Prezi for Coder Dojo

Here is the Prezi that I will use to introduce the Apps4Gaps competition to the IBM CoderDojo session tomorrow.

FixMyStreet.ie really works!

I am a big fan of the idea of applications that allow citizens to directly communicate with their local council. As a result I installed the FixMyStreet Ireland app on my phone which is a convenient interface to the FixmyStreet.ie web site which can be used to report issues to your local council. In common with similar services in other countries this is a deceptively simple application that automatically directs your problem reports to the appropriate council. Whenever, citizens spot a problem the most common reason given for not reporting it is that the person doesn't know whom to report it to. The beautiy of FixMyStreet is that it knows where to forward your report based upon what type of problem it is and where you are (it can use the location from your GPS to figure out which council is responsible for solving the issue).

My inner geek was keen to try out the app. However, I was reluctant to divert valuable council resources into fixing minor issues just so I could see whether or not the app works properly. For the last few months I have been searching for a real problem that I could report (there is never a pothole available when you need one).

There is a bridge that I needs to cycle across on my route to work each morning.  A few weeks ago I noticed a minor blemish in the road where somebody had dug up the road to lay a cable and had not repaired the road properly. Initially the problem was very minor, but the recent cold weather seemed to cause the material used to repair the road to crack and come loose. Gradually the problem became worse until there was a sizable hole in the road which made one entire lane impassable on a bike.

For a few days I got off my bike and carried it past the hole, until I suddenly remembered that this was an ideal opportunity to try out the app. Yesterday morning, I filed my first problem report describing the issue. Unfortunately I didn't properly save the picture. I suspected that the council officials would think I was exaggerating about the size of the hole so I decided to stop again this morning and update my problem report with a picture.  To my amazement I saw that the problem was already fixed.

I must publicly applaud Fingal County Council - even in this tough economic climate they are doing a great job of responding to complaints,

The business case for Open Data

I attended a great seminar yesterday organised by the Irish Software Association on the business possibilities for open data. The room was packed and we got some very good presentations followed by an interesting panel discussion. As a result of this discussion I got a pointer to an excellent EU funded research report that there was almost always a new benefit to a government from either eliminating charges for access to public sector data or reducing the price to a cost recovery level. Similarly, a recent report from Deloitte suggests that open data will be one of the main mechanisms that will enable a recovery from our recent economic woes.

I think this is very timely that this seminar was held in the week leading up to the Dublin Science Hackday, because I am sure many of the Hacks delivered at this event will probably use some of the open public data.

Here are two of the three presentations delivered (I don't have soft copy of the slides delivered by Maurice Lynch of Nathean Technologies)

This first presentation was by Dominic Byrne and it describes some of the great initiatives being done by Fingal county council to promote open government data. I must admit I was initially skeptical when I saw the relatively limited number of feeds cataloged on the Fingal Open Data web site when it launched, but time has proven that it was the correct policy to launch with what was available and then subsequently concentrate on improving it. This is a wonderful local initiative, the only concern I have is that we must not let local initiatives like this blind us to the fact that the real power of open data is its global reach. For example, when I looked for a mobile phone application for DublinBikes, I found that there were no applications written exclusively for DublinBikes but lots of applications written for city bike rental schemes which could be configured to work with bike rental schemes in many different cities including Dublin. From looking at the web sites associated with these applications I noticed that many of them were initially developed for a specific city that the developer was familiar with, but then they soon realized that they could easily broaden the appeal of their app by making it configurable to work with similar bike rental systems elsewhere.

Open Data Business Opportunities - Fingal Open Data & Dublinked

View more PowerPoint from Fingal Open Data

This second presentation was by Jonathan Raper, whose company Placr has made a great business out of exploiting Open Data in the UK. Both during his presentation and during the subsequent panel discussion, he shared some of the lessons he learned from the struggle to promote open access to public data in the UK. One interesting story he told was about what happened when the London Transport authority realized that many applications were being developed that relied upon a feed that they had accidentally made public. Their IT department initially wanted to shutdown the feed because the popularity of the application meant that too much load was being generated on their infrastructure. However, the mayor was aghast at this suggestion because he saw that there would be a huge political backlash if these popular applications suddenly stopped working. Someone pointed out that this was really an online equivalent of the ancient legal principle of "right of way".

Irish Software Association/ Open Data Bisiness Models

View more PowerPoint from Jonathan Raper