I seem to have a bit of a problem sometimes with Apple keynotes. Apart from the high end pro kit I have a bit of a “meh” response at first and then a blinding epiphany which leads at some point to understanding why I’ll be buying and then often making things that work/run on them. The original iPod was a case in point. At some Apple shindig after the announcement there were Apple staff with shiny new bricks of musical joy asking if I wanted to play. I couldn’t see the point but 5 different ones and 2 iPhones later I wonder why I was so short sighted.

It took less time this time round and it is clear to me that the IPad is just what is needed in the digital inclusion space. When the Wii launched it revolutionised not just gaming, but who plays and who buys. The Nintendo DS is similar too. It’s gesture based interface with physical cause and effect made it simpler to learn to play and eased the on ramp.

The real world is all about gestures. We turn a page. We swish a piece of paper out of the way to see what is below. We press a button and the kettle boils. In none of these do I have to learn an arcane combination of buttons to press on an overburdened controller, nor do I have to learn that if I do something on a peripheral connected to the thing that something will happen.

The iPhone feels very natural. I tap and things happen. I swipe and things move. If I want to get fancy and I want to stretch something I tug at the corners and pull them as if they’re a piece of elastic. It’s child’s play. Literally.

I knew I was seeing something interesting when my son started working out what to do with Dad’s iPhone aged just about one. When he got cross with a screen in a museum which didn’t swipe it became very clear that these interfaces feel right. Sure he’s young and learning about cause and effect and that it’s different for older people, but the adoption of the Wii and DS in audiences outside of the core gamer market would point and say that gesture based interfaces are easier and more fun.

So onto inclusion. It’s complex. If you spend any time listening to Martha Lane Fox who is doing great work in this space you’ll get how complex it is, but how vital it is too. One of the largest excluded groups are pensioners who struggle to get online for many reasons social, economic and technical. If we just focus on the last one for a moment you’ll see where I’m going.

The first main problem they have technically is that computers look complex. They have lots of things you plug into other things. Every thing has an arcane name, very few of these names really relate to their function. Each of these things causes something to happen but not in an obvious touch the thing and something happens to it way. It’s always at one removed. When you add in connecting the overarching thing to the internet then it becomes an activity of worry and confusion. My own septugenarian parents are now digitally included, but it’s been quite a journey and still is. Often I have to talk them through menus and dialogue boxes over the phone and I’m glad they have a local computer shop who play a great part in helping them to be not just included but really engaged online. Compare and contrast to how quickly they get the Nintendo DS and you’ll see that even all-in-one computes like the iMac and eMac that they have are really not all-in-one or easy. They’re just a bit easier. Sure they could have a laptop which would be all in one, but even that isn’t as intuitive as a well designed tablet OS and UI.

Then you look at the iPhone and iPad. It really is all-in-one. Sure it lacks USB ports, but actually lots of people don’t need them to much. It comes with a mechanism of internet access built in and the 3G one is essentially a “charge it up and play” inclusion device. It’s fairly cheap too. Not much more than a netbook which would be much more of a drain on mentoring resources to get people up and running. Sure you can tell me that you’re not equipping people with workplace digital skills with these things, but that’s not the issue in a lot of the inclusion agenda. It’s getting people access to services that will make a difference to their lives. Services that socially engage them, that bring them savings, that bring them government and local services.

It has another advantage over an all in one computer for this generation, or a set top box like BBC Canvas. You can sit anywhere and use it and bring it as close to you and almost as far away as you need (although you may need glasses). You don’t have to sit at a desk when you have a comfortable and possibly orthopedic chair. If you’re bedridden you could possibly use it. There’s no trying to squint at a TV which you’d have to do with a Canvas like box. I’m lucky enough to have a reasonable sized TV at home connected to a MacMini, it’s still an awful experience of browsing. This isn’t what you want people’s first experiences of the internet to be, they’ll stay excluded and the box will sit in the corner of their room hemorrhaging value. Their first experience should be fun and immediate and intuitive and personal. There is in my mind nothing more personal than holding the device and touching the device that brings you services, it will seem more like magic and less like a struggle.

