Ordnance Survey has confirmed to me that the crime maps being used by the Met Police break its licence.

And any other police force that uses “ward boundaries” (subdivisions of their force’s policing area, which is how all police forces record crimes) or refers to an OS map in order to plot the location of a crime, and then plots it on anything other than a fully-licenced OS map, is also breaking the OS’s licence.

This, basically, derails any sort of useful crime mapping - and has to call into question whether police forces can meet the deadline promised by the home secretary Jacqui Smith in July.

Just to remind you what was said:

Every neighbourhood in England and Wales will have access to the latest local crime information through new interactive crime maps, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced today.

The rollout of interactive crime maps follows the announcement made by the Home Secretary earlier this month, as part of the Policing Green Paper, that every police force in the country has now delivered monthly crime information to the public on their websites. New interactive crime maps will take the rollout of local crime information to the next level.

By the end of the year every police force area will produce crime maps which will allow the public to:

• see where and when crime has happened, down to street level for some crimes;
• make comparisons with other areas; and
• learn how crime is being tackled by their local neighbourhood policing team.

The new maps will give the public the information they need to hold their local police force to account. The maps will communicate to the public how they can get involved in setting local policing priorities to reduce the crime that matters to them in their area.

The Met Police then went and set up their own crime mapping site, which doesn’t give precise locations of crimes, but does show relative levels of crime, broken down by ward, and plotted - fatally - on a Google Map.

Yesterday OS sent me a statement which said:

“Our understanding is that the Met Police sourced their boundary information through the Office of National Statistics (ONS). We class this as being derived data therefore taking that outside the terms of our licensing. We are working with all the parties involved to find a solution.”

(Need to remind yourself about “derived” data? Be our guest.)

This though skewers Jacqui Smith’s publicly-announced plans for crime mapping. There can be no solution while the OS’s licence - which forbids one putting OS-derived data obtained under one OS licence onto a map that has another licence (or no OS licence at all), unless the two licences have an exactly congruent set of users and terms.

It’s never a good idea to tell a home secretary that the pledge they made publicly in July, allowing six months to happen, now can’t be met.

Then again, perhaps Jacqui Smith isn’t a formidable enough opponent. How about Gordon Brown, who is also in favour of crime mapping?

That said, there are some crime maps already available, which do use OS maps: West Yorkshire police; West Midlands police. As I’ll explore in a later post, they’re complete rubbish - they lack any sort of helpful positional API, multiple layers, or other features that make crime mapping useful. Though they do seem to build on an OS map. This means OS is offering some sort of API-based system. Pity that it’s pretty much hopeless.

Compare and contrast it with the Chicago output of Everyblock - for a particular police beat, or a neighbourhood - and you can see how prehistoric these UK efforts look. Even the ones that are breaking the OS licence. (And especially the ones that aren’t.)

If one good thing can come out of all this it would be for the OS’s stranglehold on geographical information to be broken by a political row in which it frustrates the Home Office - one of the most powerful departments in the country.

After the results of the Show Us A Better Way competition - the X-Factor for web services (as I think I dubbed it) - now here’s the letdown. Ordnance Survey has emailed local government organisations waving its copyright stick. And it’s quite a bit stick. One which, in effect, could prevent many - perhaps all? - of the SUABW winners (Free Our Data announcement; BBC announcement), and certainly those which might rely on local authority data that is in any way geographically related - from being implemented, certainly on Google Maps.

Which would only leave OS’s own OpenSpace product. Which as you know isn’t for commercial or high-volume use. Which would rather complicate things.

The OS, we’ve learnt, has circulated local government with a helpful Q+A about how they shouldn’t embed info on Google Maps (or of course other mapping companies such as Microsoft or Yahoo or..) if it has been “derived” from OS data.

Q I want to pass information I have captured, which has been derived from Ordnance Survey data, onto Google for Google to display on Google Maps. Can I do this?

