Mapitude: Open Data, Open Platforms, Open Communities?

(Open) Data Needs Open Service for Enterprise

I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at Mapitude. Unsurprisingly I spoke about community mapping, spatial data infrastructures in developing nations and Taarifa. I also touched upon open data and how services and platforms using open data need to be developed. I think that open data is great – for more info watch this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee – however I believe open data is only the beginning not the end point of data development.

We need platforms and services, which are open and free to use for the vast majority of citizens. This presents opportunities for new business models, while the data should be free at the point of service, the costs of collecting and distribution (if not crowdsourced – I’m not implying crowdsourced is free to produce either) need to be paid by someone/something. Data is just data, it doesn’t help improve sanitation or water access but wrapping it into a service or platform could and should.

Platforms and services like Taarifa, Ushahidi and Open Street Map all are very expensive to run, however need to be free for the public good that they serve. I doubt advertising can fully meet the needs and costs – look at Facebook, whereas I believe over a long term grants and loans are unsustainable. A freeium model could be the way forward, tailored around a service being offered which the platform sits on, which is free up to a limit. Deciding on who to charge for an what is a difficult question and would be needed to considered carefully, with questions around licencing and ‘fairness’ paramount. As such the communities which create the open source software which drives the platforms and services need to be part of any decision that takes place and be at the heart of the community and process.

I’m not saying that open source platforms and services using open data need to make a large profit, this is a charitable enterprise after all, the profit needs to be reinvested to support innovation, be it buying equipment, investing in training or paying for hosting. However open data, open platforms and open services need to make money, which can be reinvested in supporting its community, providing free services to those that deserve and need it, while enforcing payment from those that can pay.

Written and submitted from Mokka City, Dar Es  (-6.8162376,39.2885885)

Speed Isn’t King

As most of you know, I like riding motorcycles. I’ve even mentioned them a few times previously. Since 1530 on the 27th of November 2007, they’ve played a large part of my life. Being a ‘biker’ my friends, when the topic of bikes came up, would discuss stats like speed, acceleration to 60′ and the point that I would no doubt be killed in a gruesome fireball in a dumb accident. Stuff like that. Clarksonian-esque stuff. I’m annoyed and afraid but all of that, it’s just all wrong.

I recently took the annual pilgrimage to Skegness (you just have to do it, to see it’s wonder of nature, rock, fish and chips, crap weather and chavs) with a friend. He was riding a Yamaha YBR 125, while I was on my 650 Bandit. And it was grand. Speed wasn’t the objective, cruising the flat Lincolnshire countryside on the way there, then the twists, turns and drops of the wolds on the way back, via Lincoln itself.

It was a pure experience, speed cameras weren’t noticed or worried about. A feeling not felt in a long while, I believe since last being on the continent last year. This is the problem, because of the all the guff on the roads today it stops being a pure experience, soiled in someway. The youtube link is a track from Mogwai, “I know you are but what am I?”. There is a zen like state to it, I really enjoy long tours, lasting a week or two. As such the majority of riding isn’t fast and furious, it’s relaxing and needs a suitable soundtrack, hence Mogwai (on a side note I can finally listen to them again – happy about that!). In the UK it’s rare and nigh on impossible to get this feeling. Slovenia beckons.

Written and submitted from Lee Rosy’s Tea Shop (52.954335, -1.144121)

Geomob Taarifa

View more presentations from Mark Iliffe

Taarifa has been going from strength to strength, from pilots in Uganda and Zimbabwe, to talk about going to Senegal and others. As such building awareness in the wider geospatial community is an important step, not just to pull in developers to the project, but raising awareness of the project to a wider audience. Broadly the presentation framed the point that geospatial data is now available (or is coming) for developing nations, therefore we should position our efforts to understanding what platforms and services should be built on-top of this new infrastructure, while continuing to build the basemap. I believe that Taarifa represents one of those platforms, and its future’s bright.

