GIScussions

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:50:00 +0000

But you can repurpose an old video clip with a new humorous set of subtitles

Enjoy

In the wonderful world of free

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:52:00 +0000

In the wonderful world of free you pay (yes pay) London Underground to advertise a free browser. I suppose there must be some logic here, it just bypassed me.

No doubt there is some added value to getting people to click on your ad inventory in your own browser. I wonder what is hidden under the covers of Chrome.

Watch out for the adverts for Maps and mobile directions

Posted via web from Steven's posterous

Civilisation, roaming charges, GPS and holidays (not neccessarily in that order)

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:50:00 +0000

Back from a fantastic holiday in Egypt except ....

Roaming rates in Egypt (or for that matter most places) are so extortionate that you can't use mobile internet services. I cannot see how all of the much vaunted location based services like Rummble, Yelp etc are going to reach the travellers who most need them if the cost of using them is £6/MB! There surely can't be a justification for the current level of data roaming charges, perhaps the EU needs to add this to their list of gripes with mobile operators (not that that would help in Egypt, the US etc) because there is no effective competition on international data roaming packages to my knowledge.

Planning ahead I downloaded maps of Cairo using OffMaps only to discover that for some reason the GPS on my iPhone did not work all the time I was away. Mysterious? I know that Egypt opened up to GPS receivers last year, surely they can't be blocking the GPS signal on my phone? Perhaps it isn't the GPS that is doing most of the locating on my phone but a combination of the cell tower locations and Skyhook (I doubt they are too hot in Cairo). So it was OffMaps without GPS to help me work out where we were which isn't easy when most of the street signs are only in arabic script. Good thing we had a nice old fashioned paper map with landmarks etc.

So forgetting all of that what about the civilisation bit. The Step Pyramid (or Djoser Pyramid) at Sakkara was built about 5,200 years ago.

Within a couple of hundred years the more famous pyramids of Giza were being built, the largest is over 130m high.

About 500 years later the Temple of Hatshepsut had been built

Which makes you wonder a bit about so called Western Civilisation. The only thing that I know of that is pre Roman and of any substance in the UK is Stonehenge which is (depending on who you believe) 4,500 years old which is pretty cool but sort of pales into insignificance when compared with the Egyptian stuff

So how do the pyramids fit into the same blog as a rant about data roaming rates and GPS? Not sure really but perhaps the pyramids and temples of Egypt offer a humbling alternative to my (or our) expectations of technological advancement. They managed to build them without GPS, CAD, modern surveying and materials technology but they did have one heck of a lot of people available, apparently they were paid in beer.

Happy new year. More pictures here if you are interested.

GeoSeasonal Greetings

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:03:00 +0000

To all my geofriends and geofollowers I want to wish you geoseasonal greetings.

Whatever your faith and geoinclination (neo, paleo, proto or nono) I hope this time of year brings you and yours peace and happiness.

May 2010 be a geotastic and prosperous year for you

Thanks to Gary Gale a geolly good geogeezer for the use of his great geopic

Come to the GeoVation Awards Showcase and we will support MapAction

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:13:00 +0000

The deadline is drawing closer for submissions for a GeoVation Award, plans are thudding onto the GeoVation virtual doormat as we speak, the judges are panting with anticipation and the award funds are burning a hole in our e-pocket!

There is still time to submit a venture plan to The GeoVation Awards Programme this blog will tell you how.

All we need now is you to come along to the GeoVation Awards Showcase at the Royal Geographical Society on the afternoon of 26th January. For every registered delegate who attends the Showcase, GeoVation will be making a £10 donation to MapAction.

So come along, grab a geosandwich, listen to some exciting and innovative prospective new ventures utilising geography, vote for the £1,000 community award which will be given to one of the venture teams at the end of the day in addition to the main awards and you will be supporting a very worthwhile geocharity. It should be a lot of geofun.

Have a look at some of the ventures on the GeoVation Challenge to get a preview of what you might see on the 26th.

Registration here is free

New Years Cheer

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:17:00 +0000

It has been a tough year for many who work in UK Geo and uncertainty about the future will be clouding the celebrations for some as we approach the new year. So here is a bit of good news for all of us.

The Guardian is asking readers of its Technology section to pick their top technologies for the next 5 years as part of their final print edition, in the article they include the latest Gartner Technology Hype Curve. Just look at "location aware applications"

So we are pushing up the slope of enlightenment and should be mainstream within 2 to 5 years. Now will that be good news for those currently working in the industry or will there be some new entrants into the market who will reap the benefits of "enlightenment" at the expense of established players?

