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Dec 07 2011
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Never mind Wonga, use a credit union

Payday loans have been in the news today, with industry figureheads trying to persuade the public that they’re offering the punters a good service. Well, if you’re seriously stuck for cash you need or have loans you’re struggling to service, a much better place to start would be a credit union.

London Mutual Credit Union, for example, is a not for profit organisation that provides ethical financial services to Southwark and Lambeth boroughs. These services include savings accounts, current accounts and loans to people who find themselves financially excluded from high street banks. They have no shareholders, and all their profits are returned to members.

Unlike Wonga & co they are genuinely providing useful services without looking to make a very sizeable profit off the backs of the idiots and the vulnerable.

Anyone struggling financially would also be best off seeking help from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and checking out the many handy tips on web sites like Money Saving Expert (a personal favourite).

Thankfully we won’t have Wonga sponsoring our public transport network this New Year’s eve. Apparently Boris has gone for a booze company instead, who promise to promote responsible drinking. Cheers!

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Oct 17 2011
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Southern Fried London hits the spot

Here’s to Jenny Newham’s Southern Fried London, a collection of our finest grease merchants and heart attack hucksters. Thanks also to the weird and wonderful world of the South London Press, one of two locals in my neck of the woods, for bringing the blog to my attention.

I embarked on my own obsessive photo-documentary project with a friend in an otherwise ordinary market town many years ago, snapping photos of ugly gardens in Bedford. For a year or so I couldn’t walk along a street without noting ugly gardens and trying to remember their location. Perhaps a precursor to my mapping hobby?

The project was intended as a loving tribute to the dull places in which most of us live, and a comment on the influence of the endless gardening TV programmes at the time rather than a criticism of the owners. I doff my hat to anyone who makes an effort to do more with their garden than store old washing machines and weeds.

Like Jenny we ended up arousing the interest of the local media, which in turn led to a full page spread in the Daily Mail. We turned down subsequent invitations to debate garden design with TV personality gardeners on BBC Breakfast and Richard and Judy because they obviously missed the point and wanted us to attack the celebs or the garden owners.

It’s nice that Jenny clearly likes the chicken shop fronts, and isn’t just sneering.

My personal favourites aren’t all chicken takeaways, but you can find them on Denmark Hill. It starts with a Pizza Hut, which has been bested by a Tasty Hut just two doors over, followed a little further south by a Tasty House. Who will raise them a Tasty Mansion?

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Jul 19 2011
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Getting speed limits into OpenStreetMap

I’ve started trying to add speed limits data to roads in my patch of Southwark. Two things made me start looking at them…

First, I go everywhere by bicycle, which means speed limits and London congestion are of very little relevance to my journey times. But I noticed that journey planners like CloudMade’s offer wildly optimistic journey times for cars. Even ignoring congestion, I thought, they can’t be taking account of speed limits, which across London are lower than the national assumptions. For example, most main roads have a 30 mph speed limit and a growing number of roads, residential and main, have a safer 20 mph limit.

The second reason is that speed limits have been a big issue for cyclists recently, featuring in campaigns around issues like Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark’s Transport Strategy.

So here’s a snapshot of our data around Peckham and East Dulwich after a few sessions on my evening commute, using ITO’s excellent tool:

Orange roads are 30 mph, green are 20 mph or lower, grey are main roads without any data; all the minor roads without speed limit data just show through from the background. Getting more roads down to 20 mph will make them much calmer, more pleasant and safer for people on foot and bike.

Not a bad start, but we have a long way to go! I could probably get data out of TfL and Southwark Council. But I’m interested in seeing what I can actually find on the ground, both because the two sometimes don’t match up and because it made me aware of just how varied the signposting is.

With some roads it’s very obvious – it’s a short residential road with a signpost and a huge “20 mph” painted onto the road. On other roads you could easily miss it. Walworth Road has a 20 mph limit, but if you missed the single signpost going either north or south past endless distracting shops, signposts and shoppers, and buses that often block your view, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s 30 mph like most other roads.

Back to OpenStreetMap, it would be good to get better coverage of speed limits. I notice that some parts of the country like Norwich are very well mapped, while London – with the exception of my experiment, Islington and a little bit of Tower Hamlets – barely has any.

