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Making sense of numbers in Liverpool

26 September 2008

By Paul Miller

I'm running a workshop at the Insitute of Economic Development Conference on getting something useful from numbers.  Which brings me to the difficulty of working with Ordnance Survey maps! 

Guardian readers might have noticed the campaign being fronted by the paper to free up public information.  The Free Our Data campaign mentions Ordnance Survey more than most because that agency charges a fortune for giving us (the British taxpayer) access to those things which our taxes have already paid for.  A really good example of these is Ward Boundaries – we need boundary information in the form that a computer program can read it, in order to draw them on a map.  These boundaries belong to Ordnance Survey and cost several thousand ££ per annum to put them on a few computers in your office. They cost negotiable sums of money to put them on a public website.  Which is why we don't see them used interactively on a web site.  Isn’t it mad that the key to our democracy – our access to the area that our Members of Parliament represent – is too expensive to display on a map!

In fact there’s quite a lot going on around the subject of access to public data.  There’s an interesing web site called Power of Information, that it’s worth while keeping an eye on.

Anyway, all that being said, there is still a massive amount of data that we can be going on with – and I’m going to be talking about how we use it to help places get stronger economically.

I hope we see you there – 11.00 on 9th October .

Permalink: http://www.gavurin.com/ied (copy'n'paste)

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