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…

… or there again, there might not!

This is just a heads up for a couple of events/workshops that I’m involved in over the next couple of weeks and months.

Firstly, next Tuesday is the AGI Northern Group Where2.0Now one-day conference, at GeoPlan in Harrogate. If you want to know what this whole “neogeography” thing is, and what it means to you, then be there or be terribly antiquated. There are some great speakers lined up (and me, but beggars can’t be choosers), and it’s looking like a good day. With luck and a fair wind I will have “cool things” to show too…

Secondly, in January 2010 I’m helping on a 2-day workshop at Lancaster University on open source GIS. We did this last year, and it was well received, so it’s getting a reprisal. There’s a flyer here, and you can book here. For UK higher ed or other educational types, it’s pretty cheap if you ask me, and the food’s good too.

Hope you can make it to one or both of these.

I also did a talk last week to local government types, on how open source GIS could be viable within their organisation. The slides are up on slideshare if you’re interested!

To keynote or not to keynote… I chose not, so missed out on the triumvirate of ESRI, Ordnance Survey and Pitney Bowes and instead watched a series of talks ostensibly on “the GeoWeb” instead.  By the time Andy Allen from Cloudmade finished his talk I felt like I’d been run over by an unstoppable OpenStreetMap juggernaut (in a nice way, you understand). I had a bit of an epiphany about their flexible data paradigm, after all, how could you tag a road in the West Bank as one-way if you’re Palestinian and two-way if you’re Israeli without it? More “Open” from John McKerrell from mapme.at, talking about the OSM alternative to Google StreetView, imaginatively entitled “OpenStreetView“. It’s at an early stage but promises a lot, and they are addressing privacy concerns quite nicely.

Martin Daly of CadCorp won the award for the most interesting title (Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria), and of course gets points for showing the actual clip from Ghostbusters where that quote comes from. The main thing I took away from his talk about neo and palaeo was that it’s all still geography regardless of what label you put on it, and that it should be about what’s good, not what’s new.

Brian Norman from Earthware did a great talk about creating applications for Real Estate and Travel, hampered only by the fact that he had to do a live silverlight plugin installation. I hadn’t really thought explicitly about the way Estate Agents would want to censor mapping data (showing you the nice park nearby, but not the nightclub). I also hadn’t considered their need for more detailed, up to date imagery to ensure that, as the visitor, you’re not put off by out of date pictures of half-built extensions, or the dreaded grey box telling you to zoom out.

Winner of the best presentation, as voted by the punters, was the BBC with their Story-telling on Maps. It’s amazing what you can do with the might of the BBC R and D department, and lots of help from the Ordnance Survey! To be fair, what they have produced is a very slick API for tying movement on the map to actions in a video, and it’s incredibly well presented. There was a collective gasp from the audience when they rotated a piece of raster mapping, and the text stayed at the correct rotation… (a gift from the OS and not something us mere mortals can do).

I thought it was a little unfair that the afternoon’s sessions from Ed Parsons and Peter ter Haar were changed on the hoof from simple back to back presentations to some sort of boxing match. Ed got to deliver the presentation he had prepared, whereas Peter had to ad lib responses whilst trying to give his own talk. Having said that, Ed’s demonstration of the idiocy of derived data was an absolute masterpiece and Peter didn’t stand much of a chance. This is a shame as he was trying to launch some fairly innovative (for the OS) new products including (finally) OS on Demand- a service based delivery system for data.

The concluding plenary put a lot of the previous presentations to shame. 15 and 17 year olds from Leeds Grammar School, along with two of their teachers, presented on the use of GIS within all aspects of their curriculum, not just geography. It really was great to see GIS being used so innovatively, and though there was some unease on the twitter back channel about the ESRI influence, that shouldn’t detract from their achievements.

On to the concluding remarks and prizes.  Steven Feldman stepped down as conference chair, and seemed genuinely sorry to go. Everyone, in fact, seemed genuinely sorry to see the end of the conference. I think the organising team got the “community” aspect just right this time round, even more so than last year.

My own take on the trends from this year- OSM, all over the place, and in particular Walking Papers. The neo/palaeo debate, even amongst people who claimed not to care. Frustration about Ordnance Survey derived data and licensing. Twitter as a valid conference tool. All things beginning with geo. Roll on next year…

The AGI conference last week in Stratford-upon-Avon was well worth attending, with (I thought) a really good vibe and some great presentations. I thought the twitter feed, new for this year, was a real hit, as was the ability to see talks online via slideshare soon after they had been given. The twitter feed in particular gave you a chance to see what other people watching the same presentation were thinking, and occasionally caused some jealousy as people realised they’d picked the less interesting track!

