On the weekend of 27/28 April, we’re supporting BlueLightCamp, which is a free event being billed as both an unconference and hackathon. Attracting workers from across the blue light services i.e. Fire, Police and resilience services, the aim is to innovate through promoting good-practice sharing, exchanging knowledge, networking as well as providing an opportunity for concepts and solutions to be tested through the hackathon.
Through two mapping agreements that we have with the Public Sector, Ordnance Survey already works closely with many of the blue light services, providing: digital map products; the sharing and visualisation of data; supporting better problem solving and helping to reduce costs and drive up efficiency levels amongst other aspects. So it seemed entirely fitting to support the BlueLightCamp as we have a further opportunity to engage with and support the very individuals that work in these services.
Continue reading 'Unconference and hackathon weekend – come and innovate at BlueLightCamp'»
Events, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
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communities, funding, GeoVation, geovation challenge, innovation, Open Data Master Class, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace
With the current focus on the integrity, resilience and sustainability of complex food supply chains – the journey food takes from farm to fork – this post looks at how three GeoVation winners and two GeoVation suppliers are challenging the status quo using geography and geographical information.
GeoVation “How can Britain feed itself?” challenge winner Foodnation : The People’s Digital Co-op has a mission to have neighbourhood Foodnation hubs within bicycle-riding distance of most UK households. It provides an on-line platform to connect customers and farmers in their local area, easily enabling them to buy and sell local organic food and find fruit and veg-box delivery schemes around the UK. This is supported by the Foodnation app launched in May 2012. Working with the Transition town network to pilot the scheme, Foodnation founder Louise Campbell sees the model for the Foodnation Co-operative as being fully scalable in transition towns across UK.
Continue reading 'Geography and Supply Chain Integrity'»
How can Britain feed itself?, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
| City Farmers, communities, Foodnation, GeoVation, How can Britain feed itself?, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, sustainable, sustainable food, transport
Happy new year from GeoVation. I hope you had an enjoyable festive break and start to the New Year. I spent Christmas fairly quietly at home but after a great holiday in December visiting New York and Costa Rica, I was glad of a chance to catch up and get back out running. I’ve been taking part in my local free parkrun which I think is a great example of an idea starting locally with a simple solution (it started with just 13 runners in a London Park 13 years ago) that embraces the use of digital technology (website registration, bar codes, electronic timing, email and text results), includes the use of mapping data (the course, directions) and has been scaled up – parkruns are now held at 155 locations around the UK with an average of 134 runners at each event.
Photo taken when visiting Cardiff for the GeoVation Showcase. Do you know where it is and what it’s called?
In 2012, GeoVation ran 2 GeoVation challenges. The first, focused on transforming neighbourhoods in Britain and second on connecting visitors and communities to the new Wales Coast Path. We had a great response to these challenges resulting in 9 new innovative ideas that we, together with our partners in the Wales Coast Path Challenge, were able to award funding to and which will help get these exciting ventures off the ground.
Helping to transform neighbourhoods, Community Payback Visibility is an app that will allow the local community in the Staffordshire and West Midlands to nominate sites for work to be carried out by offenders on community service and track the progress. Residents’ Green Space Mapper provides a tool for local residents to have a say in the future of open spaces in their area. Shout Crime will allow people to report hate crimes more easily and Sustaination are using social, local and mobile web technologies to make it cheaper and easier for food enterprises to connect and bring resilience to our food systems
Continue reading 'Happy Innovating in 2013'»
On Wednesday night, we delivered an OS OpenData Masterclass to over 30 developers at the HUB, which is a venue located in Westminster, central London. The HUB’s mission is to provide a place where entrepreneurs, new business start-ups and aspiring ‘change-makers’ can start, grow and scale their business ventures. Hence, it provided us with an ideal spot to run the masterclass – which is an event that aims increase the awareness and use of OS OpenData, to create innovative products and services.
The event kicked-off at 6pm with Ian Holt, Developer Programme manager at Ordnance Survey, welcoming everyone and delivering an introductory presentation around open data.