Research Impact

The digital economy program encompasses five universities (Nottingham, Cambridge, Reading, Exeter and Brunel) with numerous Doctoral Training Centres (DTC) training ‘the next generation of researchers’. I’m quite fortunate to be at the Nottingham Digital Economy DTC, which is rare in that it has a combined research hub and DTC. From time to time the hubs and DTCs get together in conference, where the collective research efforts and outputs is demonstrated. However every so often the research council – i.e. the people that write the checks – wish to see the results of their labours.

Due to the nature of the PhD programs – in a cohort, as opposed to individual working – they wished to understand value for money, more specifically the research impact that the programmes have had. The format for this was a poster/live demonstration of gadgets, followed by an interview session with some direct, searching questions. It quickly became apparent the role of the DTC staff was multifaceted, focusing not just on research and supervision but deftly dealing with the work associated with the DTC. Having a window into this world offered a very different perspective on the process of research councils, from the council’s expectations to the reality of research output and the seemingly intangible process of ascertaining ‘impact’ – Impact seemingly being if you’ve done something useful and interesting.

Meeting the other DTCs with the twist of funders and assessors was a good break from the usual, made special that it only happens every few years. The only downside of the process was the EPRSC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) was based in tragic town of Swindon. However the bods have pulled a bit of a wheeze by placing the building next to the train station, adding a dedicated footbridge. This means, if day tripping, you don’t physically have to enter the town. Instead you walk in the footbridge (from the set of Threads) direct to the centre, unfortunately without seeing the famous Swindon vistas! All in all a good day all around!

Fear and Loathing in Las PhD

This post I guess has been a long time coming, basically hit it’s zenith and then subsided. About a month ago I had serious doubts within the PhD, around whether I was ‘good enough’ to complete. The majority of doubt focused around completing what I had perceived to be an easy task of implementing a ‘simple’ algorithm. This turned into three weeks of nothing. Breakthrough occured on what was supposedly a three day break in Marseille – before a 12 day conference schedule in Avignon (AGILE) and Amsterdam (WhereCampEU).

It would be fair to say I’d hit the lowest point of the PhD then. It was a sequential thought process, if I can’t do this simple thing, how am I prepared for the harder things later. Doubt set in, and the analysis was concluded in that I should quit. Then the break through came and all was good, confidence restored. I then read ‘The Valley Of Shit‘ a blog about going through the same thing; “Valleys lead to somewhere else - if you can but walk for long enough. Unfortunately the Valley of Shit can feel endless because you are surrounded by towering walls of brown stuff which block your view of the beautiful landscape beyond.”

Anyhow, I feel out of the valley now. All is good.

Written and submitted from Coffee Company, Amsterdam, Netherlands (52.371554,4.896772)

Engaging, Leading/Managing

How do you engage different groups of people and keep people engaged? These people may be some of the most highly skilled and sought after professionals. They could walk into the larger IT conglomerates (The Googles and Microsofts of the world) and name their price. They have families, nice things. So why do they give up their spare time over weekends to work on something they will have known for 5 minutes beforehand, with the potential of pulling an all-nighter. For little or no reward. If there is a reward it’s unlimited coke, burritos and pizza with a dash of chocolate and crisps. I believe they do it for the thrill of the chase, camaraderie and the challenge.

In conversation with a good developer friend he added that “90% of open source software exists because people can’t get any software written at work”. He was quoting a source which I’ve forgotten, but if someone can enlighten me I would be grateful; It’s a great quote!

It brings me on to musing about the dynamic between management and leadership. When I was eighteen I was at a leadership seminar, which for the first hour found very tiring. A combination of ironing and shoe shining the night before with a refreshing run at period zero (circa 05:30). The second hour I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It started with the beach scene of Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks gets disorientated coming up the beach, things go numb, then a solider is screaming at him “What do we do now, sir?”. Our hero organises his troops then, from the front, charges up the beach and his soliders follow him. They beach is taken, good guys win, bad guys loose. The end.