Many people will criticise the iPad for being a walled garden, but it has the open internet so for developers that’s not so much of an issue. In my opinion, and this is the only time you’re likely to hear me say this, a walled garden may be an advantage in the inclusion space. The apps that people can download have gone through some form of approval process. It’s a combination of hardware and software from the same provider so there is more chance of it working with less configuration issues which will impede smooth access. Also iPhone apps tend to be a lot simpler with less menus than apps on desktop machines, this will reduce the workload of either family or institutional mentors and helpdesks.

The other thing about it is that it does the things simply that lots of the excluded would love to do. Internet browsing, pictures of grandchildren, delivery of services, delivery of content. All too often inclusion programmes seem to go straight for the endgame. Getting people skilled up to organise their interaction with government online. That’s important, but maybe we should get people doing the stuff which will bring emotional, social and connectedness value first. They’ll then get engaged and will enjoy it and will have learnt core skills for when you want them to do the harder stuff like filling out forms and engaging with government.

Sure it’s not a complete panacea and it won’t be for everyone, but I’d love to see a trial. The government could even eventually become a mobile network operator or virtual mobile network operator to ensure secure access (I’d worry about man in the middle attacks on municipal WiFi on people who were vulnerable and not skilled enough to notice it). It would also be a good way of making sure that the device just works from the moment it comes out of the box and is handed to the individual. If you have problems with 3G signals in certain areas these could quite easily be fixed with femtocells.

In my opinion the iPad could have so much more of an impact in this space than the one all of the media outlets seem to be looking at. The hype about it saving the media industry and the newspaper industry feels a bit like straw clutching by an industry that’s doing too much hand wringing and looking for a magic bullet to appear from someone else. As my colleague at The Guardian Matt Wall pointed out this morning.

First day in the Brave New World. So far the iPad hasn’t saved the newspaper industry. Guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.

It may not be a Jesus phone, a Moses tablet or something that lives up to hype and hyperbole, but if it does something for the digital inclusion agenda it might live up to Steve Jobs saying it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.

I don’t really have a spot for banner ads so this will have to do.

If you do have a spot on your site, you can get adverts from here to help link people to the appropriate donation page which in the UK is here. Here’s hoping no evil people will set up fake “donation sites”. Donate safely people. Make sure it’s somewhere you trust.

Well done to Sam for doing this, to Mike for organising a UK list on Techcrunch. Also well done to the Crisis Camp folks and the emerging CrisisCamp London organisation who will be meeting at DEMOS on Thursday night.

This is such a chance to do what Tim O’Reilly challenged everyone on the other year… “Work on stuff that matters”.

Later today, forces of nature permitting, I’ll be at the launch of the London Data Store at the GLA building with a live link up to CES in Las Vegas. It feels like a momentous occasion in many ways. The last year has been an incredible one for things opening up, The Guardian Open Platform, the UK Government’s public data initiative and more local stores like DataSF (opened in August 2009). Bizarrely it now seems almost normal that public data is becoming public and this is just a wonderful thing to behold, it opens up so many possibilities.

It feels quite monumental partly as it’s my home city. I have a vested interest in this data and what can be made of it. I also think it feels this way because we’re starting to understand what will happen when data opens up and why it’s important, what will be made and more importantly what sort of data is needed to start building data driven businesses and economies around public data. I also think they made a great start in the project and I’m excited to see progress.

Let’s be perfectly clear about this, I’m personally for the release of public data wherever it can happen regardless of business imperative. To a certain extent, it’s a moral right. It’s ours, we want it. I want to be able to inspect how my money is spent, what level of services surround me, what my elected representatives do and I want the facts to hold people to account and to change my voting behaviour if I don’t like what I see.

