Nestoria Interview: Alan Smith of the ONS' Data Visualisation Centre

There's a restriction on how much you can fit into a title, but to be more precise, Alan Smith is the Principle Methodologist of the Office for National Statistics' Data Visualisation Centre.  Meaning he's got access to a lot of interesting statistical data to and it's up to him to present it in a visual fashion.  So you can see why he's something worth putting questions to if you're interested in the how/ why and what of data visualisation.

Before we get into the Qs and As, it's important to mention that Alan spoke to us from a personal perspective – these are his views not those of the ONS.  It's also worth noting that his background is in GIS and cartography.  ALAN: My masters is in GIS, though I confess I haven't fired up a big, proper, grown-up GIS for some while. My first maps at college in the States were ink on vellum! Now that was retro...

Ah, but there's often still a place for the old school.  Here are the rest of Alan's answers:

How would you describe your work and how did you come to do it?

The work I do now - pushing ONS forward in terms of data presentation – is a logical extension of what I first joined ONS to do, namely running the corporate mapping service.  There was a tipping point, about 8 or 9 years ago, where we looking at how traditional GIS software was being ported to the web because we wanted to move ONS into that space. We weren't too impressed with early online GIS solutions, so we starting looking at emerging web-specific technologies like SVG and, later, Flash and realised that if we worked with them, we could move beyond the restriction of 'just doing maps' and take on data visualisation in a broader sense. So in 2007 we made the move to set up a new team with the wider remit...

And how would you describe the Data Visualisation Centre and its aim/s and function/s? 

The role is really to provide a link between ONS' data producing teams and the wider world.  On the web front, that means trying to produce something engaging with entire ONS datasets. Behind the scenes, we also have a role to play defining standards and best practice for basic 'safety-first' presentation, which is very important - my team will never produce more than a small proportion of ONS' graphical outputs, there is a federated approach being adopted for most content creation in ONS.

How does your relationship with the ONS influence what you do and the way you do it?

I think we're naturally closer to the data and that's probably reflected in the form and content of our outputs. While that's usually a good thing, it means that we also work within the same constraints as the data producers - ie. most of our outputs go directly onto the ONS website - so we have a workflow that's currently working within the constraints of the organisation.

What are some of the Data Visualisation Centre projects that you think have been most effective?  And why would you class them as the most successful?

There are three that spring to mind. Firstly, our population pyramids, which were the first thing that I did which made me realise there was so much potential in looking at 'traditional' types of graphics and breathing new life into them with new media via animation and interactivity.  

Secondly, the CommuterView project which allowed us to interactively map commuting flows, showed just how powerful a modern web browser is at data handling and rendering, really powerful stuff.  Finally, the animated map of ageing, which has proven flexible as a mapping template for change over time and seems to have gone down very well with users. The idea of 'brushed' data displays - that is, more than one display of the same data linked to each other (such as a chart, a map, a histogram) is a natural thing to do on the web and this map was a good vehicle for that approach.

Do you even have moments mid way though a project where you realise there may be an even better way to show something?  Or do you come up with many structural options in the early stages?

We tend to produce small, initial prototypes and then iterate rapidly based on our discussions with clients (typically the data producers), so in terms of fundamental approach and symbology we rarely get too far in before changing things completely. Having said that, every project is a learning experience so there's very few projects we'd go back to and do exactly the same way again as you're always trying to move things on.

Where do you sit on the question of style over substance?  Do you believe that data visualisation sits perfectly in the middle, or do you think it still has a very scientific part to play?

The million dollar question! There really is no crime in making something look engaging, even pretty - there really isn't.  But too often it's at the expense of the information in the data, which is what we really care about.
ONS' expertise and insight is always going to be with the data so we're trying to reflect that in the presentation. The key decision for us is about whether visualisations are exploratory (user finds story - and with the way the web works now -shares it) or we want people to focus on a narrative (ONS experts present some insight).  There's room for both, but the risk at the moment is that everything becomes exploratory so I'm quite interested in what happens to the narrative.  Charts on their own can't tell you everything.  A good example recently is a promotional graphic we did for the 2011 Census  – we used hyperlinking between the text and the graphic to encourage people to genuinely 'read' the chart.

At the Data Visualisation Centre you get a lot your data though collaborative relationships with the people who actually collect the data, how closely do you work with the people who actually harvest the data and do they ever offer any input into the way the data is finally presented?

We work very closely with the data producers as it is generally their insight into the data that needs to be unlocked as part of a visualisation, so it's incredibly important.

That said, have you ever had any problem getting access to data that you're interested in working with, or do you usually start with the dataset/s and then decide how to present it/ them?

Yes, I think it's quite interesting that people see 'opendata' as a solution just for organisations outside of the public sector! More accessible data will make MY job easier (eg, discoverable data, less data prep by direct access through data APIs) and allow us to share our visualisations more widely.

Do you think that the situation re:data access is opening up or do you find the government, for example, are still very protective of their data.

See above - in my opinion, it's definitely opening up.  Most ONS outputs have always been free at point of use and so it's really a question about access mechanisms. I can't really comment on other departments other than to say my contacts in them are similarly like-minded people who are keen about getting their data out into the open and used positively by as many people as possible.

What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of GIS, mobile and web technology?  And what about when you add social to the mix?

It's very, very exciting. Years ago, I remember getting excited when I saw maps in vending machines on the London Underground - now of course, everyone has a GIS in their pocket, which is extraordinary. This convergence is essentially delivering a connected, personalised web experience, which is great.

Do you think it's these elements (above) that have helped to breathe lots of life into the field of data visualisation or are there other factors that you think were more influential?

It definitely plays a part, but there's something a little more fundamental going on - and it's about data. There is so much data. Too much, really, if that's possible.  And visualisation is simply one of the things that can help abbreviate data into something meaningful. There's other things too - like better data analysis - and convergence between those fields (ie. visual analytics) is very interesting. But right now, it's kind of like a
frontier and we're in a stage of learning by doing.

And what particular trend or innovations in data visualisation do you find most exciting at the moment?  What are you watching out for, or hoping for in the future of the field?

Revisiting the concept of the narrative - the interpreted story – which will help balance things against the exploratory. I quite like the idea that things are getting easier to produce as long as we're not getting lazier at what we think of is acceptable to produce. I love Google Maps - but if everything became a Google pin map, regardless of whether a pin map is the best way of showing a particular piece of information, then that would be quite sad. The American cartographer Mark Harrower has written some wise cautionary words about this - we need to be enabled by the technology, not led by it necessarily.