This part was led by a guy who, frankly, had been sunk a few too many times in his illustrious career. However he launched with gusto in leading by example, however impressed the point of knowing when to let others take the mantle. Being an exemplar shows to others how to act, even if they’re afraid, galvanising them into taking a deep jump into the unknown. But said leader needs humility to know when they’re not the best person lead and allows others to step up and show the same level of skill.

One of the sayings I’ve across (from my  father) is “Too many chefs, not enough cooks”. In theory it holds, but in practice falls over horribly. Consider a developer team, hungry for success, in all probability educated at the finest institutions on the planet and capable of developing cutting edge software and hardware. Each one of those developers will have ideas on how the project could work better and given the opportunity probably would manage an aspect of the project better. In the context of a hackathon, I think consensus can be reached within the group, in trusting the individual coders, who are giving up their free time, effort and skills to achieve the best they can do. This effort inspires other people and by default, the people that first step out into the unknown become the leaders instead of managers. These people form a nucleus around which the project (with respect to Taarifa, but could easily be a product or service) is built, they lead (not manage) by example. This doesn’t particularly conform to a specific type of programming ethos, it isn’t Aglie, Scrum or Lean, it should just be common sense.

Written and submitted from the Novotel Docklands Hotel, (51.50789,0.02329)

Wernigerode PhD Summer School

Another hectic few weeks draws to a close. The literature review is more grounded than before nearing 5,000 words and pretty much all of them are ‘good’. The past week has been spent in Wernigerode in the Hars region of Germany on an AGILE (Association of Geographic Information Laboratories Europe) PhD Winter School.

Mixing PhD candidates from research centres across Europe from GIS, Geomatics and other disciplines the event started with the customary ice-breaker. Even over (some very very good) local beer, it was clear that the participants were from very diverse backgrounds, most in the process of doing interdisciplanary research, with projects looking at conflating ontologies, predicting the location(s) of serious criminals, visualising change and crowd sourcing 3D building models among many others.

The first day started with introductions, followed by 10-15 presentations with questions on our topics. Taking all day it was good to see how other geospatial PhDs evolve in differing subjects and countries. During a very German (schnitzel) lunch we wandered in the forest surrounding Wernigerode. Though the place is quite of the beaten track it really is worth a visit if you want to chill out.

The second day started with a very good talk from Bénédicte Bucher from IGN about the differing research groups of the French National Mapping Agency, concluding with her thoughts on the PhD process. She noted that when you first start it’s like being in a Bazaar, you see the different pathways however, eventually, you’ll be forging your own path in the wilderness over tough terrain.

This followed into break out sessions with other participants to start either a paper or initiative on your subjects. Being in the Volunteered Geographic Informations group we went back to basics. Though we were from differing subsections of VGI (Crowd sourcing 3D indoor models, policy of VGI in government and myself in Community Mapping) our common ground was the lack of definitions in VGI, so we proposed an AGILE initiative to fix this.

After putting a 10 minute presentation together (where we managed to get MC Hammer into a slide, under the rather tenuous headline of “Break It Down”) we formally ended the winter school with our proceedings in hand. Then a spot of further networking in the only club in Wernigerode…!

Written and submitted from the DB RegioBahn Magdeburg – Berlin train.

Mark is Offline

 

I am taking some time to go offline. No twitter, facebook, foursquare, blogs etc. Just PhD and writing. See you all on the other side.

Taarifa: Go Big Or Go Home

Demonstrating any piece of software regardless of its inception is a hard task. You have to understand the group that you’re pitching to, even if ultimately, they aren’t the end user and have little technical inclination. It helps if the group you’re pitching to is enthusiastic. When pitching Taarifa today the group was enthusiastic, engaged quickly and wanted to participate further. I spoke my previous blog about having Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, though some of those concerns were allayed, some still remain.