One for a winter mapping party, Harry? Or maybe another good reason to get cycling and pedestrian groups interested? I’ll talk to the Southwark campaigners…

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May 22 2011
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Open scrutiny in the age of open data

This is the first of perhaps two or three short essays inspired by Emer Coleman‘s masters dissertation on open data, written in a personal capacity and not as part of my job. In this post I want to look at what her proposed model of “iterative and adaptive open government” would mean for scrutiny of the Mayor of London. Her dissertation considers the difference between the New Public Management approach, characterised by public managers setting the goals and other public managers auditing their performance, and an emerging “Open Governance” approach using open data.

Continue reading →

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Apr 19 2011
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Maps, open data and activism on the Heygate estate

Andy Allan’s excellent post on cycle campaigning reminded me to blog about some mapping help I’ve given a campaign group called the Elephant Amenity Network. One of their long-running issues has been the clearance and demolition of the unfairly maligned Heygate Estate, over 1000 council homes that should have been refurbished for council tenants instead of being knocked down for aspiring home owners to move into the area.

A photo of the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, London

One of the best features of the Heygate Estate is the urban forest that has grown there in the past thirty or forty years. But the few remaining residents and local campaigners fear the “regeneration” will see many or even most of them cut down.

Through a friend who is involved with the campaign, I came along to help them map the trees that are there now. Knowing what you have seems like a good first step to saving it.

So I helped them enter the trees into OpenStreetMap using the OpenEcoMaps install of the Potlatch 2 editor, set-up a simple map that shows them as clickable objects on a map, and provided them with a spreadsheet of all the data at the end of the process.

Some other clever bods in the campaign then used a system called CAVAT (Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees) that puts a financial value on the trees. They estimate the value to be well in excess of £7.6m! Here is the CAVAT valuation laid on top of OpenStreetMap:

I’m glad to say this has become a case study in a recent London Assembly report into the state of street trees in London, which makes recommendations about the need for open street tree data and uses this Heygate mapping to show both the demand for this data and how useful it can be.

Since mapping the trees ourselves, I’ve received a file with all the trees in Southwark from the council with permission to use and share it, which is brilliant. I did a test import in East Dulwich/Peckham Rye, but stopped short because of rendering issues. It would be great to be able to import the lot and see if citizens can keep the data more up to date than the council, or perhaps even collaborate with the council and Trees for Cities?

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Feb 26 2011
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Selecting a good politician

It’s selection time for the Green Party. In London we are voting not only on our list for the House of Lords (in case we get offered another seat there), but also for the London Assembly and Mayor. Since I work at the Assembly and I’ll be writing the manifesto for whichever people are chosen, I don’t want to endorse anyone here. But I do want to share a a few thoughts on what I’m looking for in a politician.

The most important thing for Greens to consider is that we will most likely only get one, two or three London Assembly members out of 25. There’s no room for colourful characters with narrow interests, bad tempers or a tendency for self indulgence. They need to be good communicators, both practical and radical, collegiate and disciplined.

We need to pick people who can get complicated and often innovative messages across to the mainstream media, to other politicians, to the public. It’s no use being Mr or Mrs Brains if you baffle people when you talk to them, or bore journalists with predictable soundbites. Politicians have staff to help with policy research and messaging, but nobody between them and their audience.

We rely on our Members to put across a good, rounded image of our party. Whatever your particular politics, will your choices show that the Green Party is both practical and radical, that we are able to achieve significant changes to Mayoral policy at the same time as advocating a radically different vision of London? Radical idealists might spend four wasted years making good speeches; practical realists might forget the reason they’re Green while working for minor concessions.

Our two/three members have, in the past, won a great many gains for London by working with other political parties and at times with the Mayor. The comparatively collegiate culture of the Assembly is one of the joys of working there. People who enjoy tribal politics, who thrive on factions and who find it difficult to work with others – especially if they’re those hated Lib Dems or “sell out” New Labourites, won’t get very far in the Assembly.