A Any use of Ordnance Survey data, or data derived from Ordnance Survey data, should be in accordance with the terms of your licence. You are only able to provide such data to a third party in limited circumstances, for example, to your contractor undertaking authority business on your behalf, and only provided that such contractor enters into a Contractor’s Licence. (You should note that we believe the terms of the Contractor’s Licence are wholly inconsistent with what we understand to be Google’s standard terms and conditions.)

Therefore, you cannot pass such information to Google for display on Google Maps, and we must remind you that provision of data to Google in this way would be in breach of Crown copyright.

But what is “derived” from OS data? At local government level, pretty much anything if it relates to where something is.

Q What constitutes data ‘derived’ from Ordnance Survey data?

A Simply put, Ordnance Survey derived data is any data created using Ordnance Survey base data. For example, if you capture a polygon or a point or any other feature using any Ordnance Survey data, either in its data form or as a background context to the polygon/point/other feature capture, this would constitute derived data.

It should also be borne in mind that data from other suppliers may be based on Ordnance Survey material, and thus the above considerations may still apply. We therefore recommend that you verify whether any third-party mapping you use may have been created in some way from Ordnance Survey data before displaying it on Google Maps.

OK, then, how about another way of doing things? What if you run Google Maps and overlay info on top of that, rather than putting it “into” Gmaps?

Q I want to pull Google Maps onto my system and host my Ordnance Survey derived business information on top, so that no data will pass to Google. Can I use this solution instead?

A No. Although you will not be passing any data directly to Google, by displaying such data on top of Google Maps in this way and making such mapping available to the public, it appears that you will be granting Google a licence to use such data. This is the case despite the fact that you will be hosting the data on your system. Google’s terms and conditions appear to provide that any display of data on or through the Google services grants Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such data.

The terms of your licence do not permit you to license Ordnance Survey data to a third party in these circumstances.

If you’d like a copy to marvel at, then download the PDF. (Provided as a public service.)

Now, the OS is perfectly within its rights - indeed, it’s asserting its rights as required by its terms of business - to follow this.

But as implemented it would make it impossible for local government organisations to make available any geographical data about locations of objects they own. (And just for clarification, Google does not license OS’s data, not even through a third party. I’m sure I’ve heard phrases like “have to be a snowy day in hell first” but have no idea who said it.)

That means that things like school catchment areas (if given to geographical accuracy, or pulled off an OS-based mapping system) or postbox locations (if local government holds them) or recycling locations or cycling routes or toilets… gracious me, I seem to have listed the top five applications suggested for SUABW.

Let’s be clear, again: OS is perfectly within its rights to assert these rights. One can even argue that it’s obliged to. But I suspect that it’s not going to go down very well with ministers who have worked very hard to get the SUABW competition off the ground, and indeed into the stratosphere: let’s name Tom Watson (Cabinet Office), Michael Wills (Ministry of Justice) and Jim Knight (Department for Education). And of course the Department for Communities and Local Government put up some prizemoney for the competition too. Which OS - which reports into CLG - seems now to be, um, tripping up.

One could view this as a mistake. Or a political oversight. Or perhaps an attempt to force Whitehall, and in particular the Treasury, to decide whether it wants OS’s rights to prevail, or those of ministers who want more openness. In any event, I think that it might be the first test for OS’s new chair, Sir Rob Margetts, who as you’ll recall is required - according to the job advert - to

be an experienced Chair who understands how to build commercial opportunities in the public sector and who has the intellect to take forward a challenging debate about Ordnance Survey’s future strategy. S/he will have experience of change.

“Challenging debate”. Hope your season ticket to London is up to date, Sir Rob.

The overall winner of the government’s Show Us A Better Way competition is Can I Recycle It, which (inter alia) “will tell people what the recycling facilities are in their area, based on their postcode.”

Congratulations to Adam Temple, 26, from London. He explained his project to the Cabinet Office, which awarded his prize: “Each area has a different recycling scheme with different capabilities, so it is not surprising that households are unsure what can be recycled. Local information may be of some use, but there are a million and one things that people want to know about recycling.