Thanks for the cautionary closing, and for sharing some of your thoughts with us.  It's been great to get a perspective from someone who works in a more official data vis. role, and it's good to hear that you think there's many more interesting things to come in this field. 

Nestoria Interview: Iain Dooley, Working Software

Ed Freyfogle, one of Nestoria's fair founders, recently shared a link to a blog post entitled:  “How we didn't launch in 482 days”.  Most startup posts – not that that's what this is, it's just what I assumed before I'd read it - rave about how they put everything together in a weekend etc.  But this post was about the slow and steady attitude to growing and developing your internet business, and how a tempered pace can actually be seen as a good thing.  This lesson is relevant to a lotta folks, so it seemed appropriate to delve further into the story of the poster and find out more about how he came to these conclusions. 

His name is Iain Dooley.  He founded Working Software instead of writing a thesis for his Mechatronic Engineering/ Japanese course at the University of Sydney, and now lives on the central coast of NSW with his partner and 1 year old daughter. 

Here's more about what he does:

How would you describe your company and the work you do?  Do you consider yourselves a 'startup'?

Startup is a weird word. I would never describe Working Software as a startup for the same reason as I would never describe myself as an entrepreneur: they're both annoying buzzwords that have been co-opted to mean a whole bunch of different things most of which seem to be distractions from the type of work required to create a successful business.

Working Software is a small business that has traditionally focused on providing a range of IT services primarily in the area of web based application development in PHP that has varied in size from 1 to 5 employees (there are currently 2 members of the team other than myself). We are working to build passive revenue streams through the development of web based software, most notably Decal and 8Centsms.

What are some of the major projects you've worked on?

The biggest single project we've externally consulted on was an SMS communications platform for radio stations (Melbourne readers who listen to SEN 1116 may know it as the "SMS machine") of which 8centSMS is a spin-off project. More recently, Decal CMS is the longest running, most complex project we've worked on.

Before those I worked freelance on a range of small to medium website projects and a bespoke document management system for an international student residence organisation.

Which of these do you consider to be the main 'prong' of your business?

There are 3 reasonably distinct "strategic business units" right now: Decal CMS is where all our "web consulting" work goes. We're really trying to get back to our roots with that, focusing on being able to deploy reasonably priced, professionally designed websites for fixed prices using our own product. The reason we're doing that rather than, say, flipping Wordpress sites for a few hundred bucks each is that, along the way Decal CMS matures and we're using that process to (partially) fund the development of Decal into a product that will be available as a DIY hosted content management system suitable for a range of skill levels from the non-technical small business owner/blogger that wants to setup a website themselves, to design and marketing agencies with in-house dev teams. We also have plans for building a marketplace for people to build and sell plugins, or "Accessories" as we're planning on calling them (since Apple recently sued Amazon for the use of the word "App Store"!). Ask me again in 5 years if that worked or not ;)

8centSMS is a launching point for any "communications" based work - mostly promotions/campaigns work including premium SMS and web competition entry. 8centsms.com, as well as being a web SMS gateway for personal use, is like the public face of what is essentially a stream of consulting work focused on marketing, promotions or communications. There are a few products emerging from that work which are built on the 8centsms.com platform such as an email marketing tool which allows you to create pages in Decal and send them out from 8centsms.com although we haven't really launched anything yet. It'll probably be another year at least until we have a product ready for general consumption but a couple of our clients have already started using early prototypes.

Then there's the straight up and down, by the hour, consulting work which goes a fair way to paying for the costs of developing Decal. This is your basic guns for hire type scenario where we can provide development services in a range of languages, onsite technical support, hosting, system administration, all that jazz.

We're actually in the process now of incorporating a couple of different companies to provide equity to the various team members involved and formalise this structure a bit more (up until now Working Software has just been a Sole Trader operation with employees and contractors).

How long have you been working on this project?  And what have you learned about the process of creating and developing a product during the process?

Haha, sorry my previous answer didn't lead particularly well into this question. I guess the "main prong" from a product perspective at this stage would definitely have to be Decal so I'll discuss that.

Decal technically dates back to 2006 but it's really only since November 2009 that we've been focused on it. I'd say there are two primary things I've learned.

The first is: relax, the market is huge. Of course this doesn't hold true for all markets, but just think about it for a second: if I told you I want to build a company that does hosted content management systems, wouldn't you say something like "you're an idiot. That marketplace is utterly packed and there are so many free solutions that you can't possibly compete". (I wouldn't say idiot...)

Well, there sure are a lot of competing products, but at the same time the market is just immeasurably large, and we need such a small portion of that market in order to be profitable that I'd say that the chances of being a sustainable business are significantly increased.

Not only is the market huge and growing, but people change all the time. They get sick of what they're using for one reason or another, they go looking for something else, they find you, you do your best to retain them as a customer for as long as you can. So what this really means is that all the stress and pressure you place on yourself to launch immediately for fear of "missing the boat" is bullshit. No-one cares that we didn't launch Decal last year. No-one cares that we're only launching a subset of what we consider to be the eventual goal of Decal.

I think this is a phenomenon that is greatly intensified in the web development sector. As others launch competing products and stories fly past you on a daily basis about which companies have received $X,000,000 in funding it seems as though you could never possibly keep up, but "launch day" is just the first day of the rest of your business.

The way I've started thinking about it is this: if we had managed to successfully launch last year, wouldn't I still hope to be in business at this point? Then, if we had launched last year, wouldn't I expect that some new competitors would have emerged by now? And wouldn't I be concerned about the threat from those new competitors and therefore be driven to innovate to retain my market share, however meagre that market share may be? The answer to all of those questions is yes, so it just seems so silly to me now that I was really hung up and stressed out about launching "on time" when there was no real deadline. Of course you need to release a product as quickly as you can but deciding how and when to launch probably shouldn't be driven by your fear of missing the boat in an ever changing market place.  Basically, first mover advantage is nonsense.

That leads me on to the second point: releasing software. Your software needs users. Software without users is a theoretical exercise. Decal is probably different from a lot of other "web startup" ideas where it looks like people were sitting around throwing darts at a wall full of buzzwords to come up with something they can put online and see what happens. Decal has been developed at every stage for Working Software clients, so we've always had users for it and the features have been largely driven by that, and by our own needs as web developers.

