My Talk at the INSPIRE 2011 Conference

I was invited to speak at the annual INSPIRE conference in Edinburgh last month. INSPIRE remember is the European Commission programme supported by national legislation to build a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for European Environmental data. I was asked specifically to address how INSPIRE can foster innovation and “smart growth”. These are excellent topics to …

Evening all, what going on with these crime maps then…

So initially the  moral of this story seems to be, if you are launching a Government website across the mass media, make sure you do the load testing with 100x what you expect. The real issue is that despite having best intentions and a commitment to transparency, it’s very easy to confuse, mislead and lose credibility with …

GeoWeb Conference call for papers

I have not attended the GeoWeb Conference for the past few years, but the annual international conference in Vancouver has been a highlight event in the years I was able make it. The conference represents an interesting middle ground between the very much industry dominated conference of  Where 2.0 and Location Business Summit and academic conferences where the  focus is …

Cultural differences..

This one very rare tweet from Andy Rubin, lead on the Android Programme at Google in 140 characters perfectly embodies the open and geeky culture at Google. This is of course not always initially a great advantage when building consumer facing products, for my non geeks readers “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git …

The Open Government Licence

Last week in addition to the new more open OS licesning, another in many ways more fundamental new license was introduced with little fanfare, but I would argue it’s impact if widely adopted could be far more important. The new UK Open Government licence (OGL) developed by the National Archives, is a robust licence developed using Creative Commons like …