The slides from my talk at the ECF debate are available here. This is a auto-scheduled post, so notes, changes and anything else will get posted as a separate post in the future.
My talk starts at 5:15 in to the video.
I’m one of the panel at the Activism vs Slacktivism debate on Monday in Oxford as the opening event in the eCampaigning Forum.
There’s a small fee for attending the talk in person (if you really want to come, I can probably bring one friend along as my guest), but there’ll be a livestream and videos online afterwards, but the core of my talk will be based on previous comments here about 38degrees, and other things that have been mentioned in my other place. My slides will autopost here about 6pm on Monday.
Like many of my friends, I spend most of my time in the terminal, and hence, for over a decade, I ran pine as my mail client. I still spend a huge amount of time in the terminal, but for a while recently, ran Mail.app on my mac, rather than pine (yes, I know it’s been renamed alpine about 3 years ago, but the finger programming is still there, as is the symlink).
Read more…
The Public Data Corporation consultation – on “Plans for a Public Data Corporation” closes at the end of this week. If you’ve not had a look at their questions yet, you probably should (if you read this, you’ll be interested).
In many ways, this is the big enchilada. This could be the biggest decision that cements many of the things that have been fought over for many years. If the PDC is set up in the right way, even though it wont be everything we want it to be, it’ll be a defined process for opening up currently closed data where there is no process.
Even if that process could teach James Dyson something about sucking, it is a process which can be improved in future. This is vital.
We must thank the Civil Servants who put together such a strong consultatoin, and for the questions they asked. They’re open, interesting, and asking questions that challenge and consider the very nature of the PDC. There are a number of people and organisations with specific interests which would like a very different PDC to that which would offer the most (or indeed, any) benefit to the open data community.
If you haven’t responded yet, then you should. If you read my blog, you probably already know that.
But, more importantly, we should encourage others from non-data group with which we also work to make their voices heard. If the only people who remotely engage with the PDC are open data activists, then the open data agenda will deserve to return to the sidelines from whence it came.
The consultation is here: http://pdcengagement.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/pdc/
The nice thing about #opendata these days I that, occassionally one of the immensely talented people working on code comes up with a nice simple implementation which, by virtue of it’s existance, not just decimates, but completely removes some of the arguments around #opendata.
There’s currently a belief that putting things in PDFs makes it harder to read, and that, in some way, will save some people political hassle.
Not so much any more. Jeni Tennison introduced me on twitter to @kitwallace – who built this this for converting tables in PDFs to csv/html/xml.
It’s worth an aside at this point to remember that tables in PDFs don’t exist. All you have chunks of text at positions x and y on a page; and you have lines that run from x1,y1 to x2,y2; and from those, you can see a table visually.
The most evil PDFs published are the Birmingham spending data. Simple, Long, Verbose, 80+Mb PDFs. Here’s the an html version, with links to CSV and XML:
http://184.73.216.20/exist/rest/db/apps/gtd/pdf2xml.xq?path=/db/apps/gtd/pesa&table=1.6&format=html
Not only will this save huge amounts of time; but it makes a potentially stronger argument to political types about publication: “If you publish as PDF, we’ll assume you’re trying to hide something”
The Cabinet Office have launched a consultation on the remit and plans for the Public Data Corporation. This is extremely good news.
ASBOs went away this week.
The asborometer is still considered the epitome of the simple hack day app – plot some stuff on a map and it relates to where you are, or where you would like to be. For simple, clear, tangibly useful outputs, it’s one of the few things that is both within the scope of a hack day (if the data lets you) and immediately understandable by the wider world. For external conversations, it’s still used for those purposes.
2 years ago, at the first hack the government day, this was advanced; a year ago, it was still pretty; by now, we should have moved on. We do have a better examples to use.
When open data was a bunch of people from outside throwing perl scripts against the walls to see if they would magically crack, that was ok. We had no power, and were doing what we could in the hope that someone would notice. In those times, it was completely OK to give little consideration to anything beyond building something that someone might notice. Because might notice was a win.
But now, we’ve moved on in terms of influence.
As a community, we’re no longer on the outside throwing python scripts on github.
We have real power now.
Cabinet Ministers are expending political capital on getting data to us.
Should we still consider the asborometer as the pinnacle of what we do? We still act as if it is.
The issue isn’t code any more, or necessarily access to data; it’s the data we choose to include. The awesometer is a counter-point; but we should no longer laud an app with a fear-mongering selection of data, as if there’s no clear comparison to some of the Daily Mail lunacy we mock on twitter 5 minutes later.