I think this is a great way to build software (and I'm not the only one *cough* 37 signals *cough*) - to scratch your own itches. Decal has two groups of users: the end users that manage the content, and the people who deploy the websites (developers/designers). Because we were running out of time and money, our focus now is on releasing a product purely for the "end users". It's not our ideal product, but releasing SOMETHING that we can sell and that will be useful to people (we hope!) is more important than holding onto it until we're sure it's perfect and it does everything we want it to.

So whilst I'm certainly not in the camp that can proudly proclaim to have "launched a startup" in his spare time over the weekend using the latest trendy web application framework, I've always been very focused on figuring out how we can pare back our expectations of the product to get something into the hands of the public. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be robust and reliable and I believe that so long as it shows a promising trajectory, people will start to take notice and come along on the journey with us towards the product we eventually hope to build.

What are some of the main hurdles/ challenges you've been faced with?

Well, Decal is a really challenging project because we're solving a problem in a unique way that involves a lot of R&D. That type of work is so unpredictable that the traditional notion of estimating time or having deadlines becomes sort of irrelevant. I guess you could say the biggest challenge has been trying to build a product and make money in the face of such uncertainty. If you imagine that the entire process is like a fruit tree always growing and developing. You have to cultivate the tree, but every now and then you have to hunt down some
fruit, pick it off and say "alright, we can sell that, put it on the truck". You have to learn to recognise those bits of fruit that you think you'll be able to sell in order to continue cultivating the tree.  (Nice analogy.)

Do you think your location in Australia has made any difference in the development process?  Apart from being able to work in your backyard...

The Working Software Team in 2010

Haha well actually I think there are two main advantages to being in Australia: one is that we have an excellent social security system. It seems counter intuitive but I think that "socialism" in that respect is fantastic for fostering business innovation. A lot of innovation happens in very small businesses and I've heard it said before that small business plays an ever increasingly important role in the Australian economy (no doubt eclipsed by mining though ...)

If I were living in the United States, for example, then health care would be connected to my job. I'd be far less inclined to take risks, especially given the birth of my first child and having to support a family. Since we're guaranteed a basic level of healthcare and, if worse comes to worse, housing and unemployment benefits, the risk factors are dramatically mitigated and I feel secure in being able to try and build a business which might in turn provide employment for many people for years to come. So that investment in people and society is, I think, a very important part of Australian culture and something we should consider sacred.

The other advantage is in having a very understanding and lenient tax department. I've been very cash strapped for the past year or so and the ATO have been fantastic in letting me pay things off via special arrangements (although I think this may have been leniency to keep things running during the rebound from the GFC, needless to say I'm not taking it for granted :)

Some of the drawbacks include a drastically tighter market for early stage venture capital funding (although that may be a blessing in disguise!), a much smaller market of early adopters compared with the U.S and fewer options for accepting online payments.

Do you use anything, or contribute anything to, the Open Source community?

I run everything on open source software (FreeBSD and CentOS operating systems, MySQL database, PHP) and a few years ago I attempted to take the web development world by storm with my revolutionary PHP framework RocketSled which was launched to the sound of crickets chirping and never heard from again. To be fair I didn't really keep up much of a release cycle. We still use RocketSled in production now but I'm not planning another release.

Since then I've been kind of preoccupied but there are a few little bits and bobs coming out of the work that we're currently doing that might be suitable for open source projects so when we get the chance we'll publish those.

I was involved in the inaugural Google Summer of Code and released a piece of software I called Koto which was a rapid application development tool that bound a Ruby interpreter to the QT framework. I could never work out how to use autotools though so the install process was pretty prohibitive. To my knowledge one other person apart from my project supervisor installed it - a German guy who blogged about it with the title "That's real RAD!". Unfortunately I can no longer find that blog anywhere :)

 Do you think the best developers are 'sharers and collaborators' or lone wolves?

I don't think you can judge how good a developer is by either of those characteristics. Well ... I should add that I don't really care for the term "good developer" because "good" there is pretty ambiguous. As a small business owner I'm interested in developers that make my business money. More than any other skill a developer may possess, communication is the most crucial. The ability to read, write and understand, research and learn independently are the most valuable skills.

That being said there is always value in peer review and "coding outside the vacuum", so to speak, but I wouldn't, for example, not consider hiring someone because they didn't have an active github account displaying all their various open source achievements.

When I hire, the two most prominent things on the job ad are that I need someone with impeccable English skills, and someone who knows their way around a Unix command line. If you find someone who knows Unix you can be sure they're an independent learner and good at reading instructions so that's a very good start!

What keeps you inspired?

Building things is pretty fun. When you actually see something start to come together it's exciting. The part up until that point can be mentally devastating. I think I agree with my 2nd year Mechatronics Professor Steve Scheding who said "I hate coding, but I love having coded". I hate building products, but I love having built them.

Money is also a particularly strong motivator for me. I want to build a profitable business but preferably do it with a product or service that I'm proud of.

And what products/ apps. or ideas do you love and wish you'd come up with yourself?

To be honest almost everything I see I have come up with in some form, and I don't think that's particularly unique. Web developers all have a backlog of about a billion ideas that they'd like to build some day.  As for things I didn't think of before I saw them, like Twitter for example, it's hard to be envious. I mean, it would be sort of like getting jealous of someone who won the lottery. It's so improbable that you'd stumble across something so simple that would turn into a global phenomenon that it's just not even worth bothering to think about really.

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far out.)

One idea I had a couple of years back was to setup Premium billing (similar to SMS) based on IP address for selling online mobile content. This would require mobile operators to provide an API that allowed me, as the content provider, to map an IP address back to a mobile account and then send them a billed message. Apparently Indian mobile operators pass the user's mobile number in the web request headers so maybe someone could launch that service over there.

If no-one's done it by the time Decal and 8centsms.com either succeed or peter out into oblivion maybe I'll give it a shot :)

Nestoria Interview: Stephanie Ayanian, Geospatial Revolutionary

If you want to bring a message to the masses what do you think might be the best way to do it?  Probably in cinematic format, right?  Either for web, TV or the big screen. 

So if you think it's important that people should consider how digital mapping technology is changing the way we think and do things, then a series of short films covering the ins and outs of the field is a good way to get people thinking.  Or that's the idea the folks behind the Geospatial Revolution Project settled on. 

To learn more about this mission to bring the latest adventures in geospatial space to the masses, the Nestoria AU blog spoke to Stephanie Ayanian, the producer of the Geospatial Revolution film series at Penn State Public Broadcasting. Her background is in feature documentary and fiction film making, so her skill-set is a bit different to our usual interviewees.  But film is a uniting interest for a lot of us, and her last project, Liquid Assets, was awarded the 2009 American Association of Engineering Societies Journalism Award, so she's very good at what she does. 

