The title is an exaggeration, but you need to have a witty title to get your paper read or presentation viewed. Here's a talk on the infrastructure requirements of a local goverment campaign and a review of what works and what doesn't. The key point is that collaboration is different and to succeed you need an incredibly broad set of skills, from technical and political to just getting out on the street and doing things!

It was presented at OpenTech 2008, which was a really fun event in London. The mysocietya team were out in force, and there may be some followup discussions on what need local campaigns need. One of their presentations was interesting: What do they know, which relays FOI requests to any authority of choice, and collects all results. They create a new email address for every request, so can collect all correspondence and the FOI documents themselves. It acts as a central store of all the FOI documents so retrieved.

My proposed 'George' application - a laptop-hosted program that logs all bluetooth discoverable devices (usually phones with bluetooth enabled in the 'discoverable' mode), doesnt exist yet. I've run a first pass collecting six months worth of data, but now we need to write some code to analyse that data and produce statistics. For paths and greenways, we just want to know useage numbers and what percentage of foot traffic is so discoverable. What worries everyone -myself included- is that you can start 'mining' the data to discover things the people don't want to share. Like how often they follow a route, what their times are and who they use the route with. Yet this collection and mining is currently legal. There is a lot to be said for banning it under data protection/privacy rules -maybe I can code something that provokes such an action. At least you can turn bluetooth discovery off; tracking phones by their messages to the base stations are much less optional, yet that is what is being deployed in a Portsmouth shopping centre.

Returning to the conference, there was lots of fun stuff there.

The Open Street Mapping thing was good; I do follow what's going on there; they are doing interesting maps. What I didn't know is that they are now rendering on clusters using C++ code instead of the convoluted thing that XSL'd from their map format to SVG and then invoked inkscape. We had some discussion over beers about their rendering work -they've been using EC2, were wondering if Hadoop would be useful. "It Depends" is the answer there. You aren't really reducing the data, and the ability to schedule work near the data may not be that important. Where it is useful is that you can plug in to a workflow of other operations in the cluster, and you get a big filesystem.

An industrial design company, DIY Kyoto is doing energy meters to show how much you are using in Watts or UK pounds. This is nothing unusual, but they have really nice looking kit, kit with a USB port in the back and PC software to go with. You can download stats and upload them. Cool.

AMEE the people that provide all the 'what is your carbon footprint' services on the web. As a result, they have 850K+ anonymous entries of "this is my lifestyle", which is something interesting for someone to work with. Related to this group is hotmapping, that are building up a heat map of the country. Any council willing to fund the operation can build up a map of the energy inefficient households are a fairly low cost per house.

Tom White gave a Hadoop talk to a new audience, though with no networking there were no fun demos. I think for the Hadoop UK event we should somehow start with a live demo of hadoop doing useful work on a remote cluster. I may try and set something up involving VMware linux images on local laptops hooked up to to my own wifi base station.

And here is something doing things with GeoRSS and Google maps you wouldn't normally do: tracking ex-KGB arms dealers. This was done through the published flight info from a few dubious airports and correlating it to identify which planes were flying around, even when they change their company and registration. The best bit: the arms dealer in question used to monitor the site and leave the odd death threat -and by doing so, give up their IPaddress, hence showing which country they were in. Remember: rDNS knows where you are.