[open-sustainability] Hello from London

Fri Dec 14 09:50:15 UTC 2012

Hi Chris,

I think much the same as any other politicians, though they may not have policies that are very pro-open knowledge.

The Members I work with stood on a manifesto that included various specific commitments in this area, see pages 14-15: http://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/images/londonimages/manifesto2012/Green_Party_manifesto_london2012_download.pdf

Their national policy likewise: http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/index.php/ec#EC1000

I think it's particularly relevant to sustainability, because so little data and information in this area is open compared to other policy areas we work on. For example, The UK government and the Mayor of London publish comprehensive statistics on social aspects of housing (stock, tenure, new build, overcrowding, homelessness, etc.) but far less on environmental aspects of housing, and where it is published it is often far less detailed or useful. This makes scrutiny by elected politicians and the public more difficult. We have been pushing for relevant existing data to be published on the London Datastore to try and address this, but sometimes the data isn't even collected or stored in a ready-to-release way.

A lot of knowledge is also locked up in private, proprietary databases, hampering innovation. For example, the Stockholm Environment Institute have a fantastic tool called REAP (Resources and Energy Analysis Programme) which can help you model the ecological footprint of different consumption patterns. But it's proprietary, they haven't found a commercial model that can work with completely open data. So you have to pay to use the tool, and you're to a significant extent constrained by their design. http://www.sei-international.org/reap

Tom Chance
Team Coordinator
LONDONASSEMBLY Green Group

City Hall, The Queen's Walk, London SE1 2AA
Tel: 020 7983 4963

________________________________
From: open-sustainability-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:open-sustainability-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Chris Sakkas
Sent: 14 December 2012 01:14
To: open-sustainability
Subject: Re: [open-sustainability] Hello from London

Hi Tom,

Great to have you!

I was interested to see that you support the Green members of the London Assembly. I'm a member of the Australian Greens myself and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the role Green parties can play in open knowledge - for example, open government, open access and changes to copyright law.

We could shift that discussion to another mailing list (perhaps OK-discuss) if it moved outside the scope of this list.

Cheers,

Chris Sakkas
Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki<http://fossilbank.wikidot.com/> and the Living Libre blog<http://www.livinglibre.com> and Twitter feed<https://twitter.com/#%21/living_libre>.

On 11 December 2012 01:41, Tom Chance <Tom.Chance at london.gov.uk<mailto:Tom.Chance at london.gov.uk>> wrote:
Hello,

I'd like to quickly introduce myself, and some open sustainability data.

I work at the Greater London Authority supporting the two Green Party Members of the London Assembly (a body of elected politicians who scrutinise the Mayor of London and have certain powers over his budget and strategy). I've also been involved on and off with the open data movement for many years in a personal capacity, including speaking at some of Rufus Pollock's ever-fun London Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch events back in 2005 (those were the days!)

The GLA launched one of the very first open data projects in the UK, where you can find quite a bit of enviromental data:
http://data.london.gov.uk/taxonomy/categories/environment

This includes the London Energy and Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which sounds similar to the sort of data Hans Rosling wants to see published worldwide:
http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/leggi-2008-database

Thanks to pressure from one of the Members I work with, the GLA has also started to release detailed modelling data underpinning its strategies, for example:
http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/climate-change-mitigation-and-energy-strategy-model-data

In my personal life I have also pursued various experiments with sustainable lifestyles data in OpenStreetMap, for example:
http://tom.acrewoods.net/2011/04/11/announcing-openecomaps-to-geeks/ (site currently not functioning!)
http://tom.acrewoods.net/2012/10/04/mapping-for-pedestrians/
http://tom.acrewoods.net/2012/10/26/londons-natural-geography/
http://tom.acrewoods.net/2012/11/02/analysing-southwarks-natural-geography/

I cannot give a lot of time in my day job to this group, but I look forward to seeing what it can achieve.

Tom Chance
Team Coordinator
LONDONASSEMBLY Green Group

City Hall, The Queen's Walk, London SE1 2AA
Tel: 020 7983 4963

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