Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

I’ve been attending the AGI GeoCommunity Conference here in the UK for a few years now- and this year the AGI kindly asked me if I would sit on the working group for organising GeoCommunity 2011. Being completely new to conference organisation, and wanting to get some experience for the glorious day when OSGeo:UK holds FOSS4G in the UK, I jumped at the chance. This year’s event takes place from September 20-22nd, in Nottingham (a departure from previous years, where it has been in Stratford-upon-Avon),  but the working group has met a couple of times already to get things organised. To be honest, the AGI team themselves do most of the hard work, along with the Conference Chair, but the working group decides on things like keynote and plenary speakers, assesses the papers, and decides on really important things like the theme for the party. At the event itself, I understand we have the exciting business of stuffing all the conference bags with flyers, as well as being visible through the event to help people out, moderate sessions, keep speakers to time etc.

Last week we all met in Nottingham to work through the paper selection.  This year, around 80 abstracts were received, for approximately 50 slots. The AGI uses a blind marking process for selecting papers, so we all received the abstracts with the names and any organisational details removed and had to rank them in order. This is remarkably hard to do! It’s quite easy to identify the best and the worst papers, but deciding on the relative merits of (say) papers 53-67 is very difficult. It’s also hard to be objective about this kind of thing- everyone has their own particular likes and dislikes, and their own area of expertise. However, with a working group that represents a diverse range of interests, we did end up with a reasonable consensus at the end of this process. After the blind marking, considerably more paper shuffling took place to get a balanced set of conference streams.  Grouping papers into coherent sessions and balancing out speakers was probably the hardest part of the whole process (yes, by now we knew the authors names!). The whole process was a lot of fun, including the occasional acts of sabotage as papers were (literally) stolen from one stream to go into another.

In a completely non-scientific assessment of the abstracts- “openness” was reasonably popular, although perhaps more from an open/crowd sourced data perspective rather than open source software. In the final programme, however, open source software gets a mention in a number of papers spread across pretty much all of the streams. With hindsight I’m happy that this is the right approach as it avoids ghetto-ising open source solutions rather than presenting them as viable solutions to every day problems. The whole open/crowd-sourced data debate does get its own stream though, as it’s such a popular topic at the moment.

All in all, I have to say I’m in awe of the AGI staff who make all of this look so easy. I’m also really looking forward to the event, as the programme looks really good, and the new venue should be fantastic. If you’re interested, early bird bookings are available till the end of July. For those that know about the now infamous AGI soap-box georant- it’s new location will be superb…

Last weekend was the second Wherecamp EU Unconference, this time at the University of Nottingham. A mighty good time was had by all, I think! It attracted a different crowd to the previous event, back in February in London. There were less of the “big names” there, but a lot of new faces, which is encouraging. Again, the Unconference format worked well, with people doing talks on a range of subjects, some only after being persuaded to the night before!

There was a good contingent of open source and OSGeo-related material. Thanks go to the Centre for Geospatial Statistics at the University, who have been heavily involved with OSGeo (particularly the UK chapter) over the last couple of years for this – it was a great chance to give some new people the old “Introduction to OSGeo” talk, and also my hastily knocked together “10 open source geospatial myths debunked” (both will be up on slideshare when I get chance).

Of the talks I got to attend- I most enjoyed Jeremy Morley’s talk on Vernacular Geography based around people’s perception of place- what they call places, where the boundaries are, and whether they like a place or not. There was some interesting discussion on an open database of vernacular place names- though I think this would be better fitted with one of the existing efforts around place names rather than something new and separate. However with all this linked data goodness we keep hearing about, maybe being separate doesn’t really matter, as long as we can link things together.

Otherwise, of course OpenStreetMap got  a few mentions- a stand-out was on accuracy in OSM, and efforts around measuring this in various ingenious ways. Antony Scott did an interesting talk on (paraphrasing) “Things I got stuck on with open source web mapping and how I fixed them”. The conclusion from both his talk and audience reactions was that we still have some way to go with ease of use and documentation.

Thanks should also go to the AGI who provided us with geobeer money on Friday night!

All in all, a great couple of days- thanks to all involved.

Day Two of AGI Geocommunity kicked off with some heavy-weight (in the nicest possible sense of the word) speakers in the shape of Lai Wah Co from the CBI and Vanessa Lawrence of Ordnance Survey. Lai Wah Co gave us an economic perspective to hang our insecurities onto, focused mainly on the impact on public sector jobs. That kind of thing makes my head all fuzzy, so I’ll bow to the wisdom of the twitter back channel- and say that some people’s mortgages are going to go up, some people’s will stay the same, and we’re looking at about 2 more years of hardship before getting back to the same sort of state we were before.

Vanessa Lawrence probably enjoyed her talk much more this year, after all she stayed for the full two days rather than making a quick escape. Again quoting from the twitter back channel- at least there were no angry mobs burning maps in the car park this time! The key point of interest was on the new licensing and derived data rules, that have subsequently been released and are much simpler than before (though still not perfect).