I can feel an end of year poll coming on if I can work out how to do it on the Blogger platform (suggestions?)

Who pays for our new pavement?

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:10:00 +0000

It's a decade or more since our street was enhanced with the questionable wonders of cable from Telewest or whoever they were before they became Virgin.

The byproduct was our pavements being ripped and then relaid with broken uneven paving stones, patches of tarmac and shoddy workmanship. Why Haringey allowed them to get away with it I don't know. Then recently Thames have replaced the water mains and had to dig up much of the pavement to make the connections to the houses. Loads more tarmac patches.

At long last and after numerous complaints and probably a few accidents we now have a beautiful new flat pavement being laid. I wonder whether Haringey is recovering any of the cost from Virgin and Thames? Or will this be paid for from my council tax?

What's this got to do with geo? Not sure. Oh yes "someone has to pay to fix the mess"

Correction - Poscodes will not be free

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:20:00 +0000

A case of the left and right hands not being connected.

This morning the BBC web site ran an article on the freeing up of the postcode dataset

"Currently organisations that want access to datasets that tie postcodes to physical locations cannot do so without incurring a charge.Following a brief consultation, the postcode information is set to be freed in April 2010.The announcement about releasing postcode data came as part of a much wider plan to use technology as part of the Smarter Government strategy. As part of this push, the government said it would start "consulting on making mapping and postcode datasets available for free reuse from April 2010.""

Within a couple of hours Giles Finnemore, the Head of Mrketing at the Address Management Unit of the Royal Mail sent an e-mail to all the current licensees of the PAF

Dear PAF(r) Customer

You may be aware of a story on the BBC website today that Government is planning to give anyone free access to postcode data.

Access to postcodes is already, and will continue to be, free to every citizen via www.royalmail.com/postcodes4free.

For the avoidance of doubt PAF(r), the Postcode Address File, remains the intellectual property of Royal Mail and is supplied and used under licence. The new and recently published licences come into effect from April 2010. There are no plans for that to change.

Maintaining a world class postal address file requires significant ongoing investment and it is right that organisations who obtain value from using the file pay to do so.

We are aware of no plans for Government to pay Royal Mail for businesses and organisations to use our address file.

Regards

Giles

Seems that Giles listening to Gordon. I wonder whether he got a call from the Cabinet Office today?

Someone is going to have to do some back pedalling here.

10/12/09 Some useful comments on the Free Our Data blog following up on this

Embedding content into Google maps

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Have you noticed the points of interest data that is now incorporated into Google Maps when you zoom in?

I know it has been there for a while but I only recently discovered that it is clickable - could be I just missed it or it could be because the click tolerances for some of the tiny square dot icons are very small or it could be that it is one of those neat tiny changes that google just slips in from time to time (well almost every week actually). No doubt Ed Parsons if he is reading this will chip in and tell us when this feature launched.

In addition to restaurants, hotels and cinemas I found Muswell Hill railway station. Hah I thought caught you out Google! There is no Muswell Hill railway station, the line closed ages and ages ago. But when I found the click zone on the item up pops this useful bit of local history from wikipedia

Pretty neat!

Now you can see how Google will start to drive revenue from all those sites using the API to embed maps or develop applications, the adverts will be embedded in the map. Now can they make them context and user dependent?

To privatise or not to privatise, that is the question

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:46:00 +0000

Yesterday Gordon Brown announced a "radical plan to put frontline services first by streamlining government". The headlines have focussed on his comments on the pay of senior civil service employees perhaps masking some inconsistency in the aspirations and the detail of the programme Putting the Frontline First.

"Putting the frontline first: smarter government sets out how Government will improve public service outcomes while achieving the fiscal consolidation that is vital to helping the economy grow. The plan has three central actions: to drive up standards by strengthening the role of citizens and civic society, to free up public services by recasting the relationship between the centre and the frontline, and to streamline the centre of government, saving money for sharper delivery."

So what is wrong with that you may ask? Drive up standards, shift focus to frontline and save money - sounds good but is it realistic and deliverable?