Professionally though I want to make things. I want to make utilities with this data that improve people’s lives. However to do that sustainably I need to make things that people will want to pay for somehow; either through clients commissioning the things, or government procuring them, or end users paying for them in either money or attention (advertising). Without this part of the cycle then these datasets will always be personal playthings and the people in organisations who open up the data will find it harder to do so in the long run as it is expensive and in lean financial times questions may be asked about why money is being spent there. There has to be a revenue stream and a business model for data to be opened in the long run. Taxation seems to be the best one. Licensing public data in arcane and lawyer driven ways seems anachronistic and largely only pays for more lawyers. I’ve paid for this data to be created, now you’re asking me to pay again before I can build a business on it. I’m not debating that data has value, I’m just saying that we need to think about the long term way of paying for opening it up and that for me is through business and personal taxation. Essentially it feels like central and local government is venturing with its data and that feels totally right.

So, given that we’re getting the environment where this data is available, what sort of things will be commercially viable and what sort of data do they need? It sounds kind of obvious, but it’s utility. With app stores the things that sell are utility. You can get The Guardian on your iPhone as a mobile site, but people in their droves are paying for the convenience and utility of The Guardian iPhone app. It’s the top paid news app in the UK iTunes store and is in the top three of the US store. Likewise the real-time data for the BART in San Francisco is available on their main website and with a little digging on their mobile site, and is integrated to a greater or lesser extent with Google Maps, but people are paying for iBARTLive as it is a utility which makes your life easier and your interaction with the transport system better, more reliable and more interactive.

What’s great about the BART case is that by them opening up is that it’s creating an ecosystem with competition and selective pressure, the evolutionary force. There are 3 free iPhone apps, 2 free Android apps, 7 paid iPhone apps and 1 paid Android apps listed on their developer site. This suggests to me that it’s not going to be a race to the bottom on price, but a race to the top on features, useability and utility. Isn’t this what we want for our interactions with things powered by our public data. In my opinion it is and it’s the thing most lacking in our current mechanism of public service provision where contracts awarded through tender are almost the equivalent of a monopoly.

Cities are complex things, living within them, navigating them is sometimes tricky, finding information on badly designed sprawling websites is not what you want to do in our real time society. If data is the new oil then utility is the new refining industry, finding the elements within the crude raw material and then shaping them and combining them to make valuable things. What is clear though from looking at what is making money commercially in the utility space is timeliness. The data needs to be as real time as it can be. So please London, transport schedules and real time transport data. I don’t want to know when my hypothetical transport is according to a published schedule, I want to know the real thing right now. I don’t want to know about only about collated stats from 2007. I’d like them, but I’d also like live data about school openings when it snows, school place availability, waiting lists for allotments, hospital satisfaction, after hours clubs in my area right now. That’s utility. Applications based on old data which is out of date are worthless, they don’t provide utility at all, they only builds customer dissatisfaction. A news app which gave you last week’s news would be a curiosity and a bad idea.

So London Data Store, here’s to an exciting new start. Developers, here’s to making businesses out of the sort of data we’ve long asked for. As Prof Raper says in his piece today “tomorrow we must get back to work to make this promised future happen”. And finally and personally here’s hoping that I don’t get real time data that my wife has gone into labour while I’m on a panel. I’m a fan of real time information, but there are other real time data streams I’d rather were made available today from the likes of TfL.

This morning I downloaded the brand new Guardian iPhone app. It made me think anew about one of my favourite subjects, how we read. Before I start telling you what I think I just wanted to make one thing totally clear. Although part of the week I work in The Guardian, only a very short walk away from Jonathon Moore, the product manager for the app, I hadn’t actually played with the app until this morning. Sure I’d seen screenshots and designs and the video and even worked with Mike Bracken on a deck talking about how the app fits in to our activities. However, I hadn’t played with it or more importantly made it mine.

I love print dearly. I have such a different relationship with content in print compared to online. I really see my interaction with print as a luxurious thing. It’s partly about permission. The permission to spend time with it. To think deeply, to re-read, to get lost, to allow serendipity to take hold. Online is different. For me online is about information, data, utilitarian experiences. Wonderful, but only very occasionally luxurious.

