Where do you find the development team behind the Mac version of Google Earth, the night before the Macworld Expo, Yes they join the line outside to get the best keynote seats the night before. Well they get my respect!!
That is real team building.. Well done Rose !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I was asked to speak yesterday at the e-Government National Awards Conference at the Savoy, in London – very nice gig btw!!! I was presenting on the potential impact of web 2.0 approaches and the development of mash-up applications to future e-Government services.
Coincidently a perfect example of what I was suggesting as a future approach was announced yesterday by the US Environmental Protection Agency who are taking their first steps by publishing the locations of some contaminated land sites in XML of their website, with the specific intention of allowing citizens to analyse the data themselves. Of course raw data has always been more available in the US and I not getting into that debate… the difference here is that by publishing data in XML the EPA are opening up the data for people to manipulate using their own lightweight applications.
Such approaches to providing public access to government information are by their nature simple and rapid to implement, with the current focus on “shared services” in government and bringing together back-end systems to reduce cost, we should not forget that they are simple and cheap approaches to providing greater levels of information to the citizen by allowing the citizen to carry out the analysis themselves.
Another key point I made was that the next generation of citizens, “Generation Y” if you like, are in many ways more open to sharing data, having grown up defining they characters on-line on mySpace and Bebo than today’s. However this willingness to share data with others, even government? comes from the fact that as authors their “own” their own data and are free to modify, correct and update it.
For anyone delivering the citizen services of the future here is an important lesson – it is NOT your data, it is the citizens and they must feel true ownership of it.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Last week I spent a couple of days with Reuters, as part of their excellent Innovation Programme looking at the potential for new products and services in the next 5-10 years. It is vital for information businesses such as Reuters to do this, as it is for any knowledge business, as the barriers to entry in the web 2.0 world are low for future potential competitors.
Within the geospatial industry many of us are excited by the prospect of ambient geospatial information and the ability of future devices to really deliver services using the location of the user to provide the much needed context.
The interest of Reuters in this is just one example of the increased awareness of the importance of “where” in delivering future consumer focused services, as with many things maybe it will take at least three or four attempts for “location based services” to reach the mainstream.
There are still many challenges to deliver LBS operationally, data availability, privacy concerns, standards, etc and of course the business model – however maybe awareness and the interest to innovate in this space is no longer a problem
If you don’t believe me just type iPhone and GPS into Google and see what you get !
Written and submitted from Starbucks, Fleet Street, using the BTOpenzone 802.11 network.