What is the Geospatial Revolution?
The Geospatial Revolution Project is an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact. Geospatial technology has been around for years, but we are now in a unique position to share the revolutionary ways that it is impacting all aspects of life, from how we can use it in our personal lives, business, government, etc.

What are some of the key themes and instances dealt with by the project?
Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community. We count on these technologies to:

• monitor climate change
• map populations across continents, countries, and communities
• track disease
• strengthen bonds between cultures
• assist police departments in protecting safety
• enable democracy   
• navigate our personal lives

This is the first episode:

Why was it created?

The mission of the Geospatial Revolution Project is to expand public knowledge about the history, applications, related privacy and legal issues, and the potential future of location-based technologies. We created it as a public media initiative at Penn State with input from faculty members at the university.
And what are its aims, and what practical reverberations are you hoping the project will have?
We want the series to be screened in the classroom, in the board room, in the living room. We want people across the globe to understand how these technologies are impacting their lives and how they can become a part of the revolution.

What have you personally learned while being part of the project?
I have learned that geospatial technology is really behind many of the technologies that I interact with on a daily basis. If it weren't for location-based technologies, we wouldn't know where we're going or where we've been. There is an overwhelming amount of data and information available, and it takes many people and a lot of money to keep this technology at the cutting edge.

Third episode:

What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of mapping and web technology?  
One of the exciting stories from the series focuses on the convergence of mapping and web technology. Geospatial Revolution Episode One, Why We Need It, focuses on crisis mapping and global response during the earthquake in Haiti. We are also seeing a lot of interactive mapping on the web to explain the earthquake in Japan.

And what are some of the large scale implementations you foresee that might have a big impact on our future?
We don’t believe we can speculate on this.

And what about when you add social to the mix?  Is that something that you're including in your examination of our relationship with space and maps?
Social networking is briefly discussed in the series, as it is a way that many people are experiencing the technology.

And what are some of your views on what sort of innovations might happen in the future of the geospatial space?
We don’t believe we can speculate on this.

++++
I’m Elaine Brzycki, project manager and funding executive for the Geospatial Revolution Project, and I just wanted to add a couple of comments to Stephanie’s responses.  Since the first episode was released, the Geospatial Revolution videos have been viewed in more than 170 countries worldwide.  Geospatial organizations, educational institutions, and governmental agencies are using the videos for training and workforce development. 

The Project also provides free learning materials for K-12 teachers to use in the classroom as well as in informal learning environments.  This summer, we will be creating a box set with all the videos and the learning materials.  Schools may want to purchase the box set to include in their libraries. 

It may be of interest to know that The National Geographic Society, one of our outreach collaborators, will be posting the videos to its new, updated Education Programs website within the next month or so, to help reach teachers worldwide.

Fans can follow the project on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/geospatialrev and Twitter @geospatialrev.

Nestoria Interview: Susan Wareham McGrath

Lots of people who don't live in Australia think they might like to.  Which is reflected in the fact that some of the people who use Nestoria Australia aren't searching for Australian properties from an Australian IP address.  So what sort of added difficulties might non-Australian citizens encounter while house hunting?  This is actually quite a technical question, which it's been put to an expert on your behalf, in our latest Nestoria Australia interview with Susan Wareham McGrath, Registered Migration Agent.

Thanks for sharing your expertise, Susan.

 You spend a lot of you time helping people move to, and settle into, Australia – would you say that this process is becoming easier or harder?

 In one way it's becoming easier as there's more information than ever before on the web, which makes it possible to research Australian properties, costs of living, proximity to local facilities and the immigration process itself without leaving your home country.

 But although there is more information available than ever before, people should be aware that it's very risky to try to arrange your own lease or purchase, especially from overseas.  There are significant legal implications involved in all Australian property transactions, so it's always wise to obtain advice from an Australian qualified legal adviser before signing anything.  On that note, many people are under the impression that purchasing a residential or commercial property in Australia will strengthen an applicant's case to have a visa granted.  This is not true and people should be very wary of anyone who tries to sell them property on that basis.

 What about since Julia Gillard has been the PM?

 The body that sets the requirements for non-residents purchase in Australian property, the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) has not made any major changes to its requirements since Ms Gillard became PM.  Outside that, there have been some natural market fluctuations during that period, caused both by global economic conditions and internal fiscal policy, such as interest rate increases, but nothing that has made it more difficult to move and settle in Australia.

Is finding somewhere to live high up on people's settlement lists?

Yes, it is one of the most significant decisions that immigrants need to make.

What advice do you give people about finding the right place to live?

It can be difficult to find somewhere even when you live in Australia, and this difficulty is greater when you are conducting your property search from overseas.  I suggest they rent a property temporarily to give them time to assess their chosen area before investing their hard-earned money in purchasing a property.  Wherever possible, I also suggest that they do as much online research as they can before deciding on their preferred location.  Some of the things they could consider might be the availability of public transport, schools, places of worship, shopping centres, medical centres and hospitals, as well as the distance they might have to travel to find work, and of course, property costs and the general cost of living in their chosen area – some suburbs are much more expensive than others.
 
Are there any special challenges faced by ex-pat house hunters?

Yes, ex-pats wishing to rent property in Australia sometimes find it difficult to obtain a lease, as they don't have a track record of tenancy in Australia. This situation has become particularly prevalent over the past year or so, due to the tightening of Australia's rental market.
 
And what about buying or building a property? 

Sometimes, for a number of reasons, people have to immigrate before selling their overseas property.  Until the overseas property is sold, so they can access the funds required for a deposit on their Australian property, they're not able to purchase a home in Australia, which is a frustrating situation for them, particularly as they have to negotiate the overseas sale remotely, which can be a challenge in itself.

What's the current situation regarding purchasing an Australian property if you're not a permanent resident?

Through the Foreign Investment Review Board, the Australian Government has imposed certain restrictions on foreigners purchasing property in Australia. They can:

• purchase vacant land, but must commence construction on it within 24 months
• purchase new apartments (i.e. apartments that have never been occupied), where the developer has permission to sell up to 50% to foreigners
• can purchase an existing home in an Integrated Tourism Resort (ITR) such as Hope Island, Sanctuary Cove, Royal Pines; and
• people on any temporary visa that allows a stay in Australia for at least 12 months at the time they acquire the property, can purchase an existing home to live in, but not for investment purposes - if they depart Australia permanently, they must sell the property

In some of the above cases approval from FIRB must be sought. In the second point above, the developer will already have obtained such approval.

