Showing posts with label charles arthur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label charles arthur. Show all posts

28 June 2010

Microsoft Attacks, By and With the Numbers

There's a nice piece of work by Charles Arthur in The Guardian today that puts a fascinating post from one of Microsoft's top PR people under the microscope. It's all well worth reading, but naturally the following numbers from the memo and Arthur's analysis were of particular interest:

On Open Enterprise blog.

04 July 2008

The Hidden Poetry of...Gordon Brown

There was something about the tableau that felt fragile. I could have taken a picture with my mobile, but it would have felt intrusive, rude -especially since we’d been asked not to take any pictures inside No.11. (Describing it here is different from a picture, which is just wrestled out of its context; here you have to imagine the scene yourself rather than have it presented.). It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the sun forcing through the trees wet with the heavy showers that had fallen earlier on. And two men discussed.. something, surely important.

Nice little tableau there, Charles.

05 October 2007

Why Free Flies - and Galileo Doesn't

Nice little piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian today that pulls together a bunch of disparate stories (including my Alfresco profile from yesterday's edition of the same) to explain why giving stuff away makes economic sense. I particularly liked the following:

What I do find ironic though about the (very laudable) OpenStreetMap model is how it's acquired. The key element is Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.

But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment.

17 May 2007

The Guardian Identifies Itself on ID Cards

Good to see Charles Arthur coming out with a forthright attack on the madness that is the UK ID Card. Good, too, to see the Guardian returning to its roots by doing so.

09 March 2006

The Dream of Open Data

Today's Guardian has a fine piece by Charles Arthur and Michael Cross about making data paid for by the UK public freely accessible by them. But it goes beyond merely detailing the problem, and represents the launch of a campaign called "Free Our Data". It's particularly good news that the unnecessary hoarding of data is being addressed by a high-profile title like the Guardian, since a few people in the UK Government might actually read it.

It is rather ironic that at a time when nobody outside Redmond disputes the power of open source, and when open access is almost at the tipping point, open data remains something of a distant dream. Indeed, it is striking how advanced the genomics community is in this respect. As I discovered when I wrote Digital Code of Life, most scientists in this field have been routinely making their data freely available since 1996, when the Bermuda Principles were drawn up. The first of these stated:

It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society.

The same should really be true for all kinds of large-scale data that require governmental-scale gathering operations. Since they cannot be feasibly gathered by private companies, such data ends up as a government monopoly. But trying to exploit that monopoly by crudely over-charging for the data is counter-productive, as the Guardian article quantifies. Let's hope the campaign gathers some momentum - I'll certainly being doing my bit.

Update: There is now a Web site devoted to this campaign, including a blog.