Last month the PM announced that a range of data sets from OS were going to be made freely available garnering widespread praise from all who have argued that geographic information is key to opening up public information and allowing innnovators to create new services and activists to hold public services accountable for their decisions and performance. In yesterday's announcement buried in the detail was

"We are publishing an OEP asset portfolio alongside today's report. This portfolio sets out those state-owned assets which government might seek to commercialise over the medium term. The OEP asset portfolio includes a new framework to govern which government activities should be managed as a business and which should be sold. For those activities which are best managed as businesses in the public sector, we will separate the ownership role from the customer and policy role, with a presumption that they should be incorporated"

The OEP Asset Portfolio can be found here. The introduction explains that

"The Government has today established a new policy framework – summarised in Annex A to this document – to guide decisions on how government activities will be delivered. This will facilitate clearer decision making and faster progress in improving business performance and, where appropriate, pursuing transactions"

One might think that pursuing transactions is a euphemism for privatisation or sell off. The section on the Ordnance Survey has some choice but confusing nuggets (my italics below) including

"On 17 November 2009, the Prime Minister announced that Government proposes to make certain datasets from Ordnance Survey available for free, including information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping. There will be a public consultation on these proposals from December 2009, with implementation of any change from April 2010.

The consultation will also cover other issues around the interaction of Ordnance Survey with the market – particularly the regulatory environment and the governance structure around the free offering.

Market studies have identified significant growth opportunities across the geographic information (GI) market, as data is made more available and new technologies are used to support innovation and greater use of GI data and services. The outcome of the consultation above may affect the opportunities available to Ordnance Survey in some of these growth areas and the alternative asset options outlined below. It may also open up new opportunities to work more closely with other parts of the public sector to realise efficiency savings, for example in local government resource planning and deployment, or working more closely with the Land Registry. Similarly there may be an opportunity to collaborate with local government and Royal Mail to provide a definitive addressing solution for Great Britain."

But then at the end of the chapter under the heading of Private Sector we get

"There are a growing number of commercial market opportunities, particularly around value- added services using geospatial information, which Ordnance Survey is not currently well placed to exploit.
A private sector investor and/or partner might bring expertise, new market access or additional capital for innovation. This could accelerate the development and delivery of these opportunities more quickly and successfully than Ordnance Survey operating alone."

So does this mean that privatisation is on or off? My hunch is off (no inside knowledge though).

I wonder how much of this section on Ordnance Survey had to be rewritten after Gordon Brown's announcement on 17th November. Do the left and right hands know what the other is doing? Maybe that is why senior civil servants are getting those high salaries that Gordon is so concerned about!

It is easy peasy to submit an application for a GeoVation Award

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:53:00 +0000

There is just under a month to the deadline for applications for the £21,000 GeoVation Awards Programme.

I have just posted some notes/advice for those who are planning to submit an application. Ian Holt has also made this fun little video which runs you through the submission

Couldn't be easier really could it?

There are now over 120 ideas and over 30 ventures on the GeoVation Challenge web site. If you haven't had a look through the ideas and ventures it is well worth taking the time, there are some really stunning ideas there and three are going to win some worthwhile seed funding. Even if you don't have an idea to submit it is worth considering whether you would like to link up with an idea originator or a venture team to offer your skills and participate in the programme - there are people with ideas looking for techies who can help them and others who are looking for some design or marketing or business skills.

Go on, have a go.

Good luck

Google wants your geodata

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:48:00 +0000

Last week Google Maps Mania had a post about a soon to be launched feature in the Google Maps API.

Google have announced that in a few weeks time they will be adding new functionality to the Google Maps API v2 that allows Google to log the location and content of the markers and/or infowindows that are displayed in Google Maps mashups. Google then plans to use the gathered data created by Google Maps developers within the main Google Maps site.

Can you see where this is going? If Google are building their own map of the world as they phase out Tele Atlas then all of the mashedup content provides an additional source of information and content to add to that gleaned from collecting StreetView and whatever other smart collection techniques Google have in plan.

This takes crowd sourcing to another level or is it the ultimate in Derived Data?

I would be fascinated to know how Google will extract features and infer information from the mashed up points and info windows?

Of course if you don't want your geodata to be absorbed by Google there is a way to stop them by switching off indexing in your API settings (but I guess that means that less people will find your app when they search for it).

You can sort of understand why OS lawyers were getting a little heated about the "perpetual rights" clause in Google's T&C's a few months back.

The end of dodgy offside decisions

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:30:00 +0000

I was chatting with Mike Sanderson of 1spatial last week at Where2.0Now about the potential of geo-rules in his company's Radius Studio.

