Terra Future or even terrible future - you could get depressed or ....

I've been at Terra Future for the last two days. Ordnance Survey organised the event at the RGS with a theme of "Tackling grand challenges through mass collaboration" the challenges being:

• Sustainable living
• Climate change
• Sustainable transport

Pretty worthy stuff though I went in not sure that these problems could actually be solved by more use of Mastermap. Fortunately this was a much broader event than just GI with a wide range of thought provoking speakers talking about the challenges, the potential of current and future technologies to address or ease the problems and some good discussion of the need foir behavioural change from all of us and "collective responsibility" for the planet.

Rather than write up the whole event I tweeted a lot of instantaneous impressions (not all favourable) and some paraphrased quotes that caught my attention. You can read through my thoughts at #terfut (abbreviated Terra Future) - start at the bottom and read upwards to get the flow of the event over the 2 days.

I was not sure of the value of the industry speakers explaining how they were cutting their carbon footprints (or should that be feetprint?) worthy as that was it might have gone down better at a CBI conference than for this academic and GI audience. The rest of the content was good to excellent - of special note for me was Robin Mannings starring as the nutty professor and being thought provoking on ubiquitous location and a sensored world and David Putnam finishing with some inspirational stuff including the idea that mass collaboration and the social web could help to change attitudes and behaviours. He also ranted a bit against the corrosive effect of the media in stifling informed and sensible discussion in the political sphere, he certainly doesn't like the Daily Mail (neither do I).

There was a great bit to the event each day entitled Pecha Kucha where a series of speakers  stand for 6min 40 secs and talk on their topic to 20 slides which auto advance after exactly 20 seconds each. Very intense and no one overran! Could be something we try at GeoCommunity this year.

All in all a very good event with the highs massively outweighing the lows. Shame there weren't more people attending. A follow up is planned so look out for it.

And my take away from the event is that as Putnam said we have been living connsequenceless lives for most of the last century, time is running out and we have to start changing our behaviours in some quite radical ways and not wait for someone else to go first or come up with a golden technical bullet. I'm off to make sure that we have turned off the lights in all the unoccupied rooms in casa Feldman - at least that's a start.

Blackberry maps

A press release from TDC caught my attention "New GIS software for Blackberry under $1000". I initially thought $1000/user sounded rather pricy but in fact it is $999 for a server licence with unlimited numbers of users sitting on top of ArcGIS Server.

The application looks quite neat and the list of US local government clients suggests that they have identified a market. 

Many people have identified mobile workflows as "the next big thing" but the challenges of cost (I know of apps that do sell at well over $1000 per user) plus the need to deploy on an additional device (GPS/PDA combination, ruggedised laptop/tablet, with or without connectivity etc) have probably been a big limiting factors. A relatively simple install and the massive footprint of Blackberries could change things.

Will be interesting to see whether this takes off in the UK public sector and utilities. Not sure whether the usage of Blackberry is quite as pervasive.

Ads aren't enough

Budding geo-entrepreneurs should take time to listen to this Directions podcast that reviews 3 unsuccessful startups. 

Makes me wonder whether now is such a great time for startups.

Educational Links

I have blogged a couple of times on using GI within the schools sylabus. I inteneded to regularly update the Educational Links section in the side panel here but haven't got round to it for ages. So many thanks to Mark Smith of the Grammar School at Leeds for his mail.

As for good educational links, their scarcity is part of the problem teachers face in implementing school based GIS, especially when it comes to sourcing data. 

You might have a look at the main teacher support sites at

http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Schools/Resources/GIS/Geographical+Information+Science.htm

http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/spatiallyspeaking

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gisfiles/

 and a good school GIS site is

http://www.ke5ways.bham.sch.uk/kegs/cpd/gis_index.htm

There is some material at http://www.geographyteachingtoday.org.uk/fieldwork/info/teaching-technology/

and Noel Jenkins’ site at http://www.geographypages.co.uk/gis.htm is worth a look

Hyperlocal doesn't need maps

This afternoon I was talking with some friends at BeLocal about their soon to be launched local communities site. 

The discussion was about when you are discovering what is happening in your (hyper) local area do you need a map to locate events, news, community activity etc? I felt that the nature of hyperlocal is that you know your local geography and you don't need a map to understand where things are relative to your home or workplace, others disagreed.

Some market research, what do you think?

Welcome back Eduardo

Off topic. 