“Having put in their postcode, the householder will get an easy-to-read version of what is recyclable and what is not in their area. After that, they could type in keywords for the specific piece of rubbish that they are concerned about. If it is in the database, the householder would get an immediate answer.

“If not, the question could be forwarded to the appropriate person in the local council. That person could then amend the database, and that way the website would gradually get more useful.”

(I’ll vouch for it: my local council only recycles plastics 1, 2 and 3 - though actually what would really help would be if manufacturers of packaging were obliged to print in large diagrams which of the many recyclable plastics theirs were. It gets kind of boring holding packaging up to a 100W light to try to discern whether the number two millimetres high inside the recycling logo is a 3, 5 or 6.)

Show Us A Better Way attracted more than 450 entries from around the world, with around 70,000 people visiting the website over the summer. The total prize fund was worth £80,000.

Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson, who spearheaded the competition, said (to quote the Cabinet Office press release):

“This is a world-leading competition that has attracted entries and praise from as far away as Australia, India and the USA. Show Us A Better Way has really captured the imagination of people in their own communities. This is about taking service design out of Whitehall and to the people who use it.

“By trusting the public and throwing it open to them to put forward their ideas, the solutions are of real, practical use. Ultimately, this is about building something from the bottom up rather than having Whitehall dictate from the centre.”

Watson also said: “This ingenious idea is a simple map showing you where recycling facilities are and what they will accept, so you can quickly and easily find out where to take your rubbish.”

And there’s even a quote from Hazel Blears, who we hadn’t noticed being entirely in favour of these bottom-up things recently: “The positive response to this competition rightly highlights the power and benefits when local people have their say, have access to good information and have the enthusiasm and the chance to make a difference locally. I am pleased that extra funding from CLG will help take some of these creative ideas forward and help encourage the use of new technologies and community media. Access to information - which these awards aim to promote - is an important part of empowering communities.”

Michael Wills - who has been an important driver of more open access from within the Ministry of Justice, and who would have helped raise prizemoney for the competition - said: ““The Government is committed to encouraging people to get involved in civic activities within their communities and across the country. Show Us A Better Way highlights the innovative ways in which people can do this.”

Just as important, SUABW seems to have inspired a similar project in the US - where there’s now a competition called Apps for Democracy running in Washington, DC, soon to be the home of that Obama fellow - who might have some people on his staff who will take note. Only $20,000 prizemoney, but it’s a start.

And congratulations to everyone again who entered SUABW - it has inspired a lot of thought within government about what can and could be done with data once it’s made available.

It seems like an age ago that Tom Watson and the Cabinet Office kicked off the Show Us A Better Way competition, intended to see whether there really was an entrepreneurial spirit out there that wanted to get hold of government data and make something with it.

It turns out that yes, there was. And like a team of Bob the Mashup Builders, many people said “Yes, we can!”

And now the competition has got its results. (And the Guardian reports it exclusively.)

Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister who pushed so hard to get it off the ground, said: “These excellent ideas are born out a truly democratic competition which has seen entries submitted for all over the world. Show Us A Better Way has really captured the imagination of people in their own communities. They are telling us what information they want and how they want to use it.

“I have been delighted by the ideas submitted and how ingenious people have been in applying the information that government already holds. This is about taking service design out of Whitehall and to the people who use it. I hope the people behind the ideas that just missed the cut will not be disheartened and will continue to develop them into working websites.”

So who are the winners? In no particular order, in the first category they are:

• Can I Recycle It? Input your postcode to find out what your council recycles
• UK Cycling A one-stop site to plan your cycling route, for those at any skill level
• Catchment Areas Shows boundaries of school catchment areas, even “fuzzily”
• Location of Postboxes Shows where the nearest one is to wherever you are
• Loofinder A mobile texting or website that tells you where the nearest public toilet is.