In my talk at last week’s Rethinking Media, I was talking a bit about how content is atomised by placing it online. How many readers will have no idea if the content they see is part of a story package or part of the front page of the newspaper. They inherit their relationship with that item of content through coming to it from a search. Their intent is clear. They want information and they want it quick. They may not want to explore. Serendipity is lost.

This is how I interact with a newspaper online. I scan for stories in the sections I know are interesting to me. I click on links from my RSS, I click on links my friends share. Each new item of content I see is a bundle of facts, many wonderful and full of interest or value or joy. And after I’ve consumed them I’m on to the next thing. It’s so different from how I explore a printed paper.

For a long while I’ve resorted to reading the free papers on the underground on my way in to work. Although the Berliner is more tube friendly there is still an issue with reading it standing up. There’s an emotional and financial involvement with buying a newspaper to read on your commute. If you don’t get to read it due to overcrowding the disappointment is doubled. Add into that the environmental impact of the large stack of barely read almost mint papers and buying them just doesn’t add up. Before I had my son I read far more, now other things have taken the luxurious time of enjoying a paper and I’ve missed it. The free papers are the equivalent of fast food or the emergency Cornish pasty, they fill a gap but that’s all. I missed the quality writing, the deep introspection of issues and most of all the serendipitous discovery of things through a quality paper.

Radio and newspapers are serendipity engines for me, John Peel was the classic one. I’m still in shock and sadness of his death. The delivery of high quality things you never knew you were interested in is one of the most potent things imaginable. I didn’t get it with the free papers. From them I got the delivery of many time passers which I semi-cared about. However this morning my iPhone delivered the missing magic.

I went from a replay of the live commentary and a match report and gallery of great photos of our 2-1 win over Liverpool yesterday to a wonderful piece on Theresa May, to the ever fabulous Anna Pickard liveblog of yesterday’s Xfactor final to last week’s Charlie Brooker piece. I also read a fair bit of news and then my journey Tooting to Kings Cross was over.

These pieces were all things which I could through the wonder of an offline mode enjoy without pause or delay. No matter how fast your internet connection or the servers at the other end, there is still always a lag online. This feels important from this morning’s experience. The only lag in both the printed page and the iPhone app is the action of page turning. What’s still missing is the proximity of disparate things on a printed page. Of shape and layout related curation and tagging, either intended or unintentional. That though is a form factor thing and some day maybe we’ll find a way to generate juxtapositional layouts.

The serendipity produced by my personal selction and institutional curation was there too and was key. I picked the sections I was interested in, The Guardian editors provided a set of things I’d be interested in and then there were some potluck bits from Features and Most Viewed.

What fascinated me at the end of the experience was that I’d had print like experiences; luxurious, spending-time-with experiences with what had previously been online content. Anna Pickard’s live blog from the Xfactor showed even more the quality of its words when you read it back without distractions like your screen clutter and adverts around it. It was really delicious and exceptionally funny writing. I found myself giggling out loud. You’d never find the live commentary of a match in print and yet it’s story telling experience was fantastic. There was emotion and tension event though I knew the result.

One section of the talk which Mike gave a couple of weeks ago and that I gave in Amsterdam talks about paying for content vs paying for utility. It’s clear which way The Guardian is leaning with this app. Just as you pay for the utility of a printed paper which gives you an experience around the content (in addition to a physical artefact), you do the same thing with this app. It does things for you, it changes your relationship with the content totally, it gives you a new way to experience it and in my experience helps you interact in a deeper and richer way with it.

At a very basic level the utility the app provides is that you can just get the news and read it on the tube on a small portable device but in my view the it goes a bit deeper than that.

This was the title of my talk at the first London Ignite last night. I really love formats like Ignite and Pecha Kucha as they allow you to really explore a theme deeply and yet concisely and hopefully leave the audience wanting more rather than wondering when you’ll stop talking.