To focus on these basic political skills takes the final quality: discipline. Watching Caroline Lucas over the past few years, it’s been remarkable to see how hard she works to find realistic radical ideas, get them across to the public and the media in a compelling way, and work with NGOs, politicians across the political spectrum and anyone else willing to help her achieve our goals. To compare her to someone like George Galloway, who is an excellent speaker and fires a lot of people up, is to compare an effective small party politician to a character that can only be tolerated in a large party.

Of course this portrait of an effective small party politician reflects my politics; you may think we’re in this game for an entirely different reason. If you think there’s no progress without revolution or the Mayoralty, these reasons may not sway you.

It’s well worth actually watching the webcasts of a few Assembly meetings, perusing some committee reports and reading some press releases to get an idea of the work they do.

If you like the look of that work and can see its value, you might ask yourself: would this candidate be able to work cross-party on affordable housing funding and river deculverting, gain media coverage on these issues, and win some real gains for London?

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Dec 17 2010
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How are we going to insulate London?

As another flurry of snow hits the office windows here at City Hall, we’ve put the finishing touches to a video by Darren Johnson investigating the future of insulation in London (and the reasons why over a million homes are still bleedin’ cold!)

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Nov 30 2010
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Matchmaking open data geeks and local mappers

Two parallel worlds are starting to rub up against each other – open data enthusiasts and local activist groups. As Sam Smith has pointed out, embedding the power of open data in other worlds such as local activism has barely begun.

Maps are one medium where I’ve been trying to bring these worlds together.

Stepping into the ring

In the left corner we have people like Rob Hopkins, who has just written a great summary of Transition Town groups mapping wild food, local groups and visions of the future. This wonderful work makes use of relatively open tools like Google Maps, but (so far as I can see) they make absolutely no use of open data, and keep all of their data in their own separate mapping systems.

In the right corner we have open data crowds like OpenStreetMap, and after some prodding from me the Greater London Authority and the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Together we have stacks of open data on renewable energy generators, allotments, recycling bins and more. But so far we haven’t made it easy for activists who aren’t super-geeks to do interesting things with this data, nor to use platforms like OpenStreetMap to store data they gather.

This is a great shame because both camps believe in the value and power of co-operation and collaboration.

Here in Southwark (south east London) I have found several local groups, the council and the Greater London Authority all trying to map local food growing, or at least interested in getting the results. Why not all work together on one open dataset that everyone can then use?

With OpenStreetMap it is possible for everybody and their dog to gather data of interest to them, and put it all in one place. That way you don’t duplicate effort, and you benefit from other people’s work.

It should also be possible to share the tools so local groups don’t need a resident geek to reinvent the wheel. Google Maps enabled people to make maps of local fruit and nut trees with ease; sadly OpenStreetMap has required too many geeky power skills to do this.

Touching knuckles

Which is why I have been working on the grandly-titled Sustainable London Map (ta-dah!) with much-appreciated help from another Sam Smith, Shaun McDonald and Andy Allan. This offers two tools for local groups:

First, easy access to the data we hold. My tool generates KML files with nice pointy clicky icons for all sorts of data related to low carbon power, waste, transport, food and culture. It pulls fresh data out of OpenStreetMap every hour. You can use these KML files on your own map or desktop programme, and you can embed the map itself if you don’t already have one.

Second, a customised editor (using Potlatch 2) that focuses only on the features that the map shows and that makes the presentation of all the OpenStreetMap data a little less overwhelming.

If every community group, charity and government body in London used OpenStreetMap then we would all be contributing to one definitive map instead of all doing our own thing ignorant of each other.

I have extended a hand to friends and contacts in my local Southwark who want to map food growing and renewable energy generators. Through various emails and pub meetups I hope they will begin to use the maps on their web sites (as Peckham Power have done) and to use the customised editor to enter new data.

I have also started discussions with staff at the GLA (who lead on Londonwide food strategy and projects like Capital Growth) and Southwark Council. To my slight surprise, they have been very enthusiastic about the potential of this work. If our tentative first steps in Southwark bear fruit, there is interest in rolling this approach out across London.

Pulling my punches

Given that this is a hobby, competing with a life and my Green Party responsibilities, I’m taking it all quite slowly. I know there are good reasons whymany groups will want to stick with the tools they already have, perhaps because they don’t have the time to make the switch, or because we don’t yet offer something they need.