But there are two other categories:
Ideas where the government will develop the idea further:

• Road Works API, an interface to any and all roadworks so that organisations (such as satnav companies) or individuals could build alert systems;
• Oldienet, which would tell you about services in your area;
• Free Legal Web, which would be an authoritative mashup of expert legal commentary and public-sector information;
• Allotment Manager, for better allocation of garden allotments; and
• Where Does My Money Go, an interactive web application showing government budget data via maps, timelines, graphs and charts.

There were then another four that were declared to be “fully working” already, as prototypes, and which will be funded for further development:

• UK School Maps (showing where the UK’s schools are - building on data released for the competition by the Department for Children, Schools and Families);
• School Guru, which helps determine whether your child could get into a school (in Hertfordshire only at present);
• Where’s the Path, with an Ordnance Survey map and Google Maps satellite picture of any spot; andthe
• UK Wreck Map, showing the location of undersea wrecks around Britain’s coast.

The judging was difficult, and protracted. You may wonder why the ideas that got the largest number of votes on the Uservoice site didn’t automatically get the prizes? Because we recognised that there were weaknesses in the Uservoice system - one could vote without registering, or just wipe your cookies and vote multiple times - and also that the aim of the competition was to reward ideas that were truly innovative, that would stretch the capabilities of government data, and not just replicate services that already existed either within government or commercially (a surprising number of entries did, one way or another).

Thanks of course to the DCLG (£40,000), Ministry of Justice (£20,000) and Cabinet Office (£20,000), which all contributed to the prize fund.

But that’s not all: the final winner will be announced on BBC’s iPM programme on Radio 4 this Saturday. Let’s see who gets it.

I gave a talk last month about the Free Our Data campaign to be2camp (which had the aim of getting the idea of better sharing of data through wikis and other social systems for architecture).

Amidst it there were questions, and among the questions was this one: “if you make all the data available for free download, what’s to stop companies from relocating to Jersey - which pays no UK tax - and operating from there?”

That would mean that the UK taxpayer now wouldn’t be getting the benefit of revenues to the Ordnance Survey through its licensing fees, and wouldn’t get the tax revenue on the company that would now be headquartered in Jersey. So you’d have higher taxation costs (since the OS would now be funded centrally) and no obvious economic benefit.

So what’s the answer?

We don’t know.

The government has struggled with this problem over issues such as gambling, where companies have preferred to locate in places like Gibraltar or far-flung Caribbean countries with less strict tax regimes and offer services online. There’s a money flow out of the UK with those too.

One possible argument is that even if the data were sold and the profits taken abroad, the UK economy would benefit because the information is being made more widely available - and that has to have a benefit. There could even be a multiplier effect, as there tends to be with any commodity: making steel bars is a profitable business (or can be), but making buildings is a much more profitable one. Perhaps in time, with a free data model, the OS data would be the steel bars of the building: necessary, but not the biggest part of the value chain.

The dust has settled from the ministerial reshuffle of last week, and we’re happy to see that the ministers whose views about access to government data chime with ours - particularly Tom Watson in the Cabinet Office and Michael Wills at the Ministry of Justice - remain in place. Note too that Shriti Vadera, who was at DBERR, now has a higher-profile role which is expected to have quite an impact. (Baroness Vadera, a former City high-flier - remember them? - is understood to hold strong views on, inter alia, making government data more easily accessible.)

In today’s Guardian we note the fact that that hasn’t been shuffled around, and the new challenge that ministers pushing the free data idea face: how do you persuade a government that has just melted down the golden rule in order to quasi-nationalise high street banks at a cost of around £500bn, with what looks like a shrinking economy on the way, that it should forgo hundreds of millions of pounds in tax funding to pay to make data free?

(One answer might be: because it’s cheaper to do that than pay the unemployment benefits and other consequent costs if companies that pay for government data go bust.)

In Free data faces a tough challenge in the new parliamentary season, Michael Cross notes that

Decisions about the future of such trading funds will need to be made soon. A much-delayed government-wide strategy for geographical information is due for publication this autumn. It has spent the past year being bounced between Civil Service desks as its ideas are aligned with Britain’s commitments to open access to environmental data under the EU Inspire Directive. More interesting for the Free Our Data campaign will be the outcome of a review by the government’s Shareholder Executive into the trading fund model.