Just the joy of seeing Eduardo da Silva make his first start for Arsenal after the most horrendous injury a year ago. Oh yes he scored twice just to put the icing on the cake.

Welcome back Eduardo!

A bit of geography Eduardo was born in Brazil, lived in Croatia and elected to play for their national team and now plays in North London. See - football is all about geography, or is it the other way round?

CloudMade goes into the GYM

Belated congratulations to the CloudMade team for a sparkling and professional event last Thursday that would put some of the duller mainstream players in the shadows.

For those of you who don't know CloudMade, they are the business that is endeavouring to deliver robust commercial services, through their recently launched API's, on top of the community sourced OpenStreetMap data. Which brings me to a point of confusion for me and I believe for others, the relationship between CloudMade and OSM. The event started with a high tempo presentation on OpenStreetMap from Steve Coast, the founder of OSM and a co-founder with Nick Black of CloudMade. The animation illustrating the pace of growth of OSM around the globe was almost Googlesque. Apparently there will soon be 100,000 contributors to OSM, it would be interesting to understand what proportion of the community are active, Steve referred to the OSM experience as being "addictive" - I wonder how sustainable the crowd sourcing model will be when this generation start to develop other interests? There was some discussion in the Q&A session about the extent of completeness of OSM following Steve's statement that "Germany will be complete this year" however no one was willing to say what constituted complete. What is important to note is the richness and variety of the attribution and PoI themes that are being captured as part of OSM (footpaths, building details, ATMs) which go way beyond those addressed by the mainstream navigation database companies.

Next up was Nick Black another UCL graduate (it's impressive how many of the innovators in the neogeo community have come out of that organisation, they must be doing something pretty good there) moving the focus to the new CloudMade developer API's.  His buzz phrase to describe the new capabilities was that "CloudMade overcomes Google Maps fatigue!" - an ambitious target to say the least. There were 3 themes to his presentation:

• Cusomisable maps/cartography
• A richer user experience
• Applications spanning web and mobile

Then there were some case studies from early adopters of the CloudMade API's. Chris Osborne's Where Can I Live? app for Nestoria is a neat way of trawling for property based on your journey time to work via public transport. The customisable tiles from CloudMade make for a visually more attractive map but I am not sure that the difference from using Google Maps is so great that it would encourage me to switch. Great app though if you are looking to rent or buy in London.

Next up was Nutiteq, a platform for mobile operators and applications. I didn't get this one and could not see the point in yet another platform, even if it did run on open source data. 

Finally there was mapme.at a location based social networkin app that lets you save and display your location history. Sort of "where were you when .............?" Another one that baffled me.

Then James Brown, their CTO, introducing the audience to the CloudMade Developer Zone. They have clearly thought this through well and willl gain a good following of developers sharing code and supporting each other, a community in other words.

Finally in the Q&A we got to the topic that had been puzzling me throughout the evening, where is the money? I was beginning to think that I needed a hearing aid or new glasses (I probably do). Gary Gale of Yahoo asked the big question which (in my opinion rather tellingly) Juha Christiensen, the CloudMade Chairman fielded. Apparently the revenue model goes something like this, the developer API's and low usage/data volumes are free, higher levels of usages willl either attract a transaction model or will be based on advertising revenue that CloudMade will aggregate and feed to partners' apps with a revenue share between the partner and CloudMade in which case the partner will receive money from CloudMade rather than pay them - sounds good for signing up partners but may be a little thin in terms of generating revenue for CloudMade. The infrastructure to support these services as they grow in adoption plus the team of bright people are going to cost a fair amount. They haven't yet come up with a model for the public and third sectors who I would have thought would be attarcted to the styling and open source credentials of the underlying data, that could be a great opportunity if they get it right. Astonishingly Juha claimed that the market would be $100bn by 2013! I am not sure whether that was for location based applications or what but it sounds astronomic to me.

A great launch event from the CloudMade team with some good features, whether they are unique enough to carve out a successful future in the face of intense competition from the heavyweights in the GYM, I am not sure. I hope so because we need some disruption to keep innovation pushing ahead and also because the OSM concept while not neccessarily an answer to every mapping requirement (particularly where completeness and accuracy is critical) is a project that the GeoCommunity needs and wants. 

GeoCommunity - Call for Papers

The call for papers for GeoCommunity '09 was launched today. The themes are grouped as 

• Enterprise Mashups
• Futures
• UK SDI
• Informal Geography
• Data Politics
• RoI
• Geography Making a Difference

Submit a paper, if your paper is selected you will get a free days attendance at the conference.