But if you’re involved with any mapping exercises for local community groups and would like to find out how you could make better use of open data, or if you’re an open map data geek interested in helping bridge the divide with local groups, get in touch by leaving a comment below.

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Sep 09 2010
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Are minor points of interest poisonous?

Coverage of “points of interest” in OpenStreetMap is a point of pride for many mappers. Our maps have much richer detail than commercial competitors, they provide endless handy data for mashups, and as a consequence have been a big focus of mapping party efforts in London.

But should we really be so keen? I’m not so comfortable for two reasons.

First, how up-to-date is our data? I’ve recently re-surveyed my local area in minute detail and found several takeaways, shops and banks that have closed down or changed hands. I’ve also discovered that we have very poor coverage of cycle parking in Southwark following two years of massive expansion by the council.

How likely is it that these are being regularly checked and updated? I suspect “not very likely at all”, and have therefore decided to delete all my points of interest in my local area that I’m not confident anyone will update. I mostly deleted minor shops, especially those like hairdressers that change a lot and that aren’t very important to know about. I’ve left all the amenities like banks, post offices, cycle parking and pubs.

My second concern is that the completeness and up-to-dateness will vary according to the number of active and nutty OpenStreetMappers in the area. And that tends to translate to affluent areas.

In their useful paper on the “completeness” of OpenStreetMap, Muki Haklay and Claire Ellul issue this rather stark warning:

“The large number of contributors for applications such as OSM or Google Map Maker might convey the false impression that [they] represent a real democratisation of geographical information collection, whereas the reality is that these many voices are coming from the more affluent and naturally empowered sections of society. This cacophony is likely to be silencing the voices of the marginalised and excluded even further.”

As I have auto-traced buildings in deprived parts of Southwark from Ordnance Survey StreetView tiles and sporadic re-surveying, I have noticed the very patchy and thin coverage of points of interest in those areas. Probably half the churches and schools are marked with nodes (no ways describing sites and building, though I’ve tried to draw them in) whilst the rest are missing entirely; occasionally there is a smattering of takeaways and convenience stores.

A comparison of allotments with an open dataset from the Greater London Authority reveals a similar pattern (previewed above). Most of those we have missed are in deprived areas. I’ll be revealing more work on completing our allotment coverage soon, courtesy of some help from friends and contacts in various local/regional government departments.

Muki and Claire suggest public agencies should step in to improve coverage in deprived areas, but that requires a high level of committment to OSM from those agencies. Currently we are in the very early stages on this front in the UK.

Given all of this, I would be interested to hear what other OpenStreetMap contributors and followers think. Should we bother with minor points of interest like hairdressers and takeaways until public agencies step in? Is it better to leave them out to avoid a database full of out-of-date information that only increases inequalities of coverage?

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Aug 28 2010
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Low carbon power in Open Street Map

Low carbon power in OpenStreetMapMy latest experimentation in environmental maps has been launched on the Peckham Power web site. It grabs the set of energy generators in London (updated every hour from OpenStreetMap) and plots low/zero carbon generators on the map with icons and information to tell you what sort of technology each one uses. The idea is to, eventually, impress people who didn’t realise just how much of this exists in London already.

In developing the code that creates the clickable points, I realised that the OpenStreetMap tagging schema doesn’t cope with the many different types of technologies very well. So I am currently taking a detailed proposal through the wiki process to rationalise and expand the “power=generator” feature – comments welcome! It will go to a vote in a couple of weeks.

As Oliver Kühn has pointed out, data contributors aren’t always aware of the needs of data consumers. The very sparse coverage of energy generators in OpenStreetMap is a case in point; the cluster pictured in this post was a result of a little stroll I took with a friend and Peckham Power founder Anna Plodowski. But across London there are only a few generators visible, out of hundreds or thousands that must exist. I hope this map might spur others to contribute more data.

I am also talking with contacts in the Greater London Authority and Southwark Council about getting data they hold into the public domain, to be imported into OpenStreetMap. Public bodies, and organisations like housing associations, must hold lots of data on their own kit without complex data protection issues that would stop installation companies contributing their data.

In time, it might become an interesting point of collaboration with government and third sector groups, as currently nobody holds any data indicating the extent of low and zero carbon energy generators in London!

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