IE in decline amongst blog readers

If you look at the browser usage stats IE is generally shown with 78-83% and Firefox with 13 - 15%.

When I looked at the stats for this blog nearly 35% were Firefox. I wonder if there is a connection between blog readers and Firefox usage?

Building a GeoCommunity - Looking for themes

Just over a week ago the AGI held its annual Awards Dinner - the industries equivalent of the Oscars. Very generously Chris Holcroft, the Director of the AGI gave me his award for the work I did on this years conference. As I said at the time the award should have gone to the whole team who created the conference.

A week later and the whole team assembled to kick off the plans for next year's conference. Amazingly the whole team have decided to stay on for another year and we have been joined by 3 new members who I already know after our first meeting will each bring fresh new ideas to the event. So the conference team for 2008 is:

• Muki Haklay, UCL
• Alice Froggat, English Heritage
• Sarah Harrison, ESRI UK
• Mark Percival, Coventry CC
• John Fagan, Multimap
• Sallie White, OS
• Mike Tarrier, Infotech
• Fiona Cocks, Geoinformation Group
• Lee Braybrooke, Trimble
• Chris Holcroft, AGI
• Alan Wilkes, AGI
• Claire Huppertz, AGI
• Steven Feldman, Pitney Bowes MapInfo

We had a very exciting kick off trying to nail down the themes for this years conference prior to issuing our call for papers in mid to late January. If you have ideas for conference themes either mail me or post them as comments here.

Oh you might want to put the dates in your diary now. AGI 2008 will run from the afternoon of September 23rd to the 25th at the Holiday Inn, Stratfor-on-Avon. This time we have the whole hotel reserved so there will be more rooms, more sessions and better exhibition space.

See you in Stratford

Q-ing increases shareholder value

There has been a lot of talk about Nokia acquiring Navteq for nearly $7bn and more recently the privatisation and subsequent flotation of DERA with substantial profits for private equity investors and senior management has been in the news.

An odd coincidence is that a couple of years ago Navtech changed its name to Navteq, at the time of privatisation the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency became QinetiQ - both of them decided to insert a Q into their names. Is this the formula for increasing shareholder value in the GI industry?

Will EsriQ or IntergraphiQ or AutodesQ or even MiQrosoft be the next player to rebrand in an attempt to boost their share value. I left out the company that I work for because appending a Q to our name could sound rather vulgar.

Common sense in government

An interesting article on Free Our Data.

In a recent debate on Public Information (Comercial Use) Mark Todd MP and Gareth Thomas, seem to be agreeing on the benefits of the current trading fund model and the need for caution in determining an alternative.

Good to see that politicians are seeing through some of the arguments. Could this be the beginning of the end? I doubt it, there is still a Trading Funds Study to come and there is a good case for some change but not free data for commercial use.

The desktop is enterprise

Let me start with a couple of common generalisations:

• SOA is Enterprise
• Enterprise implies big and good
• Desktop means small scale, possibly old fashioned and not so good

Now you may quickly dispute those crude statements but I would guess that they will have a slight resonance for you or at the very minimum you will know several people who hold views somewhere close to them.

At GDC we were very committed to delivering more and more in a browser based interface. For a while we talked to clients about funding the cost of a web solution through reduced deployment of desktop software. Well a few years on we have not seen the predicted decline of desktop, in fact the sales of desktop continue to grow and those clients who thought they were going to reduce the number of desktop users keep finding new tasks.

Over the last couple of years MapInfo Professional (and most other mainstream desktop GIS products) have incorporated support for both OGC web services and some SOA offerings, in our case Envinsa On Line Services. The power of combining desktop tools with enterprise web services opens up a whole new range of possibilities particularly for the delivery of data rich capabilities such as geocoding or drivetime analysis.

As more and more capabilities are exposed as services so the opportunity to craft these services into custom workflows with desktop products will become the norm. Browser based applications are great for known workflows but the power of the desktop will be in the unknown, the ad hoc requirement.

Taking service for granted

Recently I have been doing quite a lot of travelling, airports and travel seem to be plagued with hassle. I have flown with BA each time and used their on line check in, meal choices and text warnings of delays and thought "that's not bad".

I went to Stockholm this week and by mistake flew with another airline, the on-line check-in didn't work, they did not have self service at Heathrow, self service at Stockholm was broken and the queue was about 45 minutes to check in with hand luggage only! Good for the blood pressure and left them with no goodwill when the flight was then delayed. Message - stick to BA if I can.

Now I think there is another message here for those of us building on-line services (mapping or otherwise) for clients - if the service is worth having you had better make sure that it is robust and keeps working 24 x 7 because if people get used to it and take it for granted they will be seriously fed up if the service goes down or disappears.

