enough that I bombard you with my opinions without sharing where they originated from. Just in case you had forgotten I also still have some reservations about the privacy of broadcasting my location, show me my gain and I might change that view though.