Somehow (can't think how) the conversation managed to get to football and he said that it would be easy to write the offside rules into Radius if only you knew where the players are at any point in time (and where the ball was). Ubisense's real time location tracking would seem to be the answer to that offering sub second tracking at high accuracy.

So it could be that two veterans of the geospatial industry could hold the answer to all of those disputed offside decisions. Just need an enlightened football authority to run some tests.

And a happy 40th birthday to 1spatial (formerly Laser-Scan).

Vermeer 3 - iPhone 3

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:27:00 +0000

Yes it was a draw at AGI Northern's Where2.0Now event in Harrogate on Tuesday! In a great day of geoweb presentations and conversation the audience were treated to 3 pictures of Vermeer's "The Geographer" as a token paleo and surprisingly only 3 pictures of an iPhone breaking the apparent trend that every presentation has to have a picture of an iPhone and a reference to OSM.

The attendees seemed to enjoy the event although there were some baffled faces when John McKerrell was showing how he tracked his location history on mapme.at and linked it to his Weasley Clock. Surprisingly the academic contingent of the audience were most sceptical about the value of tracking personal location history which seems strange to me considering some of the topics that academics chose to research.

The presentation of the day (IMHO) was Tim Waters on a community powered project to take the New York Public Library's collection of scanned historic maps and rectify and warp them over OpenStreetMap and then to digitise features from the maps. Defying the demo gods Tim did a great demo of the tools that are used and finished with a spectacular display of ancirent maps draped over a Google Earth globe. You can play with the warping application and view the maps, or even participate, here. What use? Well Landmark have built a very substantial business deriving previous land use data and inferring potential environmental contamination from historic maps for a start.

John Fagan of Microsoft talked about the dangers of taking a too simplistic approach to thematic mapping in web applications and came up with one of the quotes of the day "Do we really want web developers carrying out spatial analysis? It could all go wrong!" as he illustrated how John Snow could have got his famous identification of the contaminated water pump wrong if he had use the wrong boundaries. It got a bit technical for me but the academics seemed to be nodding with approval when he mentioned MAUP, the slides are here.

Ed Parsons closed the event with a presentation entitled "Lessons from a Blind MapMaker" not sure that I understood the title but the presentation was good particularly Ed reassuring us that there was no Google plan for world domination!

Rollo Home and his helpers are to be congratulated on putting together this event. Joking aside, the Geoplan offices and the towns of Harrogate and Knaresborough made a wonderful setting for the event.

Oh and attending a GeoCommunity offshoot event without having to speak, organise or promote was a new and very enjoyable experience. It gave me plenty of time to tweet and even if you are not a twitterer you can follow the back channel of conversation in this tweetdoc.

Not a good week for Geowebbers in London

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:46:00 +0000

Just as the northern geoweb folk gather in Harrogate for AGI's Where2.0Now, comes news/rumours of layoffs at Microsoft and Cloudmade's London based engineering teams.

For Microsoft this is probably an inevitable part of the gradual absorption (aka disappearance) of the Multimap acquisition although it may not feel like that for any of the remaining long term mutimappers. For Cloudmade the layoffs follow the departure of a CEO and previous layoffs of community ambassadors - it looks like they are battening down the hatches to ensure that they manage costs until revenues start to pick up (or the next round of funding).

So there are going to be quite a few very clever geopeople looking for an opportunity in London. The germ of an idea is forming ..... multimappers and cloudmaders you KnowWhere to find me.

Norf London

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Well it's a matter of place really - which side of Norf London do you come from? Red or White?

One can apply all sorts of socio-economic and geo-demographic analysis to the regional distribution of excessive proclaimers (sometimes referred to as Keanites or Redknappers) within the northern reaches of London but it does appear this morning that they all seem to be concentrated around N17. Whilst the quietly confident and sometimes gloating will be found in N5.

It would be good to measure the "bragging index" between N5 and N17 but as a substitute I have used the tweetometer to show that at least in the twittersphere it is another win for the Arsenal.

It has been a good weekend

Goodbye PND

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:53:00 +0000

Google announced the beta of their mobile navigation application yesterday.

It looks like a pretty fully featured navigation application, with voice recognition, plain English search, satellite imagery, streetview, POI's on your route, live traffic feeds and of course no need to download map upgrades. Downsides - what happens when you lose internet connectivity which seems to happen every few minutes with my mobile service (perhaps service is a misnomer) and a few questions at this early stage about how accurate and up to date Google will be able to keep its own maps. It's currently only available on Android and for North America but no doubt wider coverage and phone support will follow. Can't wait for the iPhone UK version.