Lobby FODder

My attention was drawn to an article on eGov Monitor extolling the achievements of the Locus Association in "working with the Government and EU institutions to effectively commercialise public sector information in EU"

So who are the Locus Association? According to the article "The Locus Association is a group of private sector companies operating in the Public Sector Information (PSI) marketplace, who come from a range of sectors within the PSI marketplace.." actually it is a very focussed organisation with 15 of the 20 members listed on their website being involved in the Geographic Information Industry. However it should not be confused with principal industry association, the Association for Geographic Information which lists several hundred corporate members on its directory.

If you are interested in joining Locus you are directed to The Locus Association Secretary at Quintus PA whose web site says that they are "an independent political relations consultancy" who advise that "Informed planning, astute political awareness, tenacity in case making and first class communications skills are essential attributes for a public affairs programme." This lobbying firm is the only contact shown on the Locus Association web site.

Well I suppose "working with Government" is a creative euphemism for lobbying.

If you look at the Press archive on the Locus site you can get a sense of their focus - 28 articles over the last 18 months, but surprisingly (or not depending on your point of view) every one of them was published by The Guardian which also runs the Free Our Data campaign. Almost every article seems to be about GI rather than "from a range of sectors within the PSI marketplace" and a large proportion refer to the long running addressing dispute between Ordnance Survey and Intelligent Addressing (whose Managing Director is the current Chair of Locus). Is there a pattern evolving? Nothing untoward but I think a little more openness would be in order.

As for the coincidence that the Guardian series of articles and their FOD campaign started at almost the same time as the launch of the Locus Association, could it be the "tenacity in case making and first class communications skills" of Locus' lobbyists? Probably not - the guys at The Guardian and their FOD campaign couldn't possibly be Lobby FODder.

Governemnt Information Should be Free - we lost the vote but won the argument

On Monday evening I was invited to speak in a debate at the House of Commons organised by the Debating Group opposing the motion "Government Information should be Free". Speaking for the motion were Michael Cross of the Guardian and the Free Our Data Campaign and Neil Shepherd-Smith, Vanessa Lawrence (DG of OS) and I were opposing. My 16 year old daughter, Flora, who is studying politics could not resist the opportunity to hear her dad speaking in Committee Room 10, so I knew I had a fair chance of persuading one person to vote against.

I thought we were going to rehash the same arguments and to some extent we did:

OS data is funded by government so it should be freely available - no it isn't only half of OS revenue comes from the public sector and any way the data is free at the point of use by the public - but if it was available free to any business that wanted it there would be an enormous surge in creativity and loads of money for the tax payer - the economic case isn't proven and no doubt some of the beneficiaries would not be UK tax payers - anyway does anyone apart from FOD really want free OS data? - a tax payer funded model for the OS could leave the OS vulnerable to fluctuations in funding and investment - there are some ridiculous examples of duplication and infighting between sections of the public sector arising from this policy - yes there are particularly around addressing but don't forget that one of the most vocal protagonists in this particular debate is a private company not a public sector body etc etc etc ad nauseum

I have tried to capture the spirit of the arguments (not all of which were aired on Monday evening).

But there was a big surprise before I could lay into him with my rapier like wit and incisive comments Michael Cross attempted to remove the wind from his opponents sails by acknowledging that the economic growth argument based upon the US approach was unsubstantiated and that the US model had contributed to the poor quality and out of date mapping available for free! Game over I thought, he has thrown in the towel.

But no, Michael continued to point to some of the bizarre consequences of the current model (and some of these points are difficult to refute) Michael also suggested that an alternative to tax payer funding of OS could be a charge for change to the MasterMap database which would be borne by property developers, I think that would be a new tax and Michael did not really elaborate on how this might work, I seem to recall Robert Barr suggesting something similar a year or two ago. Not sure that this would be overly popular if it added to the cost of building a conservatory or a garage extension to your home.

It was an enjoyable evening, I don't think any entrenched opinions were significantly changed. I saw a few familiar faces from either side of the argument but most of the audience were not specialists and I wonder whether they really cared all that much about the topic. When it came to a vote the outcome was narrowly in favour of the motion 41 to 36, Flora thought they had miscounted the votes against and that we had carried the vote by 1 or 2 but you have to be a gracious loser.

At the end of the evening we had lost the vote but the proposer had conceded that one of his main justifications for his campaign was unproven, so maybe we moved one step closer to winning the argument.

If you haven't read Jeff Thurston's article at Vector 1 on the Importance of National Mapping Agencies in the knowledge economy you really should.