If you twitter (or even if you don't) you can follow the discussion around the conference by following GeoCommunity on Twitter or just by searching for #GeoCommunity

Debate can lead to agreement

The other night I was invited to speak at a Free Our Data debate hoted by the Policy Exchange thinktank. In the absence of any government speakers or representatives of the Trading Funds I think I was there as a surrogate. 

I have participated in the discussion about policy and funding of geographic data for a while now and the dialogue has probably helped me and other participants to find an increasing amount of common ground. So much so that Charles Arthur said of me the other night "that's not the real Steven Feldman" to which I could have replied "do my eyes deceive me, is that really scourge of OS?"

So this is what I think we agree upon. 

• Easy and costless access to public sector information for other parts of the public sector, the third sector and community groups and individuals
  
• Simple licensing and transparent commercial charges and practices for business who wish to add value to public sector information
• A sustainable funding model for those Trading Funds that are currently dependent upon licensing revenues

Now that sounds simple doesn't it?

Debate on Free Our Data? Government Agencies and Copyright

The Policy Exchange, a think tank, is hosting a debate tomorrow evening Feb 10th at 5pm in Westminster. 

Speakers are Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at Google and Charles Arthur, Editor of Guardian Technology,  Shane O’Neill, consultant and member of APPSI and Adam Afriyie, the Shadow Minister for Innovation, plus yours truly. 

Hopefully in the light of the PoIT report we can move the discussion on a bit.

If you fancy coming along mail the organisers

Power of Information Taskforce Beta Report

The awesomely named Power of Information Taskforce has published a beta version of its report for comment. There is a lot to read but for me the overall thrust of the report is summarised by this excerpt from the exec summary:

This report is about improving Digital Britons’ online experience by providing expert help from the public sector online, where people seek it, and by freeing up the UK’s public sector information for innovative new services.  This reports seeks to move into the mainstream activities that are currently minority best practice.

For geofolk the bit that they will want to jump to is the section on Trading Funds which slightly surprisingly to me sits within the section on Reforming Geospatial Data. Well to be honest I am not completely surprised as a major focus of the PoI Taskforce has been the OS (they rightly point to the massive importance of geographic infiormation in the public sector information landscape) but there seems to be little or no mention of other trading funds within this section or elsewhere in the report. Surely the Royal Mail PAF, the DVLA or the Environment Agency are not immune from some recommendations for improved access?

That said the report makes some fairly sensible recommendations which don't appear to be as dramatic as might have been expected:

It is the Taskforce’s view that the Ordnance Survey requires urgent reform.  Recent announcements of cost reductions at the Ordnance Survey point the way to wider reforms. This reform should include at a minimum:

• Basic geographic data such as electoral and administrative boundaries, the location of public buildings, etc should be available free of charge to all.
• There should be simple, free access to general mapping and address data for modest levels of use by any user
• Voluntary and community organisations pursuing public policy objects should benefit from straightforward standard provisions for ensuring access to geospatial data at all levels of use
• Licensing conditions should be simplified and standardised across the board and, for all but the heaviest levels of use, should be on standard terms and conditions and should not depend on the intended use or the intended business model of the user.
• The OpenSpace API, similar to but currently a constrained version of Google Maps, should become the primary delivery point for the Ordnance Survey’s services

There is not a lot to argue with here, although I imagine there will be a lot of tension around the definition of "modest use" and "all but the heaviest levels of use" To achieve some of these recommendations we will also need to see changes to the licensing terms for the PAF without which all postcode based searches require a license, hence my comments about other trading funds. 

The last recommendation on Open Space is certainly going to spark some heated discussion, it will be interesting to see how Google and OSM and their developer communities respond to this one.

Whether these recommendations really require "urgent reform" or some modest reorganisation is debatable. The Trading Funds Review must be nearly ready to publish their proposals, I wonder whether they are having a quick look at the PoI Taskforce Report before going final with their plans for OS et al? 

Remember you can comment on the Taskforce beta report for about another week

US NSDI as economic stimulus

In the last month three groups have submitted proposals to the US Government for funding to create a US National Map or NSDI within the $700Bn economic resuscitation bill.