How has technology changed the way the immigration process works?

It's made it much easier for potential immigrants to source information, both about their options and the immigration process itself. In terms of the process itself, some of the more significant technology-based changes include online lodgement of applications, online assessment of medical tests for visa applicants and their electronic forwarding to DIAC, the use of Skype and email which not only makes the immigration process more efficient, but also allows immediate communication with clients all round the world regularly, and at little or no cost.

What about social media?

I keep my followers up to date on Twitter, regularly post about immigration matters on Facebook and participate in a number of Australian immigration groups on LinkedIn – social media is yet another way that technology has improved the immigration process.

Susan Wareham McGrath is a MARA-registered Australian immigration agent (MARN 0601990) and Australian jobsearch consultant to immigrants and overseas applicants. She is also a blogger and social commentator, particularly on issues that affect women, immigrants and visa applicants. Susan is based on Queensland’s Gold Coast, but works with clients all over the world, via the internet, Skype and email. 

Nestoria Interview: Simon Elvery, Creator of Websites

The latest interviewee for the NA blog is Simon Elvery.  He's introducing himself, so let's get right into it.

My name is Simon Elvery and I create websites (mostly) as part of the team at Left, Right & Centre, a design studio in Brisbane, Australia, but often just for the hell of it. I've been more or less obsessed with the internet since the mid '90s when I created a startlingly ugly GeoCities 'Homestead' in a neighbourhood I've now forgotten. Times have, thankfully, moved on, and today I'm an advocate and practitioner of modern, standards based web design who is constantly excited about the possibilities. I have a neglected love affair with photography (and I challenge you to find me a web designer who doesn't). I'm much more likely to be awake at 11pm than 7am.

My colleague came across you because of your project 'What do you Suggest', can you talk us through what this is, what it does and why you came up with it?

What Do You Suggest uses the concept of a word tree to allow exploration of the language people employ when using the Google search engine. For any given word or phrase typed into the Google search box, Google provides a list of suggestions about what we might actually be looking for - What Do You Suggest simply uses that data to let us explore the suggestions in a different way. Since it was first launched, I've added the ability to explore the differences in the suggestions Google makes depending on the user's location or language preferences, which for me at least, added a whole new layer of interest.

I came up with the idea after playing with Web Seer, which uses the same data to make comparisons between two search terms. I wanted to build something which used the Google Suggest data in a new way and use it as an excuse to play with some of the newer web technologies.

How much time have you spent playing with this since you built it?  And what are some of the interesting things that you've learned about your fellow humans in the process of using and building it?

I've spent many hours playing with it, and so have many others. Some of the most interesting things were discovered quite early on when I noticed how many people search for phrases like 'how to kiss passionately' – something I'd never thought to Google.

Shortly after it went live I started collecting data on which branches of the suggestion tree people followed, and I now have almost a year's worth of data. Once I've collected the full year I plan to release a spreadsheet of all activity on the site just in case anyone wants to explore it. Stay tuned to my blog if that sounds interesting to you.

It does thanks.
What do you think is going to happen in search in the future?

I think search engines are in a bit of trouble at the moment. Google dominates to such an extent that they're basically running a monopoly; other search engines try to imitate their every innovation and because they're so dominant they're the only target spammers are bothered with. I've felt for a while that Google's results are becoming less and less useful, and I'm not alone. A number of people whose opinions I admire have noted the same decline in Google's utility (well summarised here). Whatever happens in the future of search they're going to have to regain the upper hand in their battle with spammers to avoid irrelevance. At least part of the solution to that problem is social, and Google (at least) knows it.

Your latest personal project is 'All the places I go'.  Can you give us a run down of what that is, what it does and why you decided to embark on it?

Put simply, I'm attempting to record a complete record of my geographic location throughout 2011, and I'm using All The Places I Go to document and analyse the data I gather. I come up with my fair share of strange ideas, and most of them get kicked around in my head for a couple of weeks before being forgotten or abandoned, but for some reason this one stuck.

After a week or so of letting the idea float around in my head and looking for similar projects it wasn't getting any less interesting, and the
possible uses for the data were growing. I tentatively floated the idea with my wife and a few friends and received mostly mild encouragement and bemused looks, so naturally I decided it was worth pursuing. One of the things that hooked me quite early on was the realisation that with a complete set of time/location data, anything with an accurate time attached to it could be put on a map. You might be surprised at the number of micro-events which automatically have timestamps attached to them (every purchase, phone call, text message, email, trip on public transport, tweet...the list goes on).

Have you found it at all challenging to remember to collect this data about yourself?  Are there any situations where you've been tempted to cheat?  And have you learned anything about your habits so far?  I'd be scared I'd find inefficiencies that I'd want to address - but that's me...

I've found it relatively easy to collect the data so far. I started testing collection methods in late November and quickly settled on simply carrying a GPS logger with me at all times. I deliberately started early so I could make collection a habit and reduce the likelihood that I would forget once the project started properly.

I think the biggest surprise in the numbers so far is the distance I travel on an average day. I work within walking distance of my home, so without a long daily commute I was expecting quite a short distance for the daily average, but right now it's sitting at over 30 kilometres (That's down a fair bit since the beginning of February and I expect it to keep falling).  Many people have also been surprised to see how little time I spend at work on an average day - unfortunately, that low figure is easily explained by some annual leave I took in January and it won't last. Regrettably, I don't have the luxury of a 4.5 hour work day (and it's already at over 6 hours if weekends are excluded).

Beyond that, nothing has surprised me to any great extent yet, but I've got a lot of data analysis work still to do.

What are some of the other ways you're thinking you'll be able to use this data?  And do you have any ideas about expanding it onto a larger, grander project or do you like keeping it personal?

Now that I've got more than a month of data to play with, I'm really looking forward to creating the ability to compare different time periods. One of the things I'm doing already is using my travel speed to estimate how much time I spend walking or riding as compared to driving. I'd really like to see my walking/riding time trend upward throughout the year.

I'm also looking forward to incorporating some of the other personal data scattered all around the web.
I won't say the thought of a grander project hasn't crossed my mind, but for now I'm happy just experimenting.

And while we're on topic I have to ask: how personal is your relationship with the web?
How personal do you think it's going to get between individuals and the web?

I suppose you could say I have a very personal relationship with the web in some ways - it certainly knows a lot about me - but the interesting relationships are with people not technologies.  It's fair to say that many people already have very personal online relationships. There are very strong and lasting relationships formed online all the time, and it's only getting easier to find others with similar interests. Add location data to that mix, and it's a good recipe for many and more personal and professional relationships having their genesis online. I love that I can maintain a list of people I'd like to meet and relatively easily create an alert system to let me know when they might be travelling to my city.