I guess this has been waiting for Google to phase out TeleAtlas who had prevented them offering a mobile nav service to protect their lucrative contracts with PND manufacturers (one of whom ultimately bought TA and are now sitting on a turkey). It won't be long before Google extends their coverage - think StreetView vehicles driving round Europe photographing and quietly mapping as they go. Not sure that many people saw this coming, I certainly didn't.

So what is the future of Personal Navigation Devices? Somehow I can't see Google wiping them all out but the manufacturers are certainly going to have to dramatically step up the pace of innovation and deliver some much more compelling interfaces and applications if they are going to convince people to spend ca £100 plus service charges. At the very least we will see some pretty intense price competition over the next few years. How Nokia are going to make a return on their massive purchase of Navteq was always a mystery to me (business as usual was never going to do it) now it looks like maps and navigation will be a costly to maintain low to no revenue must have feature for them.

Respect to Navteq and TeleAtlas CEO's - looks like you sold at just the right time.

GI MSc on the way out

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:40:00 +0000

At last week's AGI Foresight workshop Muki Haklay made the provocative statement that he expected Masters programs in pure GI to disappear within a few years and for GI to increasingly be taught as modules within other programs. Quite a few of the participants including several academics seemed to agree with him. When I tweeted this it prompted some rebuttal from my friends at Kingston pointing out that being able to drive a GIS package did not imply an understanding of geographic analysis.

A couple of days later and Peter Batty pointed out this post by Don Meltz comparing GIS to word processing. You probably would not want to take a Masters in word processing but you might want an MA in creative writing or journalism (especially if you fancy a career as an unpaid blogger).

It seems that the geography bit is going to come to the fore again.

Augmented Reality? A bit more reality please

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:55:00 +0000

Simon and Tony at mashupevents ran an evening of debate and discussion on Augmented Reality on Thursday night.

I hadn't planned to go to this evening because I didn't think I would find much of interest but a couple of days ago I helped to facilitate an AGI Forsesight study (more on that soon) in which the subject of AR came up and I was struck by the opportunity for AR to supercede cartographic displays in presenting a lot of information in close up situations.

The impression that I got from the evangelists of AR was of a collection of technologies that had come together in the new iPhone and Android platforms which enabled location sensitive information feeds over the current camera view. Maybe it is AR but it didn't appear to be in anyway context sensitive or particularly intelligent. I don't think I want to walk around London holding my phone up and reading tweets from people who were nearby in the last hour or so nor do I want to navigate to the nearest tube by following little arrows in the view of my camera. As some wag pointed out loads of people walking round London with their eyes glued to their phone displays is a recipe for disaster - either collision with lamp posts (painful) or vehicles (worse)!

What got people excited was a description of this aid to a BMW service engineer, shame we didn't have the video at the event.

There will be real value in AR when for example it can be used to present underground asset info (pipes and cables) to someone about to start digging up the road. Prediction - we will see something like this within 5 years.

There were a lot of people asking whether AR was just the new wow factor and someone pointed out that wow was just what marketing campaigns needed. Good point.

The demo that blew all the others away was from Total Immersion who are doing some very neat things. Worth a look and definitely wow.

I pitched for a minute about the GeoVation Awards and the Ideas Forum we are running on 2nd November. I wonder whether we will see any Geo-AR apps submitted for the Awards?

Where do all the Manchester United fans live?

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:36:00 +0000

Nothing makes me happier than being able to link geography and football.

As a Londoner I am stunned by the number of Liverpool and Man U fans who live in London (and they didn't all move here).

So if there is a football mad hacker out there maybe you can help me to put together www.wheredoallthemanufanslive.com (good URL?). You can make suggestions or offer help at the GeoVation Challenge

Any guesses which team has the lowest proportion of fans living within 30 miles of the ground?

£21,000 for GeoVators

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:31:00 +0000

So we are off and running with the GeoVation Awards Program.

If you have an idea or know someone who has an idea that has been simmering for a while or was drawn on a beermat or the back of a cigarette packet then now is the time to enter the GAP and you could win an award of up to £10,000

You can find details of how to participate at Mind the Gap - it is easy to register and you will get the chance to share your idea with others who may be able to help you turn it into a venture and possibly an award winner.