Thanks must go to Amy and Ben for organising and allowing me to talk, and also to Craig Smith from O’Reilly GMT for his support of the event and his inspirational talk on being in a band and creativity (which made me start to think about small making teams of coders, designers, entrepreneurs and product designers as bands, although I’m not sure which team member is the drummer in hommage to his “Don’t hire a drummer who can’t dance”).

I loved the variety of talks and the quality of the other talks was both awe inspiring and nerve wracking. Ben Hammersley’s romp through the mistresses of Renaissance artists was superb and I really enjoyed the theoretical counterpoint of Tina Basi’s talk on distraction and meditation to my more empirical exploration of retreat and finding balance.

Hope it’s the first of many. I’m now thinking about if I could makc good on my idea for a meta-Ignite talk entitled “How to get over 100 people into a Victorian undergroud toilet”. There must be more ways than Ignite last night but at the moment I’m finding it hard to think of a better one.

Here is the talk I gave to round off Social Media 09. I’ve actually I’ve pushed this live as I’m speaking, partly because it’s the real time thing to do, partly because due to the layout of the room half the people in the room can’t see the screen and partly because I’m flying without access to my notes which will lead for an interesting 10 minutes and I’d like people to experience the talk a bit more as I intended. Here is the slide deck and a few paragraphs on some of the themes I was trying to cram in.

I’m interested in thinking a lot about the value within sentiment streams. Thinking about it from a totally different direction from advertisers pushing sentiment and demographic derived ads into it the data. I’m not saying that ads are totally wrong, I just think we need to think of more and better things here. There are a few things I wanted to explore in this short talk.

First of all I want to think about what other business models may exist around bulk data; business models more modern than embedding ads to sell things. I think there’s great potential to buy data feeds to make products and services more efficiently. To use it look for trends you can produce towards. To look for people who might buy the things you speculatively design and to look for feedback on existing services. I’d love the industry to move away from the advertising driven arms race which has given us the six-bladed razor (via the one, two, three, four and five bladed razors) where the need for bigger better new is driven by non-experiential advertising.

The second thing I’m interested in exploring is the real time space between the internet of people and the internet of things. Thinking about some of the things that people like BERG, Stamen and RIG are doing at the moment makes me feel that the dreams of interactive built environment and ubicomp are starting to finally escape from flying car land.

I’m also excited by things like Jer Thorp’s visualisations of air travel and Lufthansa’s MySkyStatus which essentially convergent ways of looking at your travel, either declaratively by associating yourself with a plane or implicitly by associating yourself with a journey through what you say at either end. I like thinking about the way you can associate yourself with a “thing” and let it become your mouthpiece for when you can’t speak. It would also be wonderful to be able to attach and detatch your identity from real-time services; so you could be just generating ambient geodata which could help inform people about living in built environments and then, when you wanted you could go declarative you could switch on your identity so you could play locative games and tell your friends where you are.

And just to make one thing straight I don’t want geotargetted ads to my phone, that’s just such a lazy thing to do with something as wonderful and personal as this set of devices and services.

Where I want to get to is to see more about happens when you use data and social to make things like for instance fundraising and sporting events data driven and inclusive. If you can follow a marathon runner you’ve sponsored, get updates as they pass through boundaries, then maybe you could send a message of support to them as they go past a big screen. With all we have at our disposal this is more than possible technically, all we need is access to the underlying data/APIs. I did a little exploration of this with my Four Walks project and the augmented solitude I found as people joined in virtually with my meditative hike through the Austrian countryside was so fascinating and moving. I also have a suspicion that you could probably raise more money for charity through this sort of bidirectionality or data driven people centric story telling too.

So, let’s build a real time networked society, but let’s not fill it with adverts. That would be so lazy, we need to find value within the stream of data or through the use of the flow of data rather than floating billboards on it.

I’m really pleased to be speaking at Mashup Event’s Social Media 09. It’s a great line up and I’m in the exciting but nervous position of talking last. So partly to keep the surprise and partly to stop people from “acquiring” ideas, I’m going to keep the details of what I’m talking about under wraps.