A heatmap of Simon's action around his home between the 1st and the 11th of Jan 2011

Have you also been tracking your intake of good coffee and how that may impact on the other factors?  Just a thought...  You might be able to get someone who sells coffee to sponsor you...

Unsurprisingly, I do track my coffee intake (and a few other slightly less obvious metrics about my life) using Nicholas Felton's excellent Daytum.

That's a genius site!  Thanks for pointing that out.
What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of mapping and web technology?  And what about when you add social to the mix?  And do you have any views on what sort of innovations could happen in the future of the geospatial space?

Some of the most exciting web/mapping innovations right now are being released by Microsoft. I think these innovations are being overlooked by many due to Google's entrenched dominance in the space. I'm almost always disappointed by how Microsoft seems to wall up their innovations making them less accessible and standards based than many developers would like, but there's no denying they do some incredible things which are well worth checking out.

Any suggestions for real estate specific innovations?  I have to ask...

One of the things I get really excited about is the increasing availability of government data online. There is huge scope for new innovation in this area, but one real estate related piece of work already released is the excellent Planning Alerts (I believe there's also a UK equivalent).

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell
us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far into the blue sky.)

I'm looking forward to the day personal high speed mobile internet access is ubiquitous. Imagine the possibilities.

Nestoria Interview: Scott Manley, star gazer and DJ, with an interest in social search

A couple of weeks ago I spent a bit of time, outside of office hours of course, looking at lovely data visualisations.  I found a few that were quite relevant to what we do at Nestoria, but there was also one beautiful visualisation that was more relevant to all of mankind, but less relevant to Nestoria specifically.  It's a visualisation of asteroid discoveries made in the past 30 years, shown chronologically and adding to the spinning heavens. 

Here it is if my explanation isn't clear enough.

Of course after seeing this I wanted to ask Scott Manley, who's the man behind the visualisation, about the whys and hows of his project, so I took the liberty of expanded my remit to interview interesting and Nestoria relevant sorts to interviewing sorts that are interesting and relevant to us as earthlings as well.

Here are my Qs and his As:

I came across you via your beautiful data visualisation of asteroid discoveries over the past 30 years.  Can you tell me how you came to make it?  Both the reasons behind it's creation and how you did it in practical?

The video goes back to my student days in the late 1990's when I was fascinated by asteroids and trying to make a case that there was a potential impact threat which needed to be assessed. Telling people that there are thousands of asteroids regularly crossing the Earth's path is one thing, showing them a picture is much more effective, so I created a site http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html which would update with the locations of all known objects. Back then, we knew of less than 50,000 asteroids, but we were pretty sure that there are perhaps a billion or so substantial objects in the main belt.

Anyway, the site ran mostly automated, with the sysadmin at Armagh maintaining it after I moved to California. Last year I found someone posting a decade old video to youtube and decided that it was time to do better, so I dug up the code. There's actually 2 versions, the old one is written in TCL/TK and uses a canvas widget to build the image and then dumps it as a postscript object, this is nice because it provides high level drawing primitives and the resulting image scales nicely for printed publication, it did however take about half an hour to render an image.

The newer version (dating from 1998) is a lean bit of C code, it doesn't have any graphics library, it has a framebuffer in memory which I dump to disk and then shell out to ImageMagick to convert to a final image. This is much faster, fast enough that I could render hundreds of frames and make a very basic video, but it was a far more primitive system, the drawing essentially consists of setting the pixel at coordinates x-y to colour RGB. Over time I've had a few requests from people for various videos and had to add features to the rendering like lines, motion blur and 3d transforms, however it's always been a process of iteration rather than replacing the whole thing with a 3rd party rendering engine like Open GL, If I can make that leap then it's possible we'll see this kind of thing at speeds approaching realtime.

The actual asteroid data came from Ted Bowell's project at the Lowell Observatory, they compile a file with the most up to date orbital elements of every observed minor planet, this kind of vizualization would be a whole lot harder were it not for this data. One thing that's missing is the discovery date, and this information wasn't conveniently available in one place, instead I identified a couple of sources and wrote a perl script to crawl the sites in question and merge the data into the asteroid database.  For some objects with provisional designations there was no discovery date information readily available and so the script guesses the discovery dates based upon the temporary designation.

Now I had all the data, rendering the movie took a few hours and the first versions of the movie weren't quite right, so I'd tweak the settings and try again until I arrived at the final version which you see on youtube.

What did you personally learn from creating this?

First thing I learned is if you're uploading a video to youtube you probably want to make it private until you're sure it's ready. The first version uploaded had no audio, and ran at 60 fps, I primarily uploaded it to check what youtube would do to the video encoding. I knew that all those tiny dots moving in different directions represented something of a pathologically hard case for most encoding systems and I feared it would be unwatchable after youtube got its hands on it.

Well it was watchable enough that it's just passed 800,000 views, it got popular very quickly and there was no chance to replace it with a polished version. The best I could do was add some audio using youtube's audio swap, and I was really lucky to find 'Emergence' by Trifonic, they were local producers from San Francisco and when I put the sound next to the video it just seemed to go well together. Oddly enough there was a scientific explanation for why the music seemed to work well with the video.

Remember I had to scrape all those sites for discovery dates and make guesses for others? When I ran my first test renders I noticed that the discovery rate seemed very bursty rather than smooth, I hadn't expected this and at first I thought the discovery dates were subject to some sort of bias that was being introduced by my scraping or guessing. I tried fixing this in a number of different ways, but couldn't eliminate it.  It wasn't until after the video had been up a few days that a smart person pointed out that there was a pulsing in the discovery rate that was most likely due to the Lunar cycle. When there's a full moon the moonlight makes it harder to see faint objects, so the discovery rate rises and falls on a monthly basis. The video was running at 1 day per frame, 60 frames per second, which meant that the pulsing in the discovery rates was almost 120bpm (beats per minute), and sure enough the music I'd gravitated to was recorded at 60 bpm, with the piano motif driving along at 120bpm.

It was a rare moment where by astronomical experience aligned with my DJ experience.

Genius!  What a nice moment.
Once I'd seen your asteroid video I started poking around and came across the animations you created of what it might look like if an asteroid came close to us, and hit us.  Is this a sort of public service broadcast, or is animation the natural end result when you start visualising this sort of data?