Steven Feldman’s final introduction as chairman of the conference is probably a good place to start for a feel for how it went. Attendance was up from last year (600+), which was reassuring, given the financial circumstances, with a more international spread of attendees- great for a predominantly UK-based conference. He said it was no longer about “how” you did something, in other words using packages X and Y, but “why”.

The conference tagline was “Realising the Value of Place”, which is quite clever and multi-faceted. “Place” is not the same as “location”. It’s about asking why people feel happier in one place than another, and why life-expectancy differs between London Boroughs. “Value” can also be taken in a number of ways. There’s the value of a place, mentioned above, but also as an industry in a recession we need to learn how to get financial value from what we do, and controversially, how to get value from “free” (Steven’s term, not mine), as it’s not going to go away (Yay).

The two keynotes, from Peter Batty and Andrew Turner were also interesting. Peter described the current climate as a geospatial revolution, as the industry migrates from the more established mainstream technologies such as desktop GIS to more disruptive technology such as the web and crowd-sourcing. This was the first mention of OpenStreetmap, and in particular Walking Papers, but believe me it wasn’t the last…

Andrew Turner stirred the Neo/Palaeo pot (again not the last time this came up), but perhaps came closest to defining the difference between the two- as a shift from tool-centric to user-centric. Actually this ties in very well with Steven’s comments about moving from the “how” to the “why”, and also with Peter’s comments about disruptive technologies. I think the one thing that’s very clear is that it is a total mind-set shift, and people (or organisations) that don’t adapt or evolve will be become irrelevant. Someone asked the question “how do we make money from this?”, and again there is a total shift here. Massive license fees simply won’t work in a market where people know about crowd-sourcing, free data and micro-payments a la iPhone apps.

Surprisingly, the best paper I saw in the two days, and a deserved winner of the committees best paper, and a runner up for the attendee’s best presentation, was Robert Barr’s talk on Core Reference Geographies (CRG). I didn’t even know such things existed till then, though logically they should. From the UK’s Location Strategy these are: “Commonly used geographic datasets that provide a framework for linking and integrating other geo-referenced information as well as providing key contextual information”.The establishment of CRG in the UK have been talked about for several years, but only ever talked about, yet they should be absolutely fundamental. There needs to be a cost/benefit study for creating these CRG and making them available, and also an analysis of what it costs not to do it. Robert made the comparison between the CRG and other Core Reference datasets such as DNS. The same sort of funding method (pay for inclusion but not for use) could potentially be used to fund the CRG. The one negative point I had was the lack of reference to the spatial data themes talked about in the INSPIRE directive, as it seems to make sense to ensure that these (if mandated) are all core datasets.

Another stand-out presentation on Day One was on the historical development of “place” by Martin Laker. He talked about how current boundaries in fact have a heritage going back to the Black Death, and even earlier. Clearly the geography of the UK has always been tangled up and complicated (cf with the difficulty in setting up the CRGs), so all government has to do now is blame it on the Plague…

James Cutler from emapsite presented on the Geoweb’s cultural heritage (sorry, can’t find the link), but I got frustrated when he basically dismissed the problem of data licensing by saying that it’s not really all that expensive. It became clear to me that archaeology, and perhaps other environmental disciplines, have a use-case that is totally under-represented in the great licensing debate.

Day One concluded with the GeoCommunity Soapbox, a new invention for this conference. Speakers were given 5 minutes and 15 equally spaced slides, to talk about anything “geo” that they wanted. When coupled with a live view of the twitter feed and free geobeer this was a recipe for carnage and I think it’s probably good that the wifi (and hence the twitter feed) collapsed under the strain early in the proceedings. The best soapbox rant was definitely Ian Painter’s, now a veritable internet sensation.

General trends- lots of Neo/Palaeo discussion, despite exhortations that “I’m not Neo/Palaeo (delete as appropriate) but…”. This mind-shift clearly worries a lot of people, and the industry is in a process of change as it tries to re-position itself. OpenStreetMap and allied projects are definitely on the up. The back-channels (twitter in particular) were just as important as the presentations and the face-to-face discussions.

Day Two to follow…

Just a quick note to say that I’ve been away on holiday for a fortnight, in gorgeous Orkney in the far north of Scotland. A fortnight of absolutely no computers (apart from downloading digital photos), wandering around beautiful islands with sandy beaches (OK, mostly in the driving wind or pouring rain), visiting Chambered Cairns, drinking whiskey and generally chilling out. I have to say that I very much enjoyed disengaging from technology, information streams and general online interaction very much, so obviously needed the break! I’d post a photo or two but haven’t got round to QA-ing them all yet!

