datalibre.ca

This is a big week!

Friday, March 5 all day, there is a fantastic conference at Ottawa University for the inauguration of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society: Taking Stock of Tech: Reflections on Law, Technology and Society. The conference Program is fantastic and includes some of the world’s foremost authorities on things law, infrastructure, data, socio-tehnology…

Thursday, March 4, Cambridge Room of the Holiday Inn, 111 Cooper Street in downtown Ottawa at 5:00 p.m., Lecture: Zeroing In: Infrastructure Ruins and Datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dr. Lisa Parks, chair of film and media studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Parks will analyze satellite images of declassified pictures of bombed sites in Afghanistan and Iraq in the context of the American policy that limits access to satellite images due to U.S. national security interests, as well as discussing some of the controversy surrounding the use of Google Earth..

Today, March 1, The City of Ottawa IT-Sub Committee meeting discussed Open Data.
3 Constituents spoke: John Whelan from Open Street Map (OSM) Ottawa, Hacktivist Edward Ocampo-Gooding and Tracey P. Lauriault.
I characterize the sentiment as cautious optimism, with concerns regarding the private sector capitalizing on open data, cost recovery, and cost priorities of the city. The argument was made that business being innovative with data was good as they are our employers, our tax payers and our revenue generators.
There was great support from Councilor Legendre, Rideau-Rockliffe Ward, stating that the most dangerous argument being made was for ‘democracy’. He was also very surprised that the City did not already have such a an open data policy in place. The Chair of the Committee, Councillor Wilkinson Kanata Ward, was very interested in different applications, while Councillors Chiarelli, College ward and Desroches of Gloucester-South Nepean Ward, expressed concern for costs to implement and the loss of potential revenue generating activities. Bref – The ideas of open data, open access or open government were new to all the councillors and my take is much education is required to help our representatives understand the issues.
City Staff did a great job putting together a presentation showcasing other city initiatives, innovative applications, benefits to the city and the demand for this by citizens.

In several countries more official data are being issued in raw form so that anybody can use them. This forces bureaucrats and creative types to interact in new ways

Among America’s number-crunchers-in-chief, it is Mr Chopra whose office comes closest to the new culture of using data in a free, creative way. He thinks more government agencies should mimic the division of labour that now defines his own job at the top of the American administration: a CIO who guards stable information platforms and a CTO who cultivates data-handling talent in the open market.

Even the UK has come on board, recognizing that managing royalties and sales under the guise of cost recovery is more expensive than sharing the data.

Tom Steinberg, a British pioneer of data use, believes that what is valuable is what the market already pays for. He runs mySociety, a non-profit organisation founded in 2003 that builds simple web-based tools with self-descriptive names like “faxyourmp” and “fixmystreet”. Location is crucial to detecting patterns in public information; a map of crimes is more valuable than a list. Britain’s Ordnance Survey owns the country’s geographic data and, through an arrangement known as a “trading fund” sells them to, among others, mySociety. In 2008 economic analysis commissioned by Britain’s Treasury argued that the public value of the trading-fund information was greater than its revenue value to the crown; mapping data will be released free of charge from April.

The Economist: Of governments and geeks

Strange Maps has a wonderful series of posts that examine current political outcomes as viewed in electoral maps and explores the clustering patterns of those results with historical, territorial and demographic boundaries and patterns.

It would be great to see these historical patterns in Canada. Imagine a map of past electoral results animated to show change overtime and to compare those with a variety of religious, linguistic, age and a selection of other demographic variables to see if there is a pattern in Canada!

Also, on an electoral note, the UK is releasing its Postal Code geodata. In Canada, people have been lobbying to get access our postal code lookup file for free with unrestricted use because it can link postal code with electoral boundaries, a simple democratic process tool that is most certainly not libre in Canada!

See previous datalibre elections posts:
40th Canadian Federal Election Results 2008

Anti poverty advocates often have difficulty getting their points across. A new campaign in Hamilton called Do the Math has developed an interesting collaborative strategy to do just that! The Spec explains the process in this article Does $572 a month cover basic needs?. The following photo explains it all!

Does $572 a month cover basic needs?

as in comprehensible is difficult. This morning I was looking at a few of my favourite blogs and in Flowing Data came across a great multimedia educational site that uses multimedia to impart the idea of scale and cells. Wonderfully simple.

Citizen science is a great way to gather data for research. In this case a tool called ISpot facilitated the indentification of a moth found by citizen scientist.

I read this article this morning in the UK Independent about a young girl who found a moth on her windowsill. Her dad subsequently took a picture of it and posted it on ISpot. It was a new discovery for the UK but not a new species which was identified within 24 hours by an Open University expert.

The Moth was later added to the Natural History Museum‘s collection. Seems like this young girl is quite a nature enthusiast who was inspired to start visiting the museum.

Martin Harvey, a researcher at the Open University’s Biodiversity Observatory, who identified the moth, said: “Katie’s find demonstrates the power of the internet, and iSpot in particular, in helping everyone learn about wildlife.

Wonderful!