The state of open licensing

I spend a lot of time reading through licences and terms & conditions. Much more so than I thought I would when I first started getting involved with open data. After all, I largely just like making things with data. But there's still so much data that is public but not open. Or datasets that are nearly open … Continue reading The state of open licensing →

From services to products

Over the course of my career I've done a variety of consulting projects as both an employee and freelancer. I've helped found and run a small consulting team. And, through my experience leading engineering teams, some experience of designing products and platforms. I've been involved in a few discussions, particularly over the last 12 months or so, around how … Continue reading From services to products →

“The Wizard of the Wash”, an open data parable

The fourth open data parable. In a time long past, in a land far away, there was once a great fen. A vast, sprawling wetland filled with a richness of plants and criss-crossed with many tiny streams and rivers. This fertile land was part of a great kingdom ruled by a wise and recently crowned … Continue reading “The Wizard of the Wash”, an open data parable →

Discussion document: archiving open data

This is a brief post to highlight a short discussion document that I recently published about archiving open data. The document is intended to help gather ideas, suggestions and best practices around archiving open data to the Internet Archive. The goal being to gather together useful guidance that can help encourage archiving and distribution of open data … Continue reading Discussion document: archiving open data →

What 3 Words? Jog on mate!

The OpenAddresses.io website notes that "Address data is essential infrastructure". Geography underpins so much of the data we collect and is collected about us, making address registers important parts of national data infrastructure. In the UK we've been wrestling with the fact that our address register is not open for many years. After the decision to sell … Continue reading What 3 Words? Jog on mate! →

Beyond Publishers and Consumers: Some Example Ecosystems

Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that we should move beyond publishers and consumers and recognise the presence of a wider variety of roles in the open data ecosystem. I suggested a taxonomy of roles as a starting point for discussion. In this post I wanted to explore how we can use that taxonomy to help … Continue reading Beyond Publishers and Consumers: Some Example Ecosystems →

Beyond publishers and consumers

In the open data community we tend to focus a lot on Publishers and Consumers. Publishers have the data we want. We must lobby or convince them that publishing the data would be beneficial. And we need to educate them about licensing and how best to publish data. And we get frustrated when they don't … Continue reading Beyond publishers and consumers →

Designing for the open digital commons

I wanted to share some thinking I've been doing around how to create products and services that embrace and support the digital commons. The digital commons is the growing wealth of openly licensed content and data that is now available to us all. In order to benefit from the commons we need to look after it. … Continue reading Designing for the open digital commons →

First Impressions of Copenhagen’s City Data Exchange

Copenhagen have apparently launched their new City Data Exchange. As this is a subject which is relevant to my interests I thought I'd publish my first impressions of it. The first thing I did was to read the terms of service. And then explore the publishing and consuming options. Current Contents As of today 21st … Continue reading First Impressions of Copenhagen’s City Data Exchange →

Dungeons and Dragons and Data

I've run a number of presentations recently introducing teams at various organisations to the Open Data Maturity Model. A number of organisations are starting to apply the model to help them benchmark and improve their open data practice. It's being widely used across Defra here in the UK and ODI Queensland have turned it into … Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons and Data →