Comments on the spatial citizen
Just wanted to add some brief comments following discussion as GOVIS 2008, in the ‘Our Place in Space’ stream. This was held in Wellington last Friday. At the end of the day I raised the following challenging comments to the audience, and they seemed to be well received. I will be reviewing and adding to these in the near future.
1. Don’t wait for application ideas or business cases. Free as much data as possible and the applications will follow. The killer application for your data has not been invented yet.
2. Consider community and volunteers. We are enthusiastic, have a huge capacity to learn, we have a hunger for data, and if it suits us we will dedicate massive amounts of time to it. Our expectations are being fed by online mapping and we want more.
3. Spatial citizens don’t care about arbitrary political boundaries and are happy acting with national and even international datasets. We don’t want to work with 80+ Local Government agencies. We want it to be trivial to find spatial information. Let us integrate the data we want using our own systems. We want to package the data our way. We want to take it out into the real world where there is no web access. We want to fix your data, but only if it is fixed once and fixed fast. LINZ – are you listening? We can do it in 24 hours and we’re not getting paid to do it. We will only get faster, more competent, and hungrier for information about our place in space…