Oh, yes, that review. Today’s bonus link: Parliamentary Question from the Tories’ shadow minister for innovation and skills, Adam Afriyie: who has the review team met?

The answer:

the Shareholder Executive team has heard the views of around 20-25 stakeholders from the private sector, as well as others from the public and third sectors. The private sector stakeholders have included customers, suppliers and competitors of the trading funds, small UK-based companies, large multinationals and representatives of trade associations and interest groups.

However…

It would not be appropriate to name the organisations individually because their contributions to and comments on the assessment have been to inform advice to Ministers and were on a non-attributable basis.

The website ononemap.com, which has been featured here on a number of occasions - first for getting the list of telephone masts, and then for getting Environment Agency data about flood risks for England, Scotland and Wales - is shutting down.

The reason: it’s not really making any money (property adverts are one thing, but you may have noticed there’s been a tailing-off in house sales recently..) and - I understand - it was still being threatened with legal action by the Environment Agency. (We’ll check this with the EA and correct if necessary.) Update 11/10: the Environment Agency says it has not pursued any action since last year and that none is outstanding.

We noted in June 2007 that the Environment Agency asserted its copyright over flood risk data, forcing ononemap to remove it from its site.

What wasn’t told at the time was the efforts that the Environment Agency went to in order to obfuscate its data: it renders the flood maps as pictures, rather than using layers. That means each search is an individually-generated picture. There’s no “generic” map of the flood data.

So ononemap got to work - and recruited a handful of servers to crunch 24/7 through the data, using a colour-recognition algorithm to figure out what the flood risk for each part of the map was, and encode that back as its flood data. (Interesting legal question: since it isn’t using the EA data directly, but interpreting it as presented, is that a new database with its own copyright? Or is it simply a re-representation of the EA data, and hence an infringement of copyright?)

The site’s blog (ononeblog.com) is no longer functioning, though the site is for now.

It’s a pity, though: an early attempt to try to make something of the data available on the web and create a useful mashup for would-be property buyers. But the latter are in scarce supply right now, while the right data weren’t ever available in the form needed.

The government’s Show Us A Better Way competition has finished its first part - getting entries. And there are lots of them. (More than 500, by a rough count.)

We’ve been asked to help draw up the shortlist, and take part in the judging panel. And we’ve been specifically asked to get everyone out there to vote on their preferred ones.

You can: go to http://suabw.uservoice.com and get stuck in. Almost all of the entries are there, apart from some last-minute entries. (There may also be duplications: when you find them, leave a comment and I’ll try to fix it.)

You each have 10 votes; use them wisely.

How should you choose? Ah, yes, that’s the question. I think that ideas that truly deserve the £20,000 prize should be (1) widely useful [which I think rules out applications that would only run on particular computers or phones] (2) achievable [ie not requiring supercomputers, or everyone installing some custom-made widget] (3) beneficial (4) not duplicating something that could be or is already done commercially (5) has that magic something which makes you think “ooh, clever!”.

Those, anyway, would be my suggestions. You’re welcome to use your own criteria. But get voting and tell your friends!

We’ve also written about it in the Guardian. Even so, tell more people..

We were happy to be interviewed for the BBC’s iPM programme (Radio 4, Saturdays, 5.30pm) on the topic of Jack Straw’s announcement that court records will be made available online.

Now, the Free Our Data campaign is, strictly speaking, about non-personal data: we argue that should be made available for free re-use. When you’re talking about court records, that’s rather different: it’s about as personal as you can make it.

But there is a wider principle, which is that it seems to us good if the government is wrapping its collective head around the idea that data can be useful, and that the assumption should be that data are made available, rather than kept secret.

Some lawyers argue in the piece that the court records are riddled with inaccuracies. Obviously, that would have to be ironed out.

