One of the best things about working in the mapping business is the friends that I have made, of course the best thing of all is maps, maps and more maps. So how great was it when my pal Ken Field suggested that we go to the British Library for their “Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line” exhibition? Good idea, I’m up for that. For a little bonus, Ken persuaded Tom Harper, a curator […]
Yearly Archives: 2016
21 posts
Whatever you do at this time of year, take a minute to give thanks for all the good in your life Cheers Steven
Last year, I wrote about some of the challenges of mapping political border disputes and mused on how things have changed with the advent of digital mapping. I have been busy doing some further research on the topic which included a couple of hours with Tom Harper at the British Library and presented on the topic at last week’s FOSS4G in Bonn. Spoiler warning: If you are attending the British Cartographic Society conference on 7th […]
A couple of years back I wrote a piece on Open Source business models and how users could/should become contributors called “There’s no such thing as a free lunch“. Since then I have presented my thoughts at a couple of conferences and gradually shifted the pitch towards people working in Open Source Geo as opposed to end users. The ideas may be useful to people trying to articulate to their clients and potential clients why […]
Apologies, there may be a bit of gushing in this post. Last week the German Chapter of OSGeo hosted the annual FOSS4G event in Bonn. Each year the Local Organising Committee of FOSS4G wants to make their event the ‘Best FOSS4G Ever’, in 2013 the Nottingham team adopted that mantra as one of our hashtags on twitter. This year the Bonn team have really raised the bar and set an incredibly high standard for those that follow […]
“The Freedom of Information Act is a good thing” – sounds like a reasonable statement that would attract a lot of support from many who read this blog or who live in the open data, open source, open whatever communities. In line with my position on the cost/benefit of Open Data, I have occasionally wondered whether some people/organisations are ‘taking the mick’ with their FoI requests. The act applies to all and any requests regardless of the […]
This is another post about making maps from OpenData. I am trying to learn more geeky stuff rather than my usual blathering about the map and data business, things open and stuff, so I am playing with PostGIS, QGIS, taking some tentative steps into CSS and JavaScript and generally having lots of fun. But hey, you can burn a lot of time wrangling data and making maps. A week ago I saw this tweet Mapping […]
This making maps business is certainly not as easy as it seems! I have just burnt an inordinate amount of time trying to make a half decent map and publish it to the web, but I am learning stuff on the way even if I did disappear up some blind alleys. 2 years ago, I wrote a piece “Could you make a better map than this?” which questioned the way in which the Local Government […]
Warning: This post contains swear words. Younger readers, those of a sensitive disposition, the elderly and many others should NOT read on. If you are still reading, I assume you are not a cartoprude and can decode the asterisks in the post title, I am old enough to still be ill at ease with using swear words in print/online and will do my best to minimise the f***s. If you follow my ramblings here and […]
This is a maps and Arsenal post with a tiny bit of geekery added in. In the 2003-4 season Arsenal won the Premier League title while going the whole season unbeaten (actually including a couple of games in the preceding season and several in the following season they went 49 games unbeaten) a record that is unlikely to be equalled. My favourite Arsenal blogger is a guy called Andrew Managan who blogs at Arseblog, he […]
I travelled home from FOSS4GUK in Southampton yesterday afternoon on something of a high, we had had a great 3 days and at the end England had scraped a sneaky win against Wales in the 92nd minute (seeing Gareth Bale cry can’t be bad, can it?). Then I saw the awful news about Jo Cox and I was flattened, what the fuck is wrong with our world? This morning I realised that whilst our little […]
I have been pondering (and pontificating) on the business of Open Source Geo for a while now for example “There is no such thing as a free lunch“. That has prompted a couple of questions How big is the Open Source geo industry? What economic benefit does Open Source Geo underpin? You might wonder why I think this important? I spend a fair amount of my time evangelising Open Source Geo, particularly within UK government. Despite […]