What happens when geeks go camping?

I wrote this post for Life | Art | Us on 30 May 2011. Click on the link at the bottom to read the full post.

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In her session at FutureEverthing 2011, Professor Sue Thomas talked to us about her fascinating paper, When geeks go camping – finding California in cyberspace, which explores the relationship between nature, the outdoors and technological development. So, before you read any further, pack away that image of the speccy young geek, hiding away in his bedroom and chained to his computer. This post is about geeks of all ages getting out and about, and the amazing things that happen when they do.

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The fruits of Media Sandbox

I wrote this post for Life | Art | Us on 15 May 2011. Click on the link at the bottom to read the full post.

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Run by Watershed in Bristol, Media Sandbox 2010 was set up to award a series of £10,000 commissions to stimulate innovation in public services and support research and development in innovative content, applications and experiences using open data.

The projects commissioned were not primarily charged with producing services or tools for audiences directly. From what I could gather, the main aim was to try out new ideas and provide people working in local government with tangible examples of creative ‘open data projects’. This aim was born from an acknowledgment that if we want local authorities and governing bodies to get behind open data projects, in the context of driving innovation in public services, a shift in culture is needed.

Here’s some more information about the three projects showcased at FutureEverything 2011.

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Transparency and open data is great, but is it enough?

I wrote this post for Life | Art | Us on 15 May 2011. Click on the link at the bottom to read the full post.

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Liz Turner from iconomical has been involved in some really quite good public service open data projects in the last few years, including Where does my money go?, Research funding explorer and the London Gazette.

Graph showing public spending trends: Where does my money go?

Each of these projects ticks the boxes of a good open data project. They make non-personal public information more accessible online, they visualise data to make it easier to understand and they enable audiences to interrogate data in different ways and find out more. You can drill down into the detail of specific data sets (say, by a topic or region), you can look at broader trends over time and you can filter data to find out more about a specific interest area.

A voyage of discovery

Liz says that when you’re dealing with large volumes of data and opening it up, such as public spending accounts or public transport data, one of the most exciting things is that you never quite know what you’re going to find. So, these kind of projects are always in part, a voyage of discovery and data owners and audiences have to be prepared to find surprises along the way. Sounds interesting right?

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Opening the information floodgates – why open data is here to stay.

I wrote this post for Kew’s Digital Adventures blog on 22 November 2010. Click on the link at the bottom to read the full post.

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BLOG EXTRACT – On Tuesday 16 November the Royal Society ran a fantastic free public lecture entitled Opening the information floodgates: the technologies and challenges of a web of linked data. Interested in the new opportunities that open data projects can bring to the public sector, and more specifically our work at Kew, Mike (Director of Digital Media at Kew) and I decided to attend and find out more.

The lecture was led by Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton. In June 2009 together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel was appointed to help transform public access to Government information. A major output of this work has been data.gov.uk – a single point of access for all Government non-personal public data. In May 2010 he was appointed by the Coalition Government to the Public Sector Transparency Board responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data.

What is a web of ‘Linked Data’?

It is broadly accepted that we live in an age of superabundant information, and the Internet and World Wide Web have been key agents in this revolution.

 

Visualisation of the structure of the internet – wiki commons

Introducing his talk, Nigel Shadbolt said that this deluge of information and data has already led to a range of scientific discoveries and engineering innovations. From characterising the shape and structure of the Web to efficiently searching its billions of items of content.

Following developments in the semantic web and the recent release of large UK public data sets into the public domain, Nigel believes that we are now witnessing the emergence of a new Web – a Web of ‘Linked Data.’ This, Nigel says, offers new opportunities for science, government and business.

On top of the data released via data.gov.uk earlier this year, the new requirement for MPs to publish their expenses online and the Coalition Government’s recent announcement to change the law ensuring that all data released under the Freedom of Information Act is machine readable, provide yet more signs that the reality of open data in the UK is here to stay.

Find out more about ‘Linked Data’ and data.gov.uk.

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