Month: October 2009

Categories
Data Policy

For transport data, OpenGov actions can speak louder than words

transit

If you have ever wondered why there is such great public transport information available around the world on Google Maps compared to the UK, this Early Day Motion from Tom Watson MP will give you a major clue.

So here is a great opportunity to test Government rhetoric about making government data that would be useful for citizen services freely available, and it’s hard to find a case against this particular type of data,  just ask the residents of  Los Angles, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Lisbon,Moscow,Zurich, Delhi, Adelaide and nearly 100 more cities around the world.

I often talk about how making information available can change peoples behaviour and the availability of this type of information, via multiple channels including the web and mobile devices is just such an example; remove the “unknown” from using public transport planning and more people will use it.

Written and submitted from the Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort, Uganda (0.238N, 32.623E

Categories
Thoughts

Google Geo University comes to Uganda

I have been fortunate to attend the AfricaGIS Conference over the last week, which also coincided with the opening of the Google Uganda Office here in Kampala.

The conference attracted around 500 people, and was the something that Google was keen to support by providing sponsorship, but also by using it as a opportunity to carry out a series of free workshops on the use of various Google technologies.

Kampala workshopThese were a great success almost every one of the sixteen workshops was full covering subjects a diverse at using Fusions tables with Google GEO products to developing field data capture applications on Android phones.

Running a mini university of this nature requires a hugh commitment of people and resources, and Rebecca Moore and her team have received well deserved plaudits here at the conference for their efforts this week.

There is a real sense that we are reaching the point when Internet technologies can begin to make a major contribution to economic development in East Africa

Accessibility to bandwidth is improving on an almost day to day basis, something I personally experienced as I’m now happily righting this blog post on a 10Mb/s connection from my hotel… you would struggle to find that in many hotels in the US !

A point I made during my keynote was that we will hopefully soon reach the point when we can modify the famous internet cartoon, “On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog”, to “On the Internet, nobody knows your Internet business is in Kampala”, in other-words imagine the economic benefit to innovators and businesses in Uganda having the same access to markets and resources as similar businesses in Palo Alto.

Tomorrow I’m attending WhereCamp Kampala, and look forward to seeing more examples of grass roots use on internet GEO technology in East Africa.

Written and submitted from the Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort, Uganda (0.238N, 32.623E)

Categories
opensource Thoughts

Data licenses for the geoweb

Andrew summarises  with clarity the current state of licensing for “open” geodata on his blog. This is going to be an emerging theme over the next year as more data becomes available and there is greater awareness of the immature state of data licensing compared to software licensing.

When I touched upon the subject over the summer is was within the context of DRM a scary umbrella term that has too much baggage, but one which at least in an abstract sense describes the problem.

I have no doubt that the open geodata community will go through the difficult and potentially painful process the software industry experienced to reach the current broad range of potential licenses. This is a necessary step for as Andrew points out for many potential data publishers there is no standard license that is close enough to matching their needs.

As this process takes place a good resource is Kevin Promfret’s excellent blog on spatial law who is tracking licensing developments.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)