Categories
Thoughts

The Civil servants guide to the blogosphere

As reported today in the Guardian today, there are now guidelines as to how civil servants should make use of the web as a method of communication. The result, announced by the very web literate minister Tom Watson, is a very practical and simple set of guidelines.

I can speak from personal experience that such guidelines are vital, believe it or not I was once accused of breaking the civil service code, and breaching the Official Secrets Act based on the contents of this blog… Yes really !!

I would love to see someone else from the OS take up blogging under these new guidelines and provide a much needed “human” face to the organisation.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy

Crime mapping gets political

Over the past few months Crime Mapping has floated up the political agenda, reaching the mainstream with Boris Johnson’s recent call for crime mapping, echoed by the Guardian’s Free our Data campaign, and this morning followed up by the reporting of Louise Casey’s Cabinet Office report.

You would think from the media, that this is something new in the UK, but in fact Crime Mapping has been taking place for many years, and the UK has world renowned expertise as demonstrated by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL who next month are running the 6th, yes that’s the 6th National Crime Mapping Conference in Manchester.

What is new, and what should be applauded, is at last a focus on making much of this information available to the public- until now the efforts have concentrated on producing crime maps for internal consumption by police forces themselves.

As a matter of principal, making information public is always a good thing, when the information allows citizens to make decisions, and to independently monitor the services provided to them by Government.

We should not have to rely on maps like the one below created by Keir Clarke, who scraped local authority websites to build this mash-up.

London Crime map

If I can use this website to monitor the performance of British Airways, should I not be able to monitor the effectiveness of my local police force.

There is often a disconnect between peoples perception of crime and its actual occurrence, a map with a few push-pins representing successful neighbourhood policing will be much more valuable than the next crime survey report finding.

Of course there must be mechanisms to protect the identity of individual victims of crime, but is the situation really much different from the crime reporting in Local Newspapers ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS opensource

State of the Map looking good

State of the Map

I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend this years State of the Map Conference, but the schedule looks fantastic and I’m sure Limerick as a location will provide great craic. If you have not already registered, this is a conference I would really recommend attending, without question crowd sourced geodata will be an important part of the Geospatial Industry of the future, and this is the event to hear from the pioneers.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.