Well, I'm a big proponent of educating the public about the potential dangers due to celestial hazards, it's more like the reverse was true, the images and videos came about as an educational tool to help people visualize just how busy the solar system actually is.

It's very easy to take simple physics and figure out the energy released in the impact of even a small asteroid is quite staggering, this is simple high school physics - a 2000meter object moving at 20km/sec contains the same energy as 800billion tons of TNT,. The consequences of an impact could end life as we know it on earth, as the dinosaurs discovered 65million years ago. However we are not the dinosaurs, we have awareness of science now, and we can recognize the danger and moreover we have some pretty good ideas on how to avert such an event should we know about it. There have been big impacts throughout Earth's history that have had terrible consequences for the inhabitants of the planet, we're the first species that has come along with the ability to do something about it. But before you go and design your asteroid diverting rocket you have to know where everything is, and truthfully, we'll probably find that there's nothing likely to be a threat in the next hundred years of so, until we look though, we won't know.

I noticed that you're also involved in web search.  Can you let us know what your interests and goals in search are and how you got into this field?

I work at Topsy.com, we're providing a realtime search engine which indexes data from the social web, because we're aware of the social networks we factor in the influence and expertise of the participants when ranking  content.
Personally I'm forever fascinated with the data that is being shared and how the sharing dynamic can inform us about the quality and relevance of web content that's being discussed.

Thanks very much to Scott for enlightening me - hopefully, Nestorialings, you'll feel the same way I do and are glad I veered slightly off topic.

Nestoria Interview with Amanda Graham from Seniors Housing Online

Seniors Housing Online joined us as a partner soon after we launched but never got a formal introduction on the blog.  While rectifying that it seemed like a good opportunity to talk to owner, Amanda Graham about the specifics of working in real estate in their target market, and the changes Australia's ageing population might have on the industry at large. 

I asked Amanda to begin by giving us an understanding of her own background and the background of the company.  Here's what she had to say to us.

I trained as a lawyer initially and at first I worked with juvenile offenders in the children’s court then moved to work in government on law reform and developing social policy, and completed a Master of Business Administration. This took me to working in politics, for a state Premier, several Government Ministers and Sydney’s Lord Mayor as a policy adviser and Chief of Staff.  This work included responsibility for Ageing services, so I was well aware of the challenges for government in caring for an ageing population, especially around accommodation needs.
 
Can you also talk us though where the idea for Seniors Housing Online came from and how the business has developed?
 
The practical side really hit home when I had to search for accommodation for my own father, and I became extremely frustrated at the absence of a website to help with this process.  It seemed such an obvious area to apply the benefits of an internet search! to  Like many people assisting older family members, my (co-founder) sister in law Catherine and myself were busy working full time, had children of our own, and lived over an hours’ drive away from dad – making it all very difficult.  We looked at the real estate websites and asked ourselves “why isn’t retirement property on there, or why hasn’t someone set up one of these for aged care?”
 
It turned out that the aged care and retirement property industry was incredibly fragmented, and as it was not marketed through real estate agents, it was not being captured by the real estate websites.  In addition, at that time the developers/ managers of these properties relied mainly on local newspaper advertisements and most did not have any online presence at all.  But as consumers we found it almost impossible to locate suitable retirement property, especially when we didn’t live in the search area – I was reduced to using the yellow pages, ringing dozens of places during business hours only to be told they were the wrong type of place, they had no vacancies, they were the wrong price range or even (incredible but true!) “could I please ring back on a Thursday morning between 9.30 and 12 noon when the relevant staff member would be there..”  Needless to say there were no photographs available either and I had to waste numerous weekends setting up appointments and driving for hours to inspect totally unsuitable properties before I could even get together a shortlist to show dad.  It’s a sensitive time for an elderly parent and there was no way I was going to upset him by taking him to inspect unsuitable places, sight unseen.
 
Catherine and I knew that many other people must be sharing our experience, and it really didn’t need to be this difficult.  The funny thing was that initially the retirement property and aged care operators all shook their heads and said that the sector was not ready for internet marketing, and anyway old people didn’t use computers so there was no point!  They didn’t seem to think about the people like us who were typically helping their elderly parents, which is who we had in mind when we first set up the website.  And the consumers very quickly proved us right – they loved our site immediately so the biggest challenge early on was persuading the property managers to list with us so we had the content.
 
Interestingly, when the site was first established the majority of visitors were family and friends of older people needing retirement accommodation – but now older people searching online for themselves massively outnumber them and we’ve adapted the business accordingly. Older people have definitely adopted the internet very quickly, with many in their 70’s and 80’s relying on email and joining Facebook, often so they can view their grandchildrens' photos etc. But there’s still a lingering stereotype about older people not using the internet, which really underestimates the huge online potential in targeting this demographic.
 
As you've mentioned above, Seniors Housing is a property portal with a specific market.  Can you  talk a bit about how you've developed your site so that it best suits your demographic?
 
As more older people use the website for themselves, the focus of the business has shifted from higher needs “aged care” accommodation for those in their 60’s and beyond to younger retirees and downsizers in their 50’s looking for larger, more modern “resort style” independent living properties offering a holiday lifestyle near beaches and golf courses. Aged care is now a much smaller part of our market, and the biggest market is the “baby boomer” generation, who have very different expectations and lifestyles to that of their parents. As they hit retirement age, they are now transforming the retirement property market as well as the whole concept of retirement and this is reflected in the range of properties featured on the site and the search functionality.

Parkland Villas - Woodlands

We’ve recently redesigned the site and people can now search for waterfront retirement properties, golf retirement properties, beach-side retirement properties, pet-friendly retirement properties, retirement villages and many more lifestyle preferences like this. The regional search options recognise that people are often prepared to move to a new area to attain the sort of holiday lifestyle they want in retirement, and to release extra cash from the sale of their family home.  They can also filter search results by the level of care available (if needed), price and number of bedrooms.
 
What sort of design and functionality choices have you made that you think are specific to your market?
 
Our market is a niche property market, so we’ve adapted the best real estate website functionality and enabled people to search various types of retirement property categories, including independent living, low care and high level aged care, as well as buy(or entry cost) and rent (or weekly cost).  There is a wider range of legal occupancy arrangements commonly used in the Australian retirement property sector than in the general residential real estate market, and aged care services are often provided under a complex formula based on means testing, so we’ve had to incorporate all this into the search functionality in a way which makes sense to consumers and keeps it simple. And we’ve enabled search filtering for a wide range of lifestyle choices including golf retirement properties etc. as described earlier as well as specific property features like lift access or no steps.  As people in this market are often searching for retirement property outside their local area, the photographs, plans and google maps location for each property are especially important features too.
 
