I went to the Open Knowledge Foundation conference, OKCON in London a few weeks ago, and have been meaning do a review of it ever since. Whilst little of what I saw had a direct relevance to what I do, it was invigorating to be in a room with a whole bunch of people with imagination, who believe knowledge should be free to anyone, and who basically like to disrupt the status quo.

… and… relax! We’ve just completed a really intense GIS project covering the entirety of the North-West of England- which we’ve been working on since Christmas. This week is the first time I have come up for air since before Christmas, and it’s been really great! I’ve been working on integrating the new free Ordnance Survey data into our nascent SDI, and updating our sites map with new features, and new data from some of our other offices.

So, we Brits are getting all excited because the Prime Minister gave a big speech about how Britain is going to be all fab, broadbandy, and “totally, like Web 2.0, man” soon. And all this data is going to be given away- look here’s some of it now. We’re all going to have instant access to Government services, free Ordnance Survey data, and a shiny Institute of Web Science to stick all the bits together.

On Friday and Saturday I attended the inaugural WhereCampEU “un-conference” in London. The short review: if one comes anywhere near you- go for it! It’s well worth it and I enjoyed every minute. The slightly longer review: since there were no themes or papers organised beforehand, I guess it was a good opportunity to take the temperature of a certain part of the UK/EU geospatial community. So we got lots and lots of OpenStreetMap papers and iPhone apps!

There’s a fantastic article in today’s Guardian (via Computer World Magazine) about the International Intellectual Property Alliance, who say that countries advocating the use of open source software should be put on a “Specialist 301 list” (ie a trading watch list) because open source “weakens the software industry” and “fails to build respect for intellectual property”. The IIPA is an umbrella group for organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, who are of course well-known for their open-mindedness and forward thinking.

This week I have actually been doing some real GIS work for a change, rather than going to meetings, writing bids, writing reports, fixing computer problems and showing other people how to do stuff. I think this is the first time in approx 2 years that I’ve done this, and I was pathetically excited about the prospect at the beginning of the week. It has also been an opportunity for me to really put my money where my mouth is, regarding using open source GIS, since last time I did some real analysis it was with the Redlands offerings.

I’ve always used Google Alerts to let me know when Archaeogeek is mentioned online. It’s very useful for checking that your posts are not used/copied without attribution or permission, for one (this happens on a depressingly regular basis, and it’s just rude). Recently, however, via Google Alerts I’ve also found out that there are a surprising number of new Archaeogeeks (or close variants) online. Here’s the newest example. It’s not me, though I am interested in tinkering with Arduino!

The Call for Papers for the second UK OSGIS conference is now open. This will take place at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences on the 21st-22nd of June 2010. More information is available at the website. Last year’s conference was a great success, and this year it has been expanded to two days to make more space for workshops. Contributions are invited (but not limited to) the following topics:

Happy New Year everyone. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be inviting 2009 back for a repeat visit any time soon! Whilst I know it was a tough year for everyone, for me the problems were compounded by health issues (of the chronic rather than serious variety). I won’t go into the tedious details, but even non-serious health problems can take over your life, make you really stressed, and generally cause a nuisance.

I’ve been looking at a couple of “cool things” recently that don’t seem to have picked up much coverage in the blogosphere, so I’m going to do a series of occasional posts on them. The first isGvSIG Mobile and the Tellus Project. GvSIG Mobile is a development from Prodevelop in Spain, to create an optimised version of GvSIG for small-screened mobile devices such as smartphones and netbooks. The Tellus project links GvSIG mobile with an embedded mobile database, and allows you to synchronise with a remote database, eg PostgreSQL either on demand or when you choose (eg when you have a data signal), using OpenMobileIS.