Ian covered the history behind the global “open” movement, before providing details around the number and types of UK government datasets that are available, through websites such as data.gov.uk.
Continue reading 'Launch of OSDeveloper page'»
Open Data Master Classes, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
| communities, GeoVation, ideas, innovation, innovation funding, Open Data, Open Data Master Class, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace
Today we have a really great post from Jason Davies of Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust who won the ‘How can we transform Neighbourhoods in Britain together?’ GeoVation Challenge with the idea for Community Payback Visibility. Jason’s post is a great way to get a feel for what happens at a GeoVation Camp and the nail-biting climax of the GeoVation Showcase back in June:
Community Payback is unpaid work carried out by offenders on community service and the idea is for the public to nominate sites for Community Payback via an app and track the progress. The government is currently undertaking a review of the probation service and is encouraging probation trusts to be innovative in responding to fundamental change.
It’s Wednesday afternoon, mid-June and we’re back in Southampton. It’s the final of the GeoVation Challenge. The judges have retired to their chambers. We’ve made our case and it’s out of our hands, but the nerves are jangling now.
This is the culmination of a Staffordshire & West Midlands Probation Trust bid for some GeoVation funding. Ordnance Survey run the GeoVation Challenge with development funding awarded to the best and most innovative ways of combining maps and data to benefit local communities.
Continue reading 'Probation, Innovation & GeoVation'»
On 28 August, Ordnance Survey is hosting an event at London’s hottest new business start-up venue – the Google Campus. The Campus is located on the fringe of the Shoreditch area in the capital, an area that has been dubbed “Tech City” by many.
Tech City (a technology hub located in East London) has attracted investment by many companies in recent times and plans to grow the hub even further were announced by the Prime Minister David Cameron, in a speech he delivered in 2010.
Our event in Tech City – “Location, Location, Location – Mapping your route to success” is aimed at the budding Digital Entrepreneur/start-up community who work in the exciting area of location-based app development; whether they are mobile, desktop, server, or platform based applications.
Continue reading 'Location, Location, Location – Mapping your Route to Success'»
OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
| communities, developers, entrepreneurs, geolocation, innovation, maps, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, tech city
For those of you who aren’t aware, OS OpenSpace® is a free service available from Ordnance Survey that allows developers to embed high quality and accurate Geographic Information, into web applications using our JavaScript application programming interface (API).
Last week saw the launch of the OS OpenSpace Code Playground, an exciting new service that’s been designed to help developers with the applications that they are building.
The Code Playground provides an interactive way of exploring OS OpenSpace code examples, such as: ‘how to add markers and text from a file’ or ‘how to display an administrative boundary’ and so on; whilst also allowing users to experiment with their own code. Developers can edit both JavaScript® and HTML within the Code Playground, use the ‘Render’ or ‘Real-time preview’ functionality to view the map that they have created before using the ‘Download’ option to download the code as one HTML file. The code is then ready for the developer to add to their own OS OpenSpace application programming interface (API) key.
Continue reading 'New OS OpenSpace Code Playground launched'»
Thank you for all the ideas you have entered our ‘How can we connect communities and visitors along the Wales Coast Path?’ GeoVation Challenge which is now closed. In the guest post below Jane Davidson who is President of Ramblers Cymru discusses how her idea for the Wales Coast Path began, the benefits it can bring and how your innovative ideas benefit coastal communities.
Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem, ‘Under Milk Wood’, starts, ‘To begin at the beginning’. Somehow, it’s a lot easier to say than do. I have been asked many times about when I first had the idea for a Welsh coast path. It would be great to be able to trace it back to one moment, but life isn’t like that; like many ideas, it took years in gestation, although it was helped by two critical events on the way – first, at the age of 16, walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path with school friends and seeing my first dolphins; the second was the brilliant decision of two Cardiff youth clubs to walk around Wales for International Youth Year in 1985.
Ideas, brilliant or otherwise, get nowhere without a plan, and the plan did leap forward quite suddenly in 2006. I was in the kitchen of Rhodri Morgan, the then First Minister of Wales, a keen walker and dolphin watcher. We were debating what to put in the manifesto for the next elections. Ramblers Cymru were calling for greater access to the coast so my suggestion of an ‘all Wales Coast Path’ was a logical extension of that. What I didn’t know on that day was that Rhodri would then ask me to deliver on it.
