Mapping Hacks

I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School on September 6th. Steve Chilton, the organiser, has a sharp eye for the edge; my longtime collaborator Saul Albert spoke there on art and mapsploitation two years ago, after we held the Cartographic Congress in Limehouse.

This year, they’re running a half day on Public Access to Maps and Data, featuring a lot of the same people and themes as the Open Geodata Forum that we put on with the Open Knowledge Foundation in April.

Roger Longhorn, who booted my understanding of geodata policy issues to a new level; Richard Fairhurst, whose geowiki project provided pioneering inspiration; the indefatigable Steve Coast from the OpenStreetmap project, providing such a viable Plan B to hold us over until we can gain free of cost, nonprofit access without supplication, to our national mapping data. Also speaking in this session is Ed Parsons, the CTO of the Ordnance Survey, the government agency turned monopoly private company that ‘owns’ and re-sells the UK’s national mapping data.

While the European Union horsetrades its way to establishing a poorly scoped Spatial Data Infrastructure Directive which doesn’t include street addressing data, I think we have a chance to establish a working local precedent; to offer proof of value for public access to public information, emergent data infrastructures built on open knowledge; I’m looking forward to the chance to socialise that belief to such an august crowd as the Society of Cartographers.

The rest of the programme contains some gems of collaborative and community mapping, and i’d urge anyone in or near Cambridge around the 5th-8th September to think about attending.

Posted in policy |

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