The broad brush strokes of what I’m talking about though, are how it seems kind of odd to be talking about the social web or even the real-time web or flow-by web. These are all excellent and semi-interchangeable names for bits of technology which are almost totally invisible now to the people who use them. To pigeon hole these technologies, and to give them a name, especially when as a collection of things they’re now so diverse and nebulous sometimes can make them seem like a fad, or a whipping boy or magical.

However I think we’re on the horizon of some interesting implications of what we’re making and thinking at this point in time. We have the bits and pieces of technology to do some incredible things, some of which have societal implications which will outlast these names we give the technology now.

I’m interested in relating a few stories to what happens when things flip (or in some cases flip back) to a situation where people are more in control and existing hegemonies are broken. Some good, some bad and then hopefully some good again to leave people feeling smiley and that all is good in the world.

I’m really excited about speaking and would like to thank Simon and Phillip for the invitation. Hopefully see some of you on the 12th.

There were two trivial little things I saw on my flight out to Sweden to speak at Internetdagarna. The first made me smile in a “oh how nice you thought about that and made it just for me” bit of whimsy. It was that my boarding pass said API OK.

It was nice of them to check and to put a little status message on their I thought and then returned to the real world smiling.

Then I got onto the plane and discovered that the online magazine was called CloudShop.

Of course it is, it’s in an airplane, they fly in the clouds, but nevertheless it made me feel like I was in a Sixth Sense type world now where “I see datastores”.

With the advent of commercial APIs and datastores, data.gov.uk, GLA datastore, the emerging datastores in Australia and New Zealand, the soon to be launched Swedish equivalent and of course data.gov itself what we need to work more on is easy tools for people to get at and compare the data and most importantly we need to teach data literacy at school. I think of the inspirational great work David Smith is doing at St Paul’s in Barnes which shows it can be done, and done well, but it needs to spread and fan out and be part of the curriculum.

I just can’t wait for the day Sam comes home and says his homework is to analyse and compare pollution data for London from the year 2009 and we go on adventures through data together.

I had the privilege of meeting the Swedish Infrastructure minister, Åsa Torstensson, at a breakfast for people who were speaking at Internetdagarna yesterday. I heard her outline what Sweden was doing with broadband access and in my very broken understanding of Swedish one thing really stood out.

90% of households should have 100 Mbps by 2020

Which strikes me as a good and lofty goal. They want to have 40% coverage at this speed by 2015 too. Interestingly when I spoke to her there was no mention about digital media and giving everyone access to TV on demand services or downloading content, it was about access to services. Services such as education, eHealth, eGovernment, big picture things. In a report on the announcement she mentions that the trend in internet useage is towards two-way communication. The report also mentions increased consumption of online media and entertainment.

There was one phrase which I loved which came through in my short discussion with her and the report, which is that it is a democracy and freedom of speech issue. They talk about universal access being important for achieving political goals in entrepreneurship, environment, education and health.

What strikes me about this is that when the internet and access to data and services becomes not just a commercial service, but an integral part of your life as a citizen it becomes a human right. Åsa used the words democracy and freedom of speech and it makes me wonder how legal it would be to restrict someone’s democracy and freedom of speech on the fairly minor charge of filesharing.

For a while yesterday morning I was fortunate to be involved in a meeting in the GLA’s lovely top floor room before I needed/wanted to leave for #inlawcamp. Firstly, congratulations to Emer Coleman and others for this inclusive beginning. Being invited into an organisation’s home for the start of something suggests of a good and open relationship to come. The presence on a Saturday of several GLA staff involved in the process also shows me they care deeply about it. Getting the ever excellent huge pulsating brain of Paul Clarke involved as facilitator is a result too. I hope they find a way of harnessing Paul’s talents further in this sort of convening activity. If they do, good things will happen for sure.

Putting early datasets on their embryonic site is a move full of promise too, although the cleanliness of the data is dubious in places (but their response was good and quick). The datasets are a fairly safe and innoccuous set, but nonetheless have potential for mashups. I thought of Dan Catt and the data.gov.uk newspaper from Newspaper Club the moment I saw the allotments data.

