This advert recruiting for a “Head of Public Sector Mapping & Addressing Agreements Team” reminded me that the current Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA for OS geeks and followers) is coming up for renegotiation with a deadline of end 2017 (presumably the new renegotiated agreement will come into effect on 1st April 2018). This a 2 year contract at a fairly senior level: We are looking for someone with strong commercials skills and ideally experience […]
steven
21 posts
Yup you read it here, an open source advocate said that the leading GI proprietary vendor is not evil. Let me go one step further and say that I think Esri are pretty damn good. Now that is not to say that there are not aspects of their business model and practices that I wouldn’t criticise but more of that in another post. So what has prompted this outburst from an open source advocate? A […]
Excuse the corny link to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography but this morning it feels as if we are on a pretty long walk to the nirvana of open data and that we are going to need the patience and determination of Nelson to get there. Last week my friend Giusseppe Sollazzo published a report “Open data in the health sector – Users, stories, products and recommendations“. Giusseppe suggested that I might be somewhat critical of his report @StevenFeldman looking forward […]
An open letter to President Trump Dear Mr President I read in this morning’s (failing) New York Times that you were pretty keen on maps in your briefing papers. And while Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps. “The president likes maps,” one official said. Now I recognise that […]
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 […]
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 […]