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.

… and… relax!

We’ve just completed a really intense GIS project covering the entirety of the North-West of England- which we’ve been working on since Christmas. This week is the first time I have come up for air since before Christmas, and it’s been really great! I’ve been working on integrating the new free Ordnance Survey data into our nascent SDI, and updating our sites map with new features, and new data from some of our other offices. It might not look like much, but there’s lots of open source goodness in there! My colleague Lucian, who knows much more about PostgreSQL than I do has put in a function that automatically updates this map when a new project is added to our archives database. Next steps- more data integration- with our grey literature server, and sites from our two French offices, and adding the raster mapping from the Ordnance Survey to our SDI.

Anyhow, it’s great to be back in the land of blogging- I hope to do a post soon on how to deal with this great new data now it’s available, and also to recap on the great OKCON 2010 conference that I went to at the weekend!

On Friday and Saturday I attended the inaugural WhereCampEU “un-conference” in London.  The short review: if one comes anywhere near you- go for it! It’s well worth it and I enjoyed every minute.

The slightly longer review: since there were no themes or papers organised beforehand, I guess it was a good opportunity to take the temperature of a certain part of the UK/EU geospatial community. So we got lots and lots of OpenStreetMap papers and iPhone apps! Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing, but personally, the papers that stood out for me were Steven Feldman’s talk on Business Models and how we are all f*cked without one, and, as always, Bob Barr’s talk on the true cost of “Free” data.  That particular talk was timely, coming just before the deadline for the consultation on freeing Ordnance Survey data.

On business models- Steven gave the talk twice due to popular request (one advantage to the un-conference format), and got remarkably different responses. The gist was whether you could come up with a one-minute elevator pitch on your business, your customers, and your prices. If you can’t do that, then you should be able to. There was quite a split in the audience.  On one hand there were people who are genuinely trying to make a business out of what they do- who have mortgages to pay, employees to pay, and kids to feed, who can see the point in a business model, and on the other hand there were people with well-paid day-jobs and a lucrative sideline in making iPhone apps who couldn’t see the point. That’s an over-generalisation, but I have work to do, so forgive me. I did start musing about doing a 140 character “tweet-pitch” too but maybe that’s just jumping on the bandwagon!

Overall, at the end of the two days I didn’t feel like I’d been at a conference, even though it was just as packed and even more fast-paced than usual. It was just more relaxing and informal, and the lack of corporate salesmen helped too! The venues were fantastic, as was the food, and the evening geo-beer was much appreciated. The team were keen to point out that next year’s “un-conference” (if it happens) should be somewhere else in Europe. At the time there weren’t that many takers, perhaps because there was a UK bias to the attendees, but I’m sure the enthusiasm and positive feedback will percolate around and we’ll get some volunteers.

After that I spent a couple of days being a tourist in London and catching up with old friends. As a test, I did my London navigation with a zoomable paper map, which I can say works very well and is pleasingly analogue (no batteries or data costs). Crikey though- who needs that many Starbucks, Costa and Caffe Neros?

This week British Telecom ate our SDSL line, meaning we’ve been without phones, email or internet for 2.5 days. Thank goodness for Broadband dongles, though part of me feels uneasy at how impossible it was to do much work without being able to quickly check things on the internet or consult with colleagues.

In the mean time though, there have been another set of interesting posts on my current topics of interest soap-boxes, namely file formats and the openness thereof, and open source business models. Most of them are from Mr Ramsey, but my boss makes a very good point here in response to the argument “who do I sue if things go wrong”? (Answer- no one, check that license before you click on “accept”). Really, if we want to make a change we have to keep banging away at these two issues.

Have a nice Easter everyone, and don’t eat too much chocolate…

I’m off to stuff myself silly with mince pies and red wine now, so a very Merry Christmas to everyone!

