[Talk-GB] Geovation - Location information innovation grants - now open for applications

[Harry Wood]

I have mixed feelings about Geovation

You're talking very generally about consultants getting money, but there's a bigger reason to feel negative about it. The government paid Ordnance Survey £millions to release open data (because releasing open data needs to cost lots of money because... well no it doesn't) And then to show something for the money O.S. run the Geovation programme.  At the same time the government looked at the other open geodata initiative to come out of the UK, and gave a small donation of a few million to OpenStreetMap  ...except I just imagined that last part.

Of course that didn't happen. But I hope eventually something like that could happen. We'd have to present ourselves as something other than a "just"* a rag-tag bunch of volunteers. I hope maybe setting up an OSMUK organisation could allow us to get into a more grant/funding-receiving position

There's not much point moaning about the injustice of the situation. It's the world we live in. Lots of money moves around for things like map data. Even open map data. 

Instead we might ask ourselves how we might get some of it. Geovation is then an opportunity. At least they're throwing some crumbs of money out there, and engaging with developers. This gives us an in-road. We can talk to the same developers about using OpenStreetMap. Maybe we can actually get the geovation folks to promote OpenStreetMap. Sounds strange, but those particular people are concerned with promoting use of open geo-data and getting the illusive "innovation" happening. And we do have alternative data offerings e.g. POIS and worldwide coverage. I actually want to get into conversations with O.S. about how they should *offer* OSM data as part of their data product sets. In the short term maybe we could pick up some of these crumbs of funding to use as a leg-up in building OSMUK somehow.

One tiny step in this direction so far. They hosted a hack weekend last summer. We can get little bits of value like that out of them. We should do that again.

Harry

* "just" in inverted commas because of course the OpenStreetMap community got where we are today as a rag-tag bunch of volunteers, and actually every time we talk about being something else we have to try not lose our souls

________________________________
From: SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com>
To: Killyfole and District Development Association <webmaster at killyfole.org.uk> 
Cc: "Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org" <talk-gb at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Monday, 15 February 2016, 19:44
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Geovation - Location information innovation grants - now open for applications



I hadn't even thought of the travel side tbh! Faily glaring when its pointed out!

This type of competition for a grant or similar has become increasingly common. I think Nottingham spent £500,000 to try & win a slot as a venue for England's wonderfully successful World Cup bid, and the local Wildlife Trust has pitched for a few (e.g., for revamping Sherwood Forest visitor centre).

I rather suspect they're a decent source of fee income for the sundry consultants and judges necessary for running them. Also like most grantsmanship the idea is that you use money from your last grant to help bid for the second (e.g., by scheduling grant-funded travel to coincide with next round bid meetings). 

Jerry



On 15 February 2016 at 19:33, Killyfole and District Development Association <webmaster at killyfole.org.uk> wrote:

I think you are quite right Jerry, looks like participants are expected to
>travel to London?!?  Thats one way to keep the numbers down and limit it to
>the South East England area!
>
>On Monday 15 February 2016 17:23:37 SK53 wrote:
>> I think most folk on this list are fairly familiar with these: they've been
>> running for quite a few years. I think CycleStreets participated in one of
>> them a while back. My general impression is that the cost of participating
>> is often non-trivial in comparison with the potential reward.
>>
>> Jerry
>
>
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