Today I attended the Supplier Engagement Session held by Bristol City Council (#databristol). The event consisted of a series of presentations discussing Bristol's recent activities around publishing open data and their plans to procure a new open and shared data platform. The event was attended by a mixture of suppliers and also members of the … Continue reading Scoping the Bristol City Council data platform
Author: Leigh Dodds
CTO at EnergySparks (https://energysparks.uk), previously Director of Delivery at the Open Data Institute. Proud Dad.
101100
Today I am 101100. That's XLIV in Roman. 44 is also the square root of 1936. 1936 was a leap year starting on a Wednesday. The Year 44 was also a leap year starting on a Wednesday. It was also known as the Year of the Consulship of Crispus and Taurus. Which is another coincidence because I like … Continue reading 101100
Data marketplaces, we hardly knew ye
I'm on a panel at the ODI lunchtime lecture this week, where I'm hoping to help answer the question of "what does a good data market look like?". As many of you know I was previously the product manager/lead for a data marketplace called Kasabi. That meant that I spent quite a bit of time … Continue reading Data marketplaces, we hardly knew ye
On accessibility of data
My third open data "parable". You can read the first and second ones here. With apologies to Borges. . . . In that Empire, the Art of Information attained such Perfection that the data of a single City occupied the entirety of a Spreadsheet, and the datasets of the Empire, the entirety of a Portal. In time, those Unconscionable … Continue reading On accessibility of data
A key difference between open data and open source
In "left-pad and the data commons" I tried to identify some lessons for the open data community based on recent events in the Javascript/NPM world. Open source, open science and open data are all parts of the same endeavor of creating the commons. There's a lot of fertile territory to be explored by looking at how those respective communities are … Continue reading A key difference between open data and open source
left-pad and the data commons
Yesterday, Javascript developers around the world were affected by broken builds and failed installations due to a number of open source packages being removed from the NPM package manager. The significant package was called "left-pad". It's a simple piece of utility code which has become a direct (and indirect) dependency for many, many other packages and software … Continue reading left-pad and the data commons
Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning
Cities are increasingly the place where interesting work is happening within the broader open data community. Cities, of any size, have a well defined area of influence, a ready made community and are becoming instrumented with sensors. The latter is either explicit, through the installation of devices by local government or implicit via the data automatically collected by … Continue reading Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning
Everyone loves a laser
It's been really interested to watch how the recently published Environment Agency (EA) LIDAR data has been seized on by a variety of communities to create interesting, fun and useful tools. For many people, myself included, learning about LIDAR has been an interesting experience. It's a technology that suddenly seems to be everywhere and which can … Continue reading Everyone loves a laser
Caution: data, use responsibly
Originally published on the Open Data Institute blog. Original URL: https://theodi.org/blog/caution-data-use-responsibly In December 2015, Ben Goldacre and Anna Powell-Smith launched the beta of Open Prescribing. The site, which was swiftly celebrated in the open data community and beyond, provides insight into the prescribing practices of GPs around the UK. Its visualisations and reports give an entirely new … Continue reading Caution: data, use responsibly
Digital public institutions for the information commons?
I've been thinking a bit about "the commons" recently. Specifically, the global information commons that is enabled and supported by Creative Commons (CC) licences. This covers an increasingly wide variety of content as you can see in their recent annual review. The review unfortunately doesn't mention data although there's an increasing amount of that published using … Continue reading Digital public institutions for the information commons?
Lost Boy 