London Profiler is worth a look. And then take a look at the Foreign Office experiment with a little mashing.
Spatial literacy has a great role to play in the future of policy making. The way data is crunched and then presented can change perceptions. From making the case that Gordon Brown has a stronger English lineage than David Cameron to brilliantly, beautifully and comprehensively debunking third world myths. I’m so excited about this agenda. The possibilities are almost limitless.
UPDATE: If you’re on a server that doesn’t open the maps from the Gordon Brown and David Cameron links, then go to National Trust Names and type in their surnames.
6 comments ↓
[...] HT: Tom Watson MP [?] Share This [...]
Just a thought for you, Tom. When the government gets FOI requests, usually someone scurries around and prepares a response.
Often, the requests are for data.
Perhaps there should be some simple review process which says “can we publish this data in an open format?” For example – as an xml dump, or an xml feed.
Of course, we’re not mandating that this always be done – but it could be an easy way of providing mashable / analysable information when there’s some energy for it outside of government.
This is how most companies in the web industry provide information to customers (customers ask for a report; it’s usually as easy to automate it and provide it as a self-refreshing feed or web page as it is to generate a one-off response. The second time the customer asks for the same information, updated, the cost is zero. Of course, they don’t actually need to ask again because they’ve got it live.)
Yes! Five minutes of Rosling is worth five years of argument about inconsistencies in marginal pricing of unrefined data, wider markets, trading funds, re-use licensing etc. This is the important bit: the great ocean of truth.
Mashability.
I’ve been encouraging students to write blogs for some while. I’ll be able to use yours as an example of how blogging is becoming more pervasive and influential.
They teach me more than I teach them. I’m already accepted I’m out of date and the future lies in the hands of as generation developing ways of communicating through wikis, utube, facebook.
http://leaderswedeserve.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/blogging-can-seriously-help-your-career/
Best wishes
PS
I’m also learning less good habits like sending out stuff without checking ‘speling and style’….
Thanks for the mention Tom, I am glad you liked our sites, keep checking back as we have some exciting projects on the horizon!
I think a key role the government in this area is to improve dissemination of their nationally collected or funded data, specifically in those formats which are now commonly being used in these new methods of presenting spatial data.
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