But there’s a wider point: newspapers now have online archives, and they don’t delete them. (It’s a principle at The Guardian, for example, that we don’t change what’s on the site without very good reason.) That means that these records are going to be there, even if the government doesn’t make them available.

To be honest, Lord Falconer’s argument that articles relating to high-profile court cases should be removed from online news archives because of the risk of prejudicing trials is simply untenable. It won’t happen. Bloggers will write things. American sites will collect data. Google’s cache holds data. The Wayback Machine holds the data. Once on the internet, data tends to survive. Falconer’s suggestion is typical of people who can’t conceive that the internet has changed the idea of access to data completely.

My suggestion is that, given these facts, we simply need to move to a situation like the US: where juries are sequestered, and told to try people only on the facts of the case (as they are here too, of course).

Of course besides making it easier to retain data, the internet makes it easier to spread it - and, potentially, create businesses from it. Which is also what this campaign is about.

If you’ve just come here after the iPM item - welcome. Do have a look around. We have studies of the economics of freeing data and Ordnance Survey’s lobbying against our case and all sorts..

We’d suggest that once you have, you take a look at the clearest fruit of our efforts - the government’s Show Us A Better Way competition, where people are suggesting ways to use government (non-personal) data to create new services. Not long until the closing date..

As the title says: on Tuesday 30th, the competition at Show Us A Better Way closes, and judging will begin.

The idea, just as a reminder, is to come up with innovative ways to use government-collected datasets, in order to demonstrate the value that can be generated from them.

There are already hundreds of entries - which means that the judging process will be rather complex. In fact, if anyone has ideas for how the competition could use crowdsourcing (aka voting) in order to choose the finalists for consideration by a judging panel, we’d be interested to hear so we can pass them on.

In Guardian Technology of August 21 we reported on Ordnance Survey’s hiring of a lobbying company called Mandate, and how it had kept watch on MPs and organisations which seemed to be interested in the whole “free data” concept.

Ordnance Survey responded to the story: this is a reprint in full of its letter. Following this, how a story in today’s Guardian Technology examines the contradictions between what OS says it does (and what its minister, Iain Wright, responded in his original Parliamentary answer - that it’s “consultancy and advice on Corporate Communications and Public Affairs”) and what the email track seems to suggest.

First, the letter:
“We are more than happy that the Guardian has shown this interest in the way that Ordnance Survey communicates about the important work that we do.
“Ordnance Survey data helps underpin life in Britain. It is relied on by business and society, from battling the effects of climate change to the sat nav in millions of cars. Our data is mapped down to the nearest few centimeters and updated up to 5000 times a day. It is this consistent level of quality, currency and detail that makes it so vital for public services, ranging from emergency planning to the delivery of everyday services on the ground.
“It is because Ordnance Survey data is so vital that parliamentarians and other important stakeholders expect us to communicate with them about our work. That is why we engage with politicians from all parties who care about the services that we provide. We have a duty to inform them on our role collecting the data needed to map every feature on the landscape, and how we intend to maintain the quality of this sophisticated data going forward.
“We’re committed to the best possible communications with all our stakeholders, now and in the future.
“Nicole Perry head of public affairs, Ordnance Survey”

And so to today’s story, Ordnance Survey defends its use of lobbying company:

The Free Our Data campaign agrees with Perry that the need to educate opinion-makers about geographical data in the digital age is an important part of its public task. However, a study of the 361 printed pages of correspondence between OS and Mandate, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that its publicity campaign strays into broader areas of government policy. In particular, on the question of whether it and other information agencies should continue to be run as trading funds, required to cover their costs by charging for access to data. (The Free Our Data campaign argues that this policy hampers state and community initiatives to make better use of data.)

Among the papers we received is an account of a seminar on trading funds, organised on April 29 by Locus, an industry body which represents users of public sector information (and which retains its own lobbyist, a firm called Quintus Public Affairs). In an email to Perry, a Mandate executive reveals that she attended the seminar, accompanied by a colleague “Eleanor”, and reports back “on comments from the meeting that you should be aware of”. These include the views of Locus’s chairman, “Bryan Carlsberg” (sic - his name is Carsberg) that member companies should talk to the Conservative party on this issue “as they are currently looking for proposals for their manifesto”.

