Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay’s personal blog

Below you can find the presentation that I gave at the Open Knowledge Conference on 15th March. The presentation focuses on the issue of environmental information and Open Knowledge and covers several areas of open information and access to environmental information, starting with a short overview of the background, followed by some examples of environmental information over the internet from the past 14 years. It continues with a few examples of recent development and a discussion of the work that we’ve been carrying out at UCL recently. Finally, there are observations on access to information in the environmental field. The presentation contains notes that explain each of the slides – for a version with the notes, click here.

One interesting observation from the discussions during the conference was that the discourse of Open Knowledge, which is a political discussion, is lacking in the area of political philosophy, and bringing this issue up will reveal, I suspect, inherent differences which are very significant for the substance of the licenses’ structures, software design and many other aspects in this area.

What I mean by political philosophy is that if you approach Open Knowledge from an egalitarian or altruistic approach then you would have a specific set of perceptions about what it can be used for, by whom and under which conditions, which will be very different to an approach taken by a strong techno-libertarian believer. The egalitarian approach might emphasise the fact that the use of your knowledge must be beneficial for society, and, if the data or software is used for personal benefit, then there should be some social payback. It is likely that no demands will be made restricting further use. The techno-libertarian approach will pick and choose which rights you want to protect (yours) and which you don’t (for example, those of media companies). You are likely to dictate certain conditions on the use of your data, to further your belief.

The core issue is what is the social change that you are trying to lead and what levers are you using to achieve it?

The argument against an explicit discussion of political philosophy is that it can destroy Open Knowledge projects (such as OpenStreetMap, where a whole range of underlying political philosophies can be found), but the problem is that the licensing and legal structures around them are unsatisfactory exactly because the politics remain unarticulated.

Even if in many projects the politics are hidden, I think that conferences and meetings (such as OKCon) should be the right forum to discuss these aspects.

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For a more detailed analysis of public access to environmental  information, see Haklay, M., 2003, Public Access to Environmental Information: Past, Present and Future, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 27, 163-180
and other publications.

As part of the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities project, we organised the first workshop in the Royal Docks area, at the Sunborn Yacht Hotel last Saturday (27/10). The workshop was very successful and, as I usually do in these workshops, I start with ‘what mapping information can we find on the WWW about your locality’. I’ve been doing it now for about 7 or 8 years, but during the period, the Environment Agency’s Pollution Inventory maps never failed me as an example for technocratic dissemination of information which is not helping the people on the ground.

I find that, in all these workshops with people from many communities across London, very few knew about the Environment Agency information, let alone ever accessed it independently had. As the participants are usually from community or environmental interest groups, they are interested in the information – they just don’t know where to find it. I associate this lack of awareness with the fact that users find the information unfriendly and unhelpful, so there is no ‘word of mouth’ effect that leads to more use of the site. As someone in our Saturday workshop declared, ‘these maps are not written in community language or for community use’ – yet, they tick all the boxes of the Aarhus convention…

To understand what’s wrong, see the image below, which provides a view of the site on an average monitor (1024×768):

The header area is so big that all that is left is a fairly small area for the map.

Furthermore, as the full image of the page shows, the map is supposed to offer several layers of pollution data (on the right-hand side) but, as many of the layers include point data about the same site – all using the same symbols which overlap one another – the user can’t see if, in a given location, there is information from multiple categories.

The area of the map is very small (less than 400×400 pixels), and people find it very difficult to locate where they are or where the postcode is that they have selected in relation to the information on the map. Zooming in to the largest scale, or at any stage during the process, the system will run a query and provide information about the specific location only if the ‘learn more’ option is selected. Even as a more frequent user, I fail to click on this option and find the interaction with the system frustrating.

This site demonstrates that the Aarhus model of access to information, which is ‘we’ll build it and they’ll come’, is not sufficient and that a more user-centred approach is required to achieve public access to environmental information.