Bill Oates showed us some very pretty maps and apps that his team at the Welsh Assembly have been delivering- making the point that “maps are our best sales tool”. This does hark back to the point made a number of times on Day One- that we as an industry need to provide solutions to problems rather than just talking about the tools. He was followed by a value-for-money talk from Ian Painter of Snowflake Software on how exactly you go about doing this whole “open data thing”.  He made the really good point that to the rest of the IT industry, GI is just a tiny pimple, and our shape files and georeferenced tiffs are pretty much unknown outside our own little community. So when we talk about making our data open, we can’t just go around giving people shape files, we need to focus on the xml-based web formats that other IT people will actually understand.

In the afternoon I attended a frankly perplexing talk on cartography for the 21st century, that made me feel like I’d stepped back 10 years. I was expecting to be shown some really pretty maps, perhaps with a dash of MapNik or similar, but what we got was an ode to rasters and a total confusion about the difference between data and display. Oh well…

The Plenary session was clearly chosen to keep as many bums on seats as possible! Nigel Shadbolt delivered a rapid-fire discussion on open data, and the rationale behind it. Finally, the prizes for best paper as voted by the committee, and by the delegates, both went to Lisa Thomas of the Coal Authority, which I’m sorry I missed!

There have been a number of comments about this year’s conference, and the dislocation between the energy of the preceding W3G unconference and the main conference itself. Perhaps it was a mistake not to include a geoweb stream in the main conference, or perhaps W3G should have followed on afterwards, who knows. From my totally uninformed position of not having attended W3G, I wonder whether there has been a game change since last year though? We’ve got our free data to play with, and Ordnance Survey is officially not so evil. There are less things to rant about, and quite frankly when people are worried about their job, less justification for shiny web apps and cool things…

I’ve been out at a couple of Association for Geographic Information (AGI) events over the last couple of weeks- organised by their Northern Group. Their main function is to organised events in the North of England (hence the name), but the outgoing chairman Rollo, has been really pushing for events with a national attendance and relevance. I spoke briefly at both events, and my talks can be found on slideshare and on my talks page here.

The first event, a couple of weeks ago now, was Where2Now- a lively scamper through some leading edge ideas, mainly about geographic location for the masses rather than technical GIS per se (yes, I’m trying to avoid using the word NeoGeography, but that’s what I’m talking about). There were speakers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap, Geovation, Ordnance Survey- in fact if you attended the Geoweb stream at the main AGI conference you’ll have a good idea who spoke! I did a short talk on the impact of “open” (access/source/data) as a disruptive technology (as far as I’m concerned this neo/mashup/open era wouldn’t be here without it), and attempted to demo a couple of deeply cool new toys that we’re working with at the moment- mapchat and gvsigmobile, both of which I think have the potential to be incredibly useful and really big. Unfortunately my laptop had stage fright and refused to speak to the monitor, so I couldn’t do a live demo of gvsigmobile as I wanted to.

Perhaps my favourite talk of the day was John McKerrell, talking about mapme.at, with his geo-clock (if you’ve read Harry Potter, remember the Weasley’s clock, with hands for each member of the family pointing to where they are at any given moment). Luckily John hasn’t found a need for a “mortal peril” setting yet! Mapme.at is great- it’s one of those ideas which can only work with the ubiquitous nature of geolocation these days, in phones, and with all the geo-location apis that you can use. Basically it’s a way of mapping where you are, and of plotting your location history, using feeds from twitter, email, google latitude, fire eagle etc.  Someone asked what it could be used for, but I think that’s missing the point somewhat- John has provided the basic idea,  and it’s up to the user to figure out what to do with it!

Again, the #geocom twitter stream going on in the background provided an interesting counter-point to the talks, although it’s increasingly worrying as a speaker not knowing if there’s a discussion about how rubbish you are going on while you’re giving the talk!

The second event I attended last week was a World GIS Day event at the Grammar School in Leeds. This followed on from the incredibly successful closing presentation at the main AGI conference, in which kids from the school, and a couple of their teachers discussed the way in which GIS is used throughout the whole school. The event last week was a chance for professional GIS users to talk a little about the way in which they use GIS, and also to see in more detail how GIS is used in the school. We also attended part of a sixth-form geography lesson, which was really interesting (not the least for the looks of abject trauma on all the attendee’s faces at sitting in a class room again after many years).

With my “open” hat on, I was quite uneasy about the way in which ESRI is synonymous with GIS in that environment, but to be fair it’s because they have worked extremely hard to provide the material for the teachers, which isn’t yet available anywhere else. My other concern was that teaching GIS seemed to be more about teaching which buttons to press to get a particular result, rather than teaching the theory and asking the kids how to figure it out *in that particular software package*. My “open source” side is frustrated that they are producing a generation of kids who will think ESRI is the only GIS to use, and when they are in  a position to influence the use of GIS themselves, within organisations,  or other schools, that’s the route they will choose. However, where in a school curriculum is the chance to give kids a choice, and how can open source provide them with that? Things to think about…