Locatum

Weird starting with Francis Maude again but his "bonfire of the quangos" Public Bodies Act quietly came into force last week with Royal Assent. Putting aside the rather lacklustre execution to date of the quango cull it was the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) that attracted the most comment in a rather under-reported story. Now the RDAs certainly are not perfect and for many have failed to deliver on some of their purposes, notably in getting match funding to accelerate economic development. You could as I do call this a problem of execution rather than function or you could see it as an exemplar of all that is wrong with quangocracy with all the placemen, red-tape, inertia etc beloved of red top ridicule. Just for a moment step back and consider QUANGO - quasi autonomous non governmental organisation - organisations to which government has devolved power, which operate at arms length from Ministers and which in government parlance are referred to a Non Departmental Publ...

Francis Maude has today been quoted on Twitter that the Cabinet Office is busy talking to 250 companies in a bid to "identify data sets that will boost growth". Leaving aside how much what I know to be a rather over-pressured and under-resourced CO can do and how much knowledge it has, it rather begs the question, not of who they're talking to (though that should be open too) or even the data sets that might be identified (or the methodology by which that is arrived at - that ought to be open too) but rather whether indeed the sought after, mythologised even, 'growth' and the jobs and tax revenues that will allegedly follow can be acheived. Even if you believe the Euro 40bn (once you've read the report you won't) much of any 'value' to be gleaned comes from savings to government from being the beneficiary of improved knowledge and decision making - valuable yes, growth no. The big win to be had from big data is analytics; while sales and marketin...

More a reminder ot myself of the blog than a post on anything specific - there is sooooooo much to rant about that I'm just resigned to yelling at whatever media is giving me the 'news' and neglected these pages. Some say blogging has had its day but you just can't be coherent in other (anti?) social media but with say Twitter Times to curate (censor?) one's interests its evident that blogs are a significant piece of my world at least. So, more attention here this year! This post is also not going to be the ever-popular forecast of what might happen in the GI sector, plenty of others have been down that path already! 2010 was certainly a year of (some) change in the inner workings of the GI landscape, the consequences of some of which are not as apparent as some would have hoped (remind me of those killer apps folks, you know the ones with very big social and economic benefits attached; unless you were at Location Economics when the public sector laid a few out), t...

I haven't often used this blog to announce or extol emapsite's products and services but I am genuinely excited to be able to share that we are releasing an entirely new platform for the production of maps in printed plan form under our Plans Ahead by emapsite brand. We have retired the old Java platform and in its place comes a solution seamlessly integrated to our existing OpenLayers based mapshop platform; amongst many other things no more plugins for users. In comes a brand new customisable plan design interface with visualisation of backdrop mapping and user overlays at its core. Plans Ahead for emapsite is available now, accessible by all to easily create clear and compelling plots and plans whether for consumer planning applications or professional public consultation. The retired Plans Ahead was revolutionary when launched giving users the ability to view large scale mapping in any browser with re-usable OGC-compliant WMS back end, logic and web services components in...