The group to which software was demonstrated was a mixed bunch, comprising of field inspectors to managers in charge of implementing monitoring programs. Phones were unboxed the Hauwei (Lady?) Gaga and distributed to the workshop participants. They navigated to the dev.taarifa.org site and proceeded to make reports. There were two universal complaints; the keyboard screen was too small (therefore typing was difficult) and the Android system was using autocomplete . Users did not like when they were typing in something unrecognised by the system that it changed what they were typing, so they stopped. Secondly the feature took up valuable space on the screen. Barring these hardware related issues, participants were able to take photographs and make reports using the custom form provided especially for the workshop.

After this workshop we moved to field trails. After meeting the local administrator for the district our group of myself a colleague and an IT specialist from the Ministry of Local Government demonstrated Taarifa and it worked wonderfully. Taking on the district inspector and other local government officials our convoy delved into the countryside, visiting CDD (Community Driven Development) projects. The idea of CDD is that the local community raises money and the government either matches it or improves it by an order of magnitude. These projects then create a business selling or renting goods and services. Here we hit our first issue; network coverage. I can safely say that the EDGE network isn’t capable of uploading photos in any usable manner. This was expected, though due to constraints of time, a contingency wasn’t planned.

On our third and final visit the stars aligned and with 2 bars of 3G the reporting worked and worked very well. Visiting a local charcoal selling project (making around 100kg a day) the inspectors where able to file reports in a consistent manner without paper and repeat form filling. They really liked it, and wish to use it further. They like it so much that we’re now going to Northern Uganda, near the border with South Sudan to trial the project there.

What have we learnt? Taarifa has performed well in the face of an expectant and demanding crowd. The progression depends on a few factors both technical and operationally. The technical factors are ‘simple’, fix a few bugs, add an improved export functionality and allow reports to be submitted when ‘offline’. Bug fixing and exporting requires time, the offline feature is both time and a bit of HMTL5/Javascript knowledge. Not exactly low hanging fruit but it’s reachable. On the operations side we now need to consider how the Ministry (or other government agencies) host and support the project. Friday is dedicated to this, to ensure that what we’re doing isn’t a flash in the plan but that it transforms in a fully sustainable and used system.

Written and submitted from the Kampala Sheraton, Kampala, Uganda (0.3145283,32.5828674)

Engaging All Users, Not Just Developers

Taarifa is entering its endgame. Over the next week two workshops and two field tests will determine how the Ugandan Ministry of Local Government see the platform and wish to move forward with it. Currently there are three users, all with unknown requirements; the local civil servants (reporting), the national civil servant(s) (administrating) and the ministry (data users).

Currently the group which has been engaged the most are at the ministry level and as such dictate the forms and data-structure of the data which is to be collected. Taarifa (taking functionality from Ushahidi) is able to customise forms for data collection, in early stages it seems that Taarifa is being used to replicate forms directly, with – IMHO – a lot of unnecessary information. This boils down to asking what data the ministry actually requires to complete their job and that they use, instead of collecting data for the sake of it.

The Taarifa community is composes developers worked hand in glove with experts in water, sanitation and other fields. This brings a unique opportunity to design and implement software that focused on endemic issues not flashpoint crises. Taarifa could be badged as an e-government platform but goes beyond that in allowing two way interaction between government services and the citizens. This good on paper, however the platform is being demonstrated to the Ugandan Ministry of Local Government tomorrow. Engaging with them to better understand how existing functionality will fit into their workflows and what they further need is an important step and not one that should be taken lightly.

We already have buy in from the administrators on the system, now we’ve two user groups to get on board. This will be done with a series of workshops first with the Ministry then with the end users in the remotest parts of Uganda. We need more time for development, more time to understand the users and more time to operationalise. I have some fears, uncertainty and doubt. We have some bugs, and some misbehaving ‘features’. But the Taarifa platfom and community has come a long way since the London Hackathon. A roadmap is currently in production with ideas for big data visualisation. We’ve ported the code so the UI on a mobile device far outstrips known competitors (in our opinions!). This the future of Taarifa however this is pilot, and that time is now. Go big or go home. Yes, I’m a long way from home.

Written and submitted from the Kampala Sheraton, Kampala, Uganda (0.3145283,32.5828674)