The intention is clear, to build a data driven London, and they’re well aware of issues relating to geodata (I really hope one day I won’t have to write that) and data locked up by suppliers (TfL and others). The thing that heartened me was the sense that people were prepared to step up from the client side and fight for it. The developers have carried the flag for too long with no tangible support apart from people like Tom Watson. Please Emer and co, use your might and others to help get this data moving, there is so much good that can be done with it (and the Olympics is only just around the corner).

The lack of meaty data gets me into the only problem I can see at the moment with the start of the project. And please, Emer, Christine, Paul and anyone else involved with this, please don’t see this as a criticism on you or your efforts so far or of yesterday. If an organisation want to get things made by the community which can act as carrots for the data provider community you have to get some richer data up front, the good stuff… like just as an example, the full article content of everything you have rights for. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about the value of anecdotes you can tell to data providers to get them to release more data. He’s been pimping Tom Taylor’s cycle accident mashup to everyone as a good example, which it is, but he’s also saying he can’t really use it as an anecdote anymore as it’s now so well known. We need more anecdotes, but we as a developer community also need to raise the game on them and do something which really shows how new/improved data driven user centric services will work.

Making “London Allotments Near Me” (even if I could do postcode lookups) is not something which would make a better anecdote, but at the moment it’s pretty much all I can build out of London data that is a service. I don’t want to do something on gifts given to the Mayor of London, or a subset of expenses of a subset of people as these are more about transparency and not much use to everyman. I certainly don’t want to make a map mashup relating location to ethinic populations just in case some idiot at the BNP finds it twists it into an excuse for their retarded opinions. The age demographic data is interesting, as is the GLA budget and the data on pollution which is agem, but I can’t make utility from them, so it’s back to “London Allotments Near Me”.

A while ago at a meeting at the GLA, someone made a slightly pejorative comment to me when I was talking about APIs, saying that developers like me would gravitate towards “making apps for people the same as me such as things to do with cycling and wouldn’t ever be interested in making the real utility apps” (which is ironic as I don’t ride a bike and I really do want to make things that make a difference). Admittedly that day I was over casually dressed, but I’d like to turn this comment round and say if all you give me is this sset of initial data I can’t do the latter (real utility) and can only do the former (an allotments iPhone app). It’s like I’m coding with hands tied behind my back.

Carrot time is over, the developer community have been very hardworking and fruitful on their allotments growing data driven carrots for this sort of initiative and I’m sure we’ll continue as well. However stick time is here I’m afraid. Please get us the raw materials to become at the very least a cottage industry or preferably a proper farming business whose profits will derive tax revenues and whose quality products which will reduce costs and overheads for you as a provider. Robert Brook summed it up perfectly.

Encourage. Then persuade. Then insist. Then compel. #londondata

It’s worked really well from Andrew Stott/Richard Stirling/Nigel Shadbolt/Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s work on data.gov.uk, let’s do it for London please.

I don’t want to end this post on a negative note though. I love the feel of the initiative, and the inclusiveness and enthusiasm shown in this opening out of London, so I’ll end it with an anecdote of my own and a wishlist. I’ve never been to a building where the scanners were so sensitive that a packet of Polo’s and a Pret a Manger Almond Croissant set them off and had to be x-rayed. Obviously as Robert Brook, Paul Clarke, Brian Hoadley and I discussed it was a clear attempt by me to build some form of improvised explosive device to stop data being opened up.

Nice start GLA, now please can I now have all your transport data, parking zone data, local economic data, school catchment areas, locations and opening hours of all pre-school clubs and Sure Start centres, housing waiting list lengths, locations of all local services (recycling etc) and other utilities and their opening hours. Oh and the shape files, waiting list length and application URLs for those allotments. I know you may not own all of this data, but it’d be good to pull it together into a data portal of everything you may want to know if you are a citizen or visitor to London.