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.