Continue reading 'To begin at the beginning…'»
I recently visited Pembrokeshire, staying Fishguard, to run along part of the Wales Coast Path with DragonRun 1027. Since September last year the number of trains arriving in Fishguard (or Abergwaun to give it its Welsh name) has increased which means it is an ideal destination for those who want to travel by train, as I did. It is also a gateway to Ireland with a regular ferry to Rosslare.
The coastal path runs through Goodwick and Fishguard and the town’s history includes being the scene of the last French invasion of Britain 
in 1797. But our hosts at the hotel we stayed at explained how the economic downturn was affecting local businesses and as we walked around Fishguard we could see this for ourselves with many pubs and restaurants now closed. While travelling around the North Pembrokeshire coast we could see that other areas seemed to be doing pretty well – for instance, we were unable to get a table at a restaurant in popular Porthgain without a prior booking. But I 
wondered how businesses and communities could connect better with the Wales Coast Path and make the most of this world first for Wales, the only complete ‘formal’ walking trail to follow a country’s entire coastline in the world. In turn how could this stimulate sustainable economic growth, health and well- being and social inclusion in coastal communities?
During the stay there we also suffered a day of appalling weather conditions which also helped us to question how the path could be an attraction that could encourage visitors all year and not just in good weather?
On the final day, while out walking on the coastal path around Fishguard we saw children out making the most of activities in the water and I wondered whether anymore could be done to encourage children to make more use the path and the coast?
I don’t have the answers, only questions? So maybe some of you have some ideas on how to make more of this amazing attraction. If so, enter them on our Wales Coast Path GeoVation Challenge and you could win a share of up to £125,000 funding to get your idea started.
Below is a guest post from David Roberts, one of our colleagues at Ordnance Survey, who has been working hard alongside the GeoVation team to launch and run the Wales Coast Path GeoVation Challenge.
Working for Ordnance Survey has given me a double view and insight into the importance of the completion and opening the Wales Coast Path on May 5th. The sheer size of the logistics to successfully launch an ‘e challenge’ to tackle the problems associated with the world’s first coastal path around a Country; and to bring together a nation to walk on it is immense. And yet the GeoVation Challenge has successfully brought together an extremely diverse range of people from Government through Local Authorities to professional and charity groups, businesses and individuals on and around the coastline. With their unique talents, all have expressed their thoughts, views, doubts and fears from those early meetings, but share a real desire and enthusiasm to see this work; not only for May 5th but for 365 days per year, every year.
To get as many people aware of the opening and on to the path as possible for May 5th, I have been working alongside the Welsh Ramblers who have led many of the meetings and workshops to ensure success. Through their informative website and electronic map of Wales they show a growing number of walking groups, their routes, leader contact details and even where the media helicopters will be flying for TV coverage. Ordnance Survey has created a giant “walk on map of Wales” using the Explorer 1:25,000 scale and will measure approx 15m x 12m. This map will be available on the opening day in Cardiff and will made available “Free to use” to any organisations who would like to use it in for, demonstrations, functions, education etc.
My own role has been working with the youth groups of Wales, including Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Scouts & Guides to 
ensure that as many groups from the youngest upwards are walking, camping or just having fun on the day and are aware that they will form part of a historical event for Wales. With around 20,000 Scouts & Guides in Wales, plus those on the Marches, there has been enthusiasm from the Heads of both organisations to organise by County or Area and get the boys and girls involved in activities son the day. All of these events will be fed back to the Welsh Ramblers to be included on their electronic map acting as an information page and historical document. A special badge for Scouts & Guides has also been created for this event and will sit above the Queens Diamond Jubilee Badge.
With three major celebrity openings around Wales in Flintshire, Aberystwyth & Cardiff on the day itself this as an important staging post for the Country and with the right coverage and media it will put us on the map a little bit more firmly and encourage others to visit.
We have the coastline; all we need now is the people to share it with.
David Roberts
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