We’re just trying to square that with Iain Wright’s suggestion that this is “consultancy and advice on Corporate Communications and Public Affairs”. It seems very like, well, straying into areas of policy.

And there’s also the question of quite what is recommended.

On April 24 this year, Mandate alerted Perry that a Conservative MP, Greg Clark, had tabled a question about the relationship with Mandate. The email urged Perry to “please rest assured” that Clark had asked many such questions, and that the information needed in response is “minimal”. We will see whether Ordnance Survey’s minister follows that advice.

I had always thought that it was the responsibility of departments and government agencies to seek to answer Parliamentary Questions as fully as possible; if this is not done and the minister answering is not sufficiently briefed, it can be extremely embarrassing, initially for the minister. Is “minimal” advice sufficient? And overall, has Mandate really been good value for money?

One other thing we’ve heard:

Ordnance Survey’s use of a lobby firm to engage in the free data debate is likely to be on the agenda at the next meeting of the government’s Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information next month.

We’ll look forward to the minutes of that meeting.

Coming late to posting this (I blame holidays), but Mike Cross entered an FOI request after we noticed in May that it had paid a lobbying company called Mandate about £49,000 for “consultancy and advice on Corporate Communications and Public Affairs”.

Except that that description seems rather askew from what we found in the emails (released on paper, and redacted - you know, blanked out - to protect the names of individuals in Mandate and Ordnance Survey). Our thanks by the way to Greg Wright, then shadow minister for the Cabinet Office and MP for Tunbridge Wells, who asked the question (not on our behalf; we’ve no idea why he asked it, though it seems to have been well-informed). Iain Wright of DCLG answered it.

And so to our first story on the topic, which appeared in Technology Guardian under the headline “Ordnance Survey hires PR company to lobby politicians” (can you tell our lawyers checked it first?):

The correspondence reveals that Ordnance Survey (OS) is targeting MPs from Westminster and devolved assemblies, civil servants and leading figures in the free data debate. The agency openly attends party conferences and other political events to promote the value of geographical data. However, earlier this year a Parliamentary question revealed that it had paid a company called Mandate £42,076.20 plus VAT since August 2007.

…

However, it refused to release emails on backup tapes on the grounds of cost, £11,250. The correspondence released - mainly between Nicole Perry, head of public affairs, and Mandate executives whose names have been blanked out - reveals a busy programme of meetings with politicians, especially those who have asked questions in Parliament about OS’s corporate affairs, or about free data.

Among MPs named are Labour’s David Taylor - “you might recall that he’d (sic) raised the issue of free data” - Conservatives Anne McIntosh and Paul Beresford, and several Welsh Assembly members. According to Mandate, Robert Kee (Conservative, Salisbury) “is a big supporter of OS, so I don’t think this [a Parliamentary question] is anything to worry about”.

This story (of which that’s only part; go to the story itself to read in full) generated a response from OS, which will be dealt with (and we’ll publish the letter in full) in the next post up.

Apologies for coming late to this; I’ve been away (and Mike Cross has mislaid his passwords to the blog).

Anyway: the Met Police have made their first version of the much-promised crime mapping system available. It’s at http://maps.met.police.uk/ and says it has been developed “in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Mayor of London”.

And the test version does come with a sort of data health warning:

Please note, that whilst every effort is made to record the details of crime and its location as accurately as possible, there are occasions when victims are unable to provide the actual location of a crime. In these instances, the site will not be able to display all the crime reported to the police.

So we make that, since 5 May 2008 when Boris Johnson came to power promising crime mapping, a total of 101 days to get to a beta implementation. As political fulfilment goes, that’s really not bad.