Directions posed 3 questions to each of the authors:

1. Before it was posted to the Web, to whom was the proposal sent for review, if anyone?
2. Was the proposal sent to, or formally presented to, any members of the U.S. Congress or their staff? If so, please share with whom and when.
3. What current efforts are underway to further the acceptance and inclusion of your proposal into the stimulus package? Are you looking for endorsements? Letters of support to congresspeople?

One might gain the impression that these counter proposals are more about gaining competitive advantage than stimulating the economy or the national interest. 

Of course we wont have these concerns as the UK SDI starts to publish implementation plans!

Building and Engaging Local Communities

I've been spending time with a startup called BeLocal who are working in the HyperLocal space. You will get to see the launch of BeLocal in the next few weeks.

Yesterday we ran a small workshop entitled "Building and Engaging Local Communities through Digital Technology". This very comprehensive post by Carl Haggerty from Devon County Council is a brilliant summary of the event and some of the thoughts that it prompted.

If you want to know a bit more, mail me through the Kontactr on this site

Latitude

There has been a lot written in the last few days about the launch of Google's tracking service - Latitude. Jonathan Raper's post covers the topic and opinions well. My only addition would be the thought that it seems like sour grapes that now Google have launched their own mobile phone they have relegated the iPhone to the back of the queue, not that I really care since I don't think I want to broadcast my location in this way (bound to forget to switch it off and on as appropriate)

Is this Location Based Social Networking? I don't think so, unless you consider Google to be your social network. There are already tools which seek to map your Facebook friends or twitter accomplices and several startups have tried to build new networks with location more tightly embedded, dopplr or brightkite are examples. None of these seem to have really caught on and popular wisdom is that the killer apps will come from MySpace or Facebook when they fully integrate location into their platforms and mobile clients, which they surely will do soon. Perhaps Latitude will be the toolkit to prompt them to add location.

Getting Legal

Adena Schutzberg has a very good article on Directions discussing different Terms of Service for web mapping API's and the issues of derived data.

It prompted the thought that almost no one who works with these API's or is a geo-practitioner ever studied law or thought they would have to get into these complex issues with megacorps. Still I guess that is the case for all software users.

#uksnow

Yesterday afternoon at 12:02 Julian Bray started a new hashtag #uksnow on Twitter with the post 

#UKSNOW Starting thread as Met Office Alerts are usually rubbish! RT and tweet conditions to#UKSNOW and if stuck in snowdrift!

Hashtags are a community determined way of identifying a topic on twitter and provide a quick way to search for comment on a topic and to track trends. Anyone can create a hashtag just by typing it into a posting (I started #geocommunity as a hashtag for this year's conference) then it is over to the viral transmission of the tag to determine its use.

People started responding with local reports and less than half an hour later someone incorporated their postcode in their update. Just over an hour after the hashtag had been initiated Paul Clarke suggested an informal standard for reporting the progress of the anticipated snow storm

paul_clarke: snow? tag with #uksnow and 1st part postcode then some bright spark will mashup amazing time/snow map. or something

A few minutes later Paul posted a slightly more refined version

paul_clarke: #uksnow [1st part postcode] [n/10] on a notional #snowscale to give mashing a chance

Gradually this informal format was tweeted and picked up by more and more of the twitter community, by the end of the evening as the snow started to come down heavily about half the posts were using the format. At the time of writing #uksnow is the second most posted topic after the Superbowl with over 3600 posts.

Now I don't normally post on trends in the social networks but there is a postcode in this informal format and Ben Marsh put together this mashup which searches for tweets with #uksnow and maps them by postcode. It builds up cumulatively as the tweets come through each minute so you may not see much if you are reading this a few days after posting. Here is a screengrab from this morning.

An impressive example of how a social network can be an almost instantaneous  means for crowdsourcing observations. There is a lot of potential in this, how about #ukcrunchfeel [1st part of postcode] [n/10] where n is your level of optimism today on a scale of 0 - depressed to 10 euphoric? Loads of opportunities here.

The buses aren't running today, no cars getting up or down the hill I live on, school closed and kids gone tobogganning. Still snowing

#uksnow N10 3/10

Geomeltdown

Directions asked a number of industry leaders whether people should invest or cut back on geotech. 

Hardly surprising that a group of Geo-business heads all recommend continuing investment in their products and services! Turkeys don't vote for Christmas. 

I fear that in the real world hard pressed executives trying to reduce costs will not be convinced by promises of jam tomorrow and will ask for evidence of achievements to date. In some sectors outside of government that may be hard to demonstrate