It’s ok to screwup – even community friends at the Guardian DataBlog sometimes use data to create a post that’s at best a rewrite of an agenda pushing press release. Not everything will be suitable for examples – but the solution is to think about what is used as a laudable example.
Crime Maps
There are various narratives about the crime maps. The best and most well considered is the Guardian’s Editorial. On twitter, the people I follow include disparate groups of people who are technical, and who are activisty or policy types who aren’t. The response of the first group to the crime maps was overwhelmingly negative (not wishing to single anyone out). But it was mostly for technical reasons – “I could have built a website which did that at scale”.
In some comments, what was missed was the point of the exercise. Harry somewhat agrees (possibly for different reasons). But this is something that needs more discussion.
Not that commentary was necessarily completely wrong on some levels – the website did collapse under 750k hits/hour doing interactive searches – a load that needs some serious infrastructure (it was EC2) and good design behind it. That’s not the point. The underlying point of crime maps, asborometer, and the thing we produce, is what tools do we think are important (there are many answers), and what do we use them to do? Different answers to those questions have different constraints.
Asborometer was built to see the reasons you could be afraid. And it’s still a canonical example of what we think open data is for. Some of the same people who use that as their laudable example also wondered on twitter why they didn’t get privileged advance access to a media sensitive crime dataset.
If open data is to remain in the centre of the agenda in a sustainable way, we must consider the examples we use from the perspectives of everyone. And some of the apps that were built, which were valuable in their own way, may need replacing as examples which are slightly more inclusive.
If the open data community hasn’t outgrown the asborometer, then we don’t deserve access to other, better data. And that’d be even more embarrassing.
In the week that the Government ditched ASBOs, the community should ditch the asborometer.
The proposed Public Data Corporation must balance all 3 of its named parts: The Public and its interests at all levels, the Data and its potentials in all the rich detail, and the Corporations and their specific focii.
this weekend was netrootsUK. As DailyKos Liberal Conspiracy, Netroots Nation was intended to be copied as NetrootsUK.
And I’m not quite sure what it was, but it was a rather wierd event. Not in a bad way – even the trolls on twitter were entertaining for those who gave them more attention than they were worth. I’m not entirely sure what the event was trying to be, and as such, not sure whether it succeeded in it’s mission.
With 2 plenary sessions, and 2 sessions each with up to 9 workshops simultaneously, the balance felt very wrong. The first plenary seemed to be enjoyed by few, and criticised by more. I picked spending some extra time with the friend who let me crash at their place – I think that was the right call. Showing up just before the first break, the various breakout sessions were, as these often are, of differing quality based on interest, pre-existing knowledge, and expectations, and those didn’t seem to be set that well.
I popped in to a couple for a little while, but the interesting ones had no space left at all (not even standing room, it was more like levitation space only). It was, however, a fantastic time to catch up with a load of people who were all there for the event.
I’m not sure whether it was intended, but that may have been the value of the event. People in the same room talking about the same things.
At the Convention on Modern Liberty 2 years ago, it was in some ways a “labour-bashing” type event; whereas this was definitely a Govt-policy event, but there was a strong theme that Labour wasn’t a huge amount better.
Tom Watson spoke of his political journey over the last N years, and how it has lead to some slightly contradictory positions when naively viewed over time, but I wonder whether the critical mass of the labour party will end at the same destination. The path doesn’t matter a huge amount, the destination and its integrity does.
And, maybe that was the tension at the heart of this year’s netrootsUK – those with a focus on ideology , and those with a deeply practical focus on making things identifiably better for people. And while there’s disagreement on what that is, it is directly measurable if there’s an agreed metric of what better means and improving looks like.
The thing that was dramatically different over this time last year, and has changed in parts of the party, is that if feels like the labour members (and of course, this is a self-selecting group already filtered) are willing to talk about what they got wrong. A friend who, prior to the election would have defended Phil Woolas, even privately to those outside the party, now feels able to say what they really think. And that increases trust. But it can be lost just as easily should that transparency changes.
There were a number of impressive speakers, Tom Watson was on top form as usual, but one person who I’ve heard various good anecdotes about by Londoners is new MP Stella Creasey. In terms of someone who “gets it” from the activist community, she’s taken that into Parliament, and seems to have kept it all moving in the right direction.
If you’ve seen the videos of Gordon Brown speaking at TED and Citizens UK , it was a speech which could follow those two.
And, in the broadest possible sense of marching – doing someting in the real world – netrootsUK was trying to be about the sentence after “Let’s March”.
The lovely people at Do have accepted my application for a seat at the Do Lectures in 2011.
Very, very much looking forward to it. I have no idea who is speaking, or that much idea who will be there, but it will be great.
Disruptive Proactivity