There are observations and criticism: Simon Dickson is only half-surprised that it’s built on Google Maps, not Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace (”Here’s a extra-high-profile government mapping application, and they’ve made a conscious - and entirely predictable - decision not to build it using the tool provided by the government’s own mapping agency.”); though Tom Loosemore, writing in his personal capacity, comments that

The biggest missed opportunity is the lack of proper profile for your local coppers (aka your “Safe Neighbourhood Team”). The site should make it dead easy for your to contact them, and challenge/shape their priorities. After all, even coppers work for you…

True, though it’s still early days. My principal criticism is that it simply shows crimes against “average”. If you go for a postcode (the first half, eg SW12 is enough) then you get total figures for an area, but that too isn’t helpful - there’s no idea of whether that covers a large area (is Balham, where I used to live, larger than Wandsworth, which apparently has far more crime yet is still “average”?).

Basically, it’s still keeping the information inside the police station walls, and I don’t think that’s enough. This information doesn’t have to be personalised, but it does need to be localised - in fact, made precise.

Update: there’s a Guardian story which has some quotes from police people involved:

A Met spokesman emphasised that this version of the map is a test phase and will be subject to a technical review.

“The software development will enhance the service that we currently provide regarding the number, rate and geographical location of defined crime types within the capital,” the spokesman said.

So, what does anyone out there know about Sir Rob Margetts’s web 2.0 credentials? Because that’s what he’s going to have to show now that he’s going to be the Ordnance Survey’s new, first non-executive chair, as announced in a formal press release today.

Sir Rob, it says, is a CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineers and FIChemE (institute of chemical engineers). The appointment is initially for three years.

Biography:

Sir Rob began his career with the ICI Group in 1969, progressing through a number of appointments within the group prior to joining the Board in 1992 and being Vice-Chairman from 1998-2000. Since 2000 he has been Chairman of Legal & General Group plc and in 2006 also became Chairman of Ensus Ltd.

(In case you’re wondering, Ensus aims “to become a leading provider of bioethanol to the European transport fuels market. Made from natural products such as wheat and sugar beet, bioethanol offers a renewable and environmentally friendly alternative to oil for petrol driven vehicles.”)

He is also a non-executive director of Anglo American plc and Chairman of the Energy Technologies Institute. In addition, Sir Rob was Chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) from 2001-06.

To be honest, on first glance it’s hard to see precisely what he’s bringing to this party. After all, what OS needs now is someone who can chart a course through the new web 2.0 world, where what matters is being able to see the best ways to exploit (in the most general sense) its intellectual property, amidst a changing political (small p), economic and online climate.

But back to the press release:

Of his appointment, Sir Rob comments: “I am delighted to have been invited to chair Ordnance Survey. It is a great privilege to join this organisation, which provides so much benefit to its users and enjoys an excellent reputation. I much look forward to working with Vanessa and Board colleagues as well as staff, business partners and customers.”

Vanessa Lawrence, who remains Ordnance Survey’s Accounting Officer and continues to report directly to the Minister, welcomes the appointment, saying: “I am delighted that Sir Rob will be joining us in the new role of Non-Executive Chair. With his outstanding record of business leadership and organisational development, I know that his knowledge, skills and expertise will be invaluable as we move forward in the coming years.”

Love the bit pointing out that Vanessa Lawrence continues to report directly to Ian Wright at DCLG. Why was that felt necessary? In case the media got the “wrong” idea about what this appointment means, one must presume. But then what’s the point of a chair over whose head the chief exec can appeal, since both are appointed by the same person?

Sir Rob will report to Shareholder Executive, the body that advises Ministers and senior officials on the government’s “shareholding” in organisations like Ordnance Survey. His appointment brings Ordnance Survey in line with other Trading Funds with Non-Executive Chairs who have already modernised their governance structures, such as the Met Office and UK Hydrographic Office.

Make no mistake: this is a shakeup of how OS functions. It’s a political (small p) shock to its system, but what will be interesting will be to see precisely how that plays out.

Anyone got any more information about Sir Rob Margetts, and in particular his approach to online intellectual property, business models and the web?