RAW DATA NOW! My first LocalGovCamp

And so to Lincoln's multi-coloured new Innovation Centre, the Think Tank, for my first ever LocalGovCamp. Wow, what a way to run a conference - spread the word on Twitter, allow delegates to set the agenda, and let the group sessions moderate themselves. It was a world away from the sleeping delegates on a day away from work who attend most of the presentations I've given at user conferences and technical workshops over the years. With about 45 people there it's a good deal smaller too, and all the more effective for it.

Why was it so good? For me, it was a combination of factors:

• A pretty unique mix of delegates, not the usual corporate conference crowd at all
  
• No big corporate presence, just open discussion (I wondered - unnecessarily as it turned out - if being an ESRI employee would actually upset people)
  
• Great presentations, especially Stuart Harrison's Easy Mapping demo, and Paul Canning's reworking of Jakob Nielsen's still-relevant Discount Usability ideas (well, 20 years after the original was published, only one person in the room had done any user testing of any sort!)
• The chance to get past the GIS departments and speak to the webmasters, PR people, and a whole slew of innovative minds - who are now busily filling the web with maps and spatial data, often without a GIS system in sight.

I think the key lessons for me were related to what I do, i.e. web mapping and GIS:

• Simple is good. By and large the public don't want really complex map data like OS MasterMap, they want pushpins on a Google map. MasterMap has a place though, for marking up planning applications for example.
  
• GIS Data needs to be indexable and mashable. Webmasters want embeddable maps and raw data: as KML or GeoRSS, not in a black-box, closed system that runs as a standalone web page. At one point the whole room was shouting "Raw data now!"
  
• Usability of old-school web maps, based on GIS systems, is poor. Usability analysis has been neglected for too long, but with just 5-7 users testing, you can find 80% of your site's defects.

So, kudos to Andrew Beeken for organising it, to Stuart Harrison for showing us how to just get on with getting the data out there (and for some constructive criticism of LocalView :-)), and to the whole LocalGovCamp crowd for making it happen.