October 21, 2010

the perils of geolocation with social media

Posted by josediacono @ 8:40 am under Uncategorized

Radio National’s Futuretense show this morning. podcast How social networking like foursquare and twitter is using geolocation – the upside means you can find out if friends and colleagues are close by to catch up with them or find out what interesting places are close by if you have a few minutes to kill, but the downside is that if you enable geolocating and forget about it, you can be revealing your location inadvertently to the world. Interesting take on terminology, ‘geolocating’ sounds ok, but ‘geotracking’ sounds sinister.  Interviews with social media experts and a lawyer (who is actually very enthusiastic about sharing his location.

Website in Holland ‘pleaserobme.com’ Raising awareness about oversharing. Shows how the devious could stalk you or identify when your house is empty to rob me. The gist of the program is “it has huge benefits, but use it wisely”.

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October 15, 2010

spatial@gov news

Posted by josediacono @ 9:17 pm under Uncategorized

Wow, Maurits and my presentations have been viewed 84 times each now. That is pretty good going.  No comment yet though. All the presentations have been uploaded to a private page on slideshare for the eyes of conference delegates only. This is a bit frustrating since speakers were urged to publish their presentations under creative commons (most did).  But because some speakers didn’t want to, now none of the them are being shared freely. I would urge speakers who want to share their presentations more widely to upload them to slideshare themselves and put spatial@gov in the title so they are easy to find.

Welcome news. OSDM are looking into a blog for spatial@gov.

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October 11, 2010

spatial@gov and social media

Posted by josediacono @ 9:30 pm under Uncategorized

Having urged the organisers to enable ongoing discussion and collaboration in the spirit of government 2.0 I offered my services to assist – followed up with Ben Searle today. Ben will look into slideshare for sharing presentations – this would allow discussion and comment on specific presentations. Maurits v/d Vlugt and I have uploaded ours already – has anyone else? (Search slideshare for spatial@gov). Ben is also looking at what sort of forum/wiki his current platform with support so watch this space. Maurits was blogging very eloquently last week so until we have a general forum do comment on our blogs.

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spatial@gov snippets

Posted by josediacono @ 8:46 pm under Uncategorized

Peter Kinne and I share maps on the touchy feely Surface

Back on deck after a huge week at what must have been the largest national spatial conference ever held in Australia (FIG was bigger but that was international).  The government 2.0 sessions threw up some very interesting papers. Check out Maurits vd Vlugt’s presentation and blog I got some very positive feedback on Mashup Competitions and Data Portals, especially from those who found it refreshingly untechnical.  Memorable things for me were playing with the Microsoft Surface  on the Geomatic Technologies stand, Neat Streets (a production equivalent of itsbuggeredmate)  and Colin McDonald, the head of Land information New Zealand on the aftermath of the New Zealand earthquake (3 metre land shifts in all directions).

While in past years, we have bemoaned the fact that “outsiders” didn’t understand the power of spatial, they are now throwing down the gauntlet, telling us clearly what they want.

Outsiders are starting to throw down the gauntlet to the spatial industry

Michael Haines of Westgate Ports wants a Virtual Australia, starting with the Port of Melbourne (shades of James Bangay and his SIM city model of the power network). Barry Sandison of Centrelink has phenomenal amounts of data that his staff only use a tiny part of. He said  ”Tell me something I didn’t know” rather than confirming what policy advisers and case workers already know. Sounds like the serendipity of mashups to me. “Data snobs” are inhibiting the flow of information.

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October 1, 2010

New data.gov.au in November

Posted by josediacono @ 3:43 pm under Uncategorized

I asked Peter Alexander, Assistant Secretary at AGIMO (Australian Government Information Management Office)  about the future of the data.gov.au data portal used to supply data the MashupAustralia competition. This portal also has the url data.australia.gov.au.

I’m speaking on data portals and lessons learned from around the world on Wednesday afternoon  in the government 2.0 spatial@gov conference.

The data.gov.au  beta portal will be replaced by a  production version next month,  hosted in the cloud. First priority is discoverability because it doesn’t matter how good it is if you cannot find it.

Second priority is format.   The philosophy is to go with whatever is possible (it may be a table in a pdf initially), then improve on it  e.g. with web services.  AGIMO will be working very hard with agencies to get their data published.  Agencies are a lot more comfortable about sharing now they know the sky did not fall with Mashup Australia, on the contrary they saw  the benefits.

Agencies will self publish. There will be 5-10 attributes for every dataset, then links through to specialist portals for statistical or geospatial data (eg. Geoscience Australia). These will have more and different metadata.

We agreed on the  importance of resourcing the admin, blog etc. But there will be a ‘lag response policy’. If you jump in straight away with an answer it can kill the conversation. Better to encourage comments on comments and let conversation blossom.  That’s an interesting take.

Peter has had some discussions with ANZLIC and states. The same technology platform can be used by states.

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