We will be running an ideas evening on 2nd November at the RSA from 6.30 to about 9.30. Come along, meet some other GeoVators, eat some nibbles, share some ideas, drink some beer and learn more about the GAP. Just let us know that you are coming by registering here as places are limited.

Please Mind the GAP

Legible London

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:23:00 +0000

Great evening at BCS this week listening Tim Fendley talk about the Legible London project.

On behalf of TfL his team have been looking at how to coordinate the signs and directions available to pedestrians to encourage people to walk around London rather than use the underground because they don't know the way. In London we have all sorts of people putting up signs which offer conflicting and confusing advice to pedestrians. They have done some great research into wayfinding and how people navigate using visual cues and have produced the new miniliths that are being piloted around Bond Street

They have also produced some stunning cartography which really makes pedestrian navigation easier. If you have an iPhone you can download a copy of their early app for Brighton from the App Store, it is called WalkBrighton (says what it does on the can). At the moment they are just a set of georeferenced raster images that you can pan, no search or navigation but it gives you an idea of what pedestrian mapping should/could be.

It would be nice if we could get something similar for the whole of London but that will take a load more tech than a few rasters. Anyone?

The party is over .... or is it?

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:34:00 +0000

A week and a bit has flown by since the end GeoCommunity and I have gone through post conference elation, slump and a stinking cold (possibly related). Jo Cook, Ed Parsons, Gary Gale, Martin Daly and others have written some great summaries of the event and their impressions of it – you can also view masses of content from and about the conference at www.geocommunitylive.com (we will need to work out what we do with this site between now and next year, polite suggestions welcome). The presentations can be found here, the papers are here and all of the video is here and that in itself is a big first for GeoCommunity getting all that stuff up so quickly (we hope to be able to add the video of the 3 plenaries and some other stuff over the next few weeks)

So before it all disappears into the mists of my increasingly forgetful mind here is my view of what happened and whether it mattered.

Before commenting on this year’s event I want to look back 4 years to the end of the AGI conference in 2006. Declining numbers of delegates, a separation between the conference and the industry, a London venue that made attendance unaffordable for many in the public sector and an agenda that seemed to have limited relevance to those outside of it. Add to that an industry that had been coasting, to some extent, on the back of the flood of funding from transformational government initiatives and that was not delivering the innovation that customers were craving. That’s a slightly harsh view which is purely mine and not AGI’s or anyone else’s (before the how dare you’s come flying in). I was of the opinion that the event did not any longer serve the AGI, the wider community or its sponsors (I had decided that my company would not exhibit at a future event under the same format) and perhaps foolishly told the AGI in my forthright manner.

Some wackos (aka far sighted people) in AGI then entrusted their flagship event to me and a largely new conference team (fortunately moderated by the common sense of the then new AGI Director, the outstanding Chris Holcroft). At our first team meeting I outlined to a somewhat stunned team my vision for an event that would be the base for building a community of people who use, research and earn their livings from geography – somewhat unoriginally we called it a GeoCommunity. Moving out of London, going residential, reducing to 2 days, not having a free walk in exhibition (“wow you can put dots on maps, can I buy some?” really wasn’t working anyway), limiting the number of sponsors, not giving away free passes, tough rules on sales pushes in presentations and big reductions in delegate fees and sponsor costs were just some of the changes that we took on (to be honest with some hesitation/reservation).

3 events on what have we learnt? Clearly we got more right than wrong, the numbers have grown to nearly double those in Islington, even in a very challenging financial climate delegates and sponsors see real value in supporting GeoCommunity.

The excitement building up to this year’s GeoCommunity and the number of returning delegates suggests that our aspiration to create a community has at least to some extent been realised. GeoCommunity was an unashamed celebration of all things geo with over 620 delegates spanning practitioners in local government, central government, utilities, business, education/academia, policy makers and the geoindustry.

