Open Data: Isle of Man Progress Report
I attended #OGDCAMP 2010 in London and helped maintain the momentum in a session with David Eaves and Joey Hutchinson. I kept in touch with a couple of new contacts. I scheduled an IT professional body event to kickstart a local open data community:
www.bcs.org.im/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bcs-feb-v5.pdf
The Speaker of the House of Keys was in the audience and contributed to the debate on the pending FOI legislation. We have just had our general election and ministers will be appointed in due course by the new chief minister. An important point in open data circles will be any proactive publication and data format.
Progressed an SMS updates agreement between Twitter and Manx Telecom but low usage to date.
Helped Chris Taggart with the Isle of Man on opencorporates.com and other offshore jurisdictions such as Gibraltar, Cyprus and Liechtenstein based on previous experience in financial services. Learned about webscraping with Python and Ruby on ScraperWiki.
Google Street View went live in June 2011, followed by a positive EU benchmark report from CapGemini:
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/ded/governmentachiev.xml
I reviewed official Isle of Man websites and noted, for example, national statistics were “locked” in PDF documents. Building on experiments with WordPress.com and Ideascale.com, I decided to launch an independent open data blog data.iomgov.com in the absence of any other central point. I uploaded some cleaned data to the blog but very surprised WordPress does not include csv in the upload options!
I made the most of pushing the toddler around in a pram to maximise sleep with street parking data collection and developed the Isle of Man Parking Map in Google Maps.
Developed a point and click front end to OpenCorporates in Google Maps with the Isle of Man.
More recently, worked on opensic.com with Chris Taggart, Shaun Emerson, Andrew Stott et al and I had a very productive meeting with Treasury to prioritise and progress datasets.
Graeme Jones MBCS
Lateral Thinking Project Manager
