government

Maryland Council on Open Data

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Back in May, I had the honor of being appointed to the newly established Maryland Council on Open Data. The Council had its inaugural meeting in Baltimore yesterday and was heavily attended, including attendance by Governor Martin O’Malley. I’ll discuss his remarks to the group later.

As the first meeting of a new group, it went off largely as I expected. The agenda consisted primarily of an overview of the establishing legislation, a review of ethics requirements, demos of the existing open data portals, discussion of the history of open data in Maryland, and remarks from the Governor.

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FCC Open-Sources MapBox Module for Drupal

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See the FCC announcement here.

MapBox has been winning a lot of high-profile converts lately, such as Foursquare. In my opinion, it’s one of the more perfect web mapping solutions, commercial or open-source, to come along in a while. The combination of cartographic engine (Mapnik), tile generation (TileMill) and storage (MBTiles) make MapBox one of the most elegant ways to serve beautiful maps currently available.

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Open Government, Open Data and Some Lessons from Arkansas

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I was reading Brian Timoney’s excellent post “Open Government is a Slammed Door at the BLM,” when I encountered this line:

Top-down, large scale spatial-data-integration-by-directive simply doesn’t have the track record of success to justify the costs…

This resonates well with observations that I have made during the course of my recent work with the Arkansas GIO office. The immediate focus of that work was to help AGIO assess the current state of their GeoStor platform and gather data about current and emerging capabilities in order to support decision-making about whether to migrate to a hosted (cloud) environment. In the course of doing that work, I learned about the collaborative approach AGIO has taken with the cities and counties of Arkansas, which also informs some of the functional requirements of GeoStor.

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