Much has been made of the paleo meets neo sessions and dialogue – in my opinion we are moving beyond the mutual misunderstanding and distrust towards a recognition that we are all engaged in aspects of doing geography. It’s not that we do the same things, anymore than UI designers, web services architects and database people who all work in IT do the same things (and that is not suggesting that any technique or skill set is in any way more important than another) just that we all do geography. The geosolutions of the future will rely upon neo, paleo and a whole lot more. I think Ian Painter (winner of the Steven Feldman Georanter 2009 Award) just about summed it up in his brilliant 5 minute slot at the Soapbox which is worth a pause to watch

Although the Soapbox may have grabbed a lot of attention (next year we will need to find a bigger space and a wealthy geobeer sponsor) it was not the only new idea that we introduced at this year’s GeoCommunity. Probably the most significant change was the introduction of a geoweb stream that ran through the whole event. Watching so called “paleos” squeezing into these packed sessions validated Christopher Osborne’s and my belief that we could bring relevant and stimulating new content to the conference. I am not going to pretend that we are in the mutual love and admiration phase, I imagine that there are some who are horrified by the arrival of the “free data, free software” generation (nb “free stuff” still needs paid services or premium versions to support it) but there were also many potential users who were excited by the possibilities that geoweb offers them to deliver better services to their clients.

A big change this year compared to previous years was the online channel to the conference. The twitter tag #geocom was fizzing throughout the conference and continued for at least a week afterwards, the dialogue was both informative and at times critical of presenters, next year it would be great if the back channel could be visible on screens around the conference rather than just on the iPhones and Blackberries. We also ran the GeoCommunityLive blog which scooped up other bloggers pieces, the videos posted on youtube and the slide presentations went live within a couple of hours. I think it ran pretty smoothly despite the somewhat erratic wifi at the hotel (have to do better next year) and it enabled people who couldn’t get to the conference to track what was going on and hopefully decide to come to GeoCommunity next year.

So 2 days of love and maps came to a close with (in my opinion) an inspirational presentation from the Grammar School at Leeds which had all of the delegates on their feet applauding the 3 students (15,17 &17!) who had stunned most of us with their GI and presentational skills.

Was it a success? I think so. The early feedback certainly says so. After 3 years I think we have built a GeoCommunity that is vibrant and has the momentum to grow and flourish even in the difficult economic times that we are going through. With the digital channel, the hashtag and smaller events like the AGI Northern Where2Now event on November 10^th there is the potential for the GeoCommunity to become a year round series of gatherings of varying degrees of formality and structure.

Does it matter? I think so. Geography has a massive potential to solve problems and realise opportunities, we all know this and some of us preach it regularly. Those of us who enjoy this stuff and work with it need a GeoCommunity to nurture us, teach us, give us a voice and to showcase our successes. We also need a place to look for a new job, a new customer, launch a product or company and catch up with old friends.

So 3 years after “mouthing off” at Islington I can say “Job done”.

A few people noted that I looked “quite emotional” as I gave my final address as chair to the conference – that was an understatement! It felt like when I was saying goodbye to my teenage son as he set off on his gap year travels around South America, a mixture of pride that he was ready to go off on his own and anxiety about whether he would be safe. It’s time for me to handover GeoCommunity to a new chair and team and to ask them to take good care of my kid.

So for me the party is over or at least as the fussing host it is. Next year I will be back at GeoCommunity as a guest and will be lapping up the hospitality.

See you there?

WiFi, Blogs & Video at GeoCommunity

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:14:00 +0000

I am sitting here uploading video instructions about getting connected at GeoCommunity. If you have a look at www.GeoCommunityLive.com you should be able to find the instructions.

If the technology and the bandwidth hold up we want to post video interview clips with the delegates and of course we hope to get some georants up there as well.

Bag stuffing is now underway. See you later

My name is Steven, I am a geoholic

noreply@blogger.com (Steven) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:47:00 +0000

Yes it is true, I am a geoholic. I love things geo and probably go a bit over the top (well maybe a lot over the top) in trying to preach geo as the answer to everything. Geo has kept me twittering, blogging and consumes much time and has from time to time even generated a bit of income.

For the last year since leaving MapInfo (or Pitney Towers as I affectionately call it) I have been suffering from a touch of withdrawal. Life has been good and I am working on some interesting projects but where has the hardcore geo been?

So thank you to AGI for inviting me to chair this year's GeoCommunity for the third and last time (yes this really is my last year, I have to kick the habit) - I am off to Stratford for 3 days of giscussions, geonetworking, georants, geobeers (or geolagavulins if that is your preference) and geofun. Hopefully this major fix of geo will not result in an overdose or even a geohangover and I will come back from Stratford cured and a reformed character (some chance).

Anyone else in the GeoCommunity got a confession they want to share?

You can follow GeoCommunity at www.GeoCommunityLive.com and on twitter by searching for #geocom (on Wednesday evening at 5.30 the georanters will be throwing digital tomatoes at #geosoap)