… According to Wordle:

(Thanks to Electric Archaeology for the link)

It makes you think actually. The prevalence of words like “posts” might suggest that I am often apologising for breaks in posting, and certainly I know several people called “Chris” that I might concievably mention. I should use the terms “archaeology” and “gis” more, though, and of course this post itself will influence the result in future!

I’ve been on holiday in Egypt for the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. Sorry ’bout that, but I needed a total ban on computers, the internet, phones to regain my sanity. And what do you know, but two weeks away really did help!

Regular(ish) posting should return next week, once all the washing and unpacking is done!

All Points Blog pointed me at the direction of a piece on the mess of mapping and postcode data in Northern Ireland, which got me thinking a bit about this rush to rely on location-based services and always-on connections to “the cloud/interweb”.

At first glance, the situation in Ireland (National Mapping agency has copyright on maps, Post Office has copyright on property location) sounds very familiar. However, Ireland doesn’t have postcodes yet, so things are a not so cut and dried- in this day and age, if you had to go to an awful lot of trouble to implement a system for locating properties, would you invent the postcode system or something else?

What worries me though, is this assumption that the best solution is a technological one. Apparently LBS are the way forward, so much so that your Gran will know her position (in lat/long or a local coordinate system? not sure) the same way that she now knows her address. If she doesn’t remember it, then she can go to her mobile device or google maps and find it out. Clearly this writer is very lucky that he lives in an ultra-connected area with great GPS/phone signal, never has a powercut and has an entire family/social network of technologically adept people who won’t bat an eyelid at this.

It is only in the last 50 years that power of some kind has been laid on to every house in the UK, after many decades of trying. I think it’s dangerous to assume that ubiquitous computing will reach all areas and all social classes in a few years, and it’s also dangerous to assume that everyone will jump into it whole-heartedly to such an extent that you could rely on it totally for critical infrastructure like postal services.

I guess a lot of people will have seen the article on slashdot pointing to an article on a Stanford/Harvard paper on how businesses can win against open source software/technology. I don’t want to get into a debate about how the authors are in fact the spawn of the devil, as you can read the slashdot comments for that. Personally, I started off being slightly disappointed by a number of points that they made, and then quite up-beat about the prognosis for open source as a result.

Why disappointed? Firstly, the article (which is of course a summary of a paper and not the actual paper, so possibly a mis-interpretation) confuses free software with open source, again. Lazy. It assumes that the only reason people will choose an open source product is because it is free, and not because it gives the users better control and freedom from licenses etc. Secondly, they argue that particular types of software are popular because so many people use it (circular argument?, even more lazy?). Apparently this leads to less issues with training, and incompatibility. If this was the case, would Microsoft have had so many issues when they changed the interface for Vista, or Office 2007, and the default file format for Office? Ditto Autocad with their file format in every new release? Consumers are more intelligent than that, and these things do have a big impact on how easy it is to upgrade software.

Why up-beat? Well the point has been made elsewhere that this paper only exists because open source software is seen as a threat. Not only that, all of the strategies outlined in the paper are reactive- how can businesses deal with this threat by using aggressive practices. Even making better, more compatible software is seen as a reaction to this threat, rather than the modus operandi for the company. It’s disappointing that improvement is only seen as a reaction to a threat, but on the other hand if companies are forced to improve their product, and make it more interoperable, everyone wins.

All in all I think it’s disappointing that consumers are given such short shrift in this article, and as always we have this lazy assumption that the open source argument is all about price. It does, however, show that open source software can, and does, have the power to affect the proprietary market, and I find that very encouraging indeed.

I’m off to the AGI conference tomorrow, ready to give my talk about Open Source GIS in the UK on Wednesday. (What kind of nutter agrees to give a talk about open source GIS at a conference supported by ESRI, Autodesk and the Ordnance Survey, amongst others… if I don’t post again you’ll know that I have been “removed” or something).

Anyhow, if anyone wants to meet up, and perhaps huddle in a corner somewhere talking about OSGeo local chapters, or even, I dunno, non-gis things, then catch me there!