I’m off to the AGI conference in Stratford this afternoon, and would welcome the opportunity to meet up with folk while I’m there- we’re intending some kind of informal OSGeo UK meetup on Thursday but I’ll be around for both days. I’ll blog about the conference while I’m there if I get the chance.

As someone else said recently, the advantage of catching up on several weeks of RSS posts all at once is that you see some trends and relationships that you’d probably miss otherwise. One that caught my eye was this, from Martin Daly, in response to a long and thought-provoking piece on open source by Ian Bicking. Without trying to second-guess either Ian or Martin, it’s clear that there are always going to be different motivations for adopting and working with open source. Via a tortuous chain of links I revisited this post of Paul Ramsey’s from last year, responding to a Jack Dangermond interview, in which open source is mentioned and summarily dismissed. Paul is uneasy with the political connotations of calling open source a “movement”, but for some people that’s clearly what it is.

I’m beginning to see open source as being a choice similar to choosing organic food, or going green. For some people, this is a political movement. For others, nothing else makes any logical sense. For others, it’s a purely market-driven decision, and I’m sure there are many more motivations. The different camps don’t always sit nicely together, and occasionally see each other as harming the general cause. But we should all take heart from the fact that going green used to be the province of the yoghurt-eating, hemp-wearing hippies, but we’re all recycling and changing our light-bulbs to energy savers (and even eating yoghurt and wearing hemp) now.

I attended (and spoke at) the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Technical Special Interest Group Open Source Event yesterday- down at the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge (I want to work there, they have skiddoos parked in their carpark). The event was designed to kick off the newly invigorated Tech SIG, after a hiatus of several years. I can understand why there was a hiatus- the other SIGs have a more defined focus, such as the Environment, or Crime and Disorder and so on. The Technical SIG covers all areas, from a methodological point of view at least, and yet doesn’t want to tread on the other group’s feet.

Anyhow, the Open Source event was fairly well attended- with 30-odd people there, most of whom were new to the group, which bodes well. Alongside my own talk (on “Going Open-available on the talks page), there were talks from Paul Cooper (a roadmap of Open Source components for GIS web services and clients, and the South Georgia GIS) and Andrew Fleming from the BAS (access and delivery of Polar Satellite Imagery), Andrew Mackay from IPL (Using Open Source software in operational systems) and Gillan Arnold and Egbe Equavoen from the Ordnance Survey (OS Web Map tools).

A general observation- almost everyone talked about using some combination of geoserver/postgresql/openlayers. Other packages were mentioned in passing, but these were the big 3, the packages du jour. That’s not to say that there aren’t perfectly viable alternatives, but these ones definitely seem to have the momentum at the moment. It was nice to spread the word about mapfish though, which most people hadn’t heard of!

Andrew Mackay talked about using open source to deliver crime mapping to Kent Police. The thing about Andrew’s talk that stood out was the discussion about software development cycles. At first glance this seems like overkill for the majority of small-scale mapping applications. But then IPL are involved in some very large-scale application development, and probably understand more than most the need to get it exactly right.  I did begin to think that a little more discipline in my software development would be a good idea, even if the full cycle as per the textbook is a little too much!

Andrew Fleming’s talk about Polar satellite imagery was interesting. He raised a lot of issues around the delivery of the imagery, as near to real-time as possible, with less than brilliant communication lines (not much broadband in Antarctica).  For their needs, georss was a better bet than wms, due to speed and the size of the data set. They are still looking for a solution for deploying 3D and radar data, but have yet to come up with an optimal solution. Answers on a penguin to…

The demo of the Ordnance Survey’s web mapping tools was interesting, but ultimately frustrating because whatever you do with it you’re still hamstrung by the data license. The basic tool itself is a integrated postgresql/openlayers setup, with some nice extras for cutting their mapping tiles into handy chunks, and built-in geocoding (if you have the license…). I was hoping to hear that they are ready to start rolling out wms access to their data with an innovative new pricing structure, but no, so I’ll keep waiting for that.

The end discussion revolved around people’s concerns over the “risk” of open source either in general or in their organisation, and the need for traditional support agreements. In simple terms there was a basic division between those organisations with in-house IT staff who were quite flexible and willing to try out, or see the advantage of, open source tools, versus those who had out-sourced their IT to external companies with 3 or 5 year contracts to use particular packages. It’s a chicken and egg scenario put far more succinctly by other people than I ever can- but basically without the critical mass of open source adopters, how can large “traditional support companies” be supported?

All in all, an enjoyable and informative day.

Here’s the google docs version of the talk I gave at the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference. It’s more of a general discussion on the preconceptions and limiting factors in the uptake of open source GIS in the UK rather than a run down of what’s available.

Note that I’m hoping to put up a page with pdfs of all of my GIS-related talks pretty soon, so pop back for the downloadable version with notes…