The site is really unique in the capacity it offers for consumers to tailor their own search to meet their specific needs and personal preferences.

Aveo Peregian Springs Country Club
 
Do you think people still feel there's a stigma about retirement living?  Do you think the retirement lifestyle has changed over the past few decades?  And do you think that people are fully aware of the changing nature of
this sort of a lifestyle?
 
There’s a big difference between retirement living and aged care services, and I think people still confuse the two. One is about lifestyle and the other is about healthcare services. Retirement lifestyles in Australia have changed enormously in recent years, reflecting the demands and expectations of the baby boomer generation. People are now looking for luxury, a holiday lifestyle and quality of life when they finish work, or as they gradually exit from the workforce - the whole concept of “retirement” is more transitional and not so clear cut as it once was.
 
Now there’s an acceptance that it’s just a different stage of life, that people live much longer with better health so there’s plenty of time to enjoy life more without the responsibilities of working to pay off the mortgage and support young children.  Just as 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 40 - Australians aged over 50 now commonly work part time; undertake courses to learn or study; travel more regularly both nationally and internationally; take up sports and focus on keeping fit and healthy.  This generation has more accumulated wealth and disposable income than younger consumers, they are accustomed to the finer things in life and have no intention of downsizing their quality of life in their later years.  They certainly don’t consider themselves to be “old”!
 
In Australia, there is a higher level of home ownership than in many other comparable developed countries and in the past twenty years the residential property market has boomed, delivering high (tax free) capital gains. So selling the family home is a common way to help fund that lifestyle. It’s become very popular to downsize to a villa or apartment in early retirement and release cash as well as reduce the burden of home and garden maintenance. Many younger retirees look for a “lock up and go” property so they can travel regularly, or want space to park their boat or caravan.  And there are many new retirement property developments which cater specifically to this “over 50’s” market and their lifestyle focus.  As people get older, if their health declines they may have the option of buying in-home support services or moving to accommodation offering a higher level of aged care support.
 
Finding a home is always stressful, but it must be an even more stressful decision for older house hunters.  Do you think there are adequate accommodation provisions for Australia's ageing population or do you think the situation will become more competitive?
 
Yes it can be very stressful particularly for the older generation of retirees, who tend to want to stay in their long term family home for as long as possible.  For many it means they struggle with maintaining the home for years and then eventually they are forced to move after a fall, declining health or the death of a partner.  This scenario is very traumatic for all concerned and it is usually the adult children who step in and assist with these decisions.  By this stage high level aged care is more likely to be needed and it may be difficult to find a place.
 
In recent years, increasing demand for aged care services due to an ageing population has seen governments fund more in-home aged care, to enable people to “age in place” and receive more support services in their own home as they become more frail.  This is a more cost effective use of limited public resources and frees up facilities with high level aged care places for those most in need.  It also means younger retirees downsizing to lifestyle properties can access more support if needed without having to move house later on.
 
Retirement villages have been popular in Australia for many years – these are purpose built communities with common facilities, comprising mainly of independent living villas and apartments, but often offering higher levels of care on the same site.  However many of these are older building stock which do not meet the expectations of younger retirees, prompting the recent development of many new villages with larger more luxurious villas and resort style facilities such as swimming pools, bowling greens, gyms and restaurants.
 
There is a mix of not for profit and commercial developments and in the past few years it’s moved from being an extremely fragmented industry following considerable market consolidation, as larger groups buy up independently owned and managed villages.  With consolidation, marketing activity has become more professional and centralised as the larger groups recognise the importance of advertising online and gearing up to cater for the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation.
 
While there’s adequate housing stock available to cater for the younger retirees looking for lifestyle property, the real challenge lies in funding sufficient high level aged care as demand increases for limited places with an ageing demographic.

Runaway Bay Village
 
Do you think the Australian Government should be more pro-active in this sector?  Or do you think that this is the changing nature of the Australian housing market, and it will become less common for people to leave whole properties to their kids, having instead used the equity in them to help fund their retirement?
 
There’s a major policy debate going on in Australia at present about what provision is made by government to fund aged care services for an ageing population, and how much should be paid for by individuals as a private cost, and how this can be managed equitably. We’ve currently got a system of accommodation bonds in place, which is often based upon the value of the family home, and there are also complex asset tests around the aged pension and government benefit eligibility. There’s broad acknowledgment that demand for aged care services has outstripped the capacity of the existing arrangements to fund the services required but no clear consensus on the best way forward. With a minority government in power only with the support of independent and greens MPs after recent elections, there’s unlikely to be the political will to make the sort of hard decisions needed but which are likely to alienate a significant proportion of the electorate.
 
Australia has had compulsory superannuation in place for some years too, although at present these retirement savings are insufficient to privately fund the level of aged care services needed. Meanwhile more retirees are selling the family home to release capital to fund their retirement, or else using reverse mortgages or shared home equity products to subsidise their retirement lifestyle. So yes, it’s becoming much less common for people to leave whole properties to their kids, and when the baby boomer generation has spent their home equity they’ll still be dependent on government services to support their final years, so the national government needs to take a responsible long term view about how to manage these costs and build consensus around this issue.
 
Not all of your target market have a reputation for being web or techno. savvy, can you think of any technology - be it a website, an app. or a product - that has, or could make this process a lot easier for them?
 
Most people start to need reading glasses in their 40’s, so two things which immediately spring to mind are larger fonts to make things easy to read as eyesight declines, and voice technology to avoid reliance on visuals and keyboards.  Things like small keypads on mobile phones are a particular problem for an older demographic.  Also for frailer older people, emergency call pendants and similar technology has been really important in enabling longer term independence, so updating and integrating these benefits into other products and making them cheaper and more accessible would be fantastic. Even some of the electronic diary applications would be great to manage medications and appointments and probably could be tailored for this market.
 
And if you could invent some kind of site or technology or app. etc. for property, and there were no limitations on its powers, what would you think would be the ultimate property tool/ product?
 
Real estate websites combined with google earth have revolutionised the real estate industry and really empowered consumers.  Anything which enables the consumer to more accurately research and assess a property online is great – eg. if google maps could show a 360 degree view of the property including the surrounding landscape from any angle and bring up the most recent sales prices of neighbouring properties, and of course the ultimate online democracy is to cut out the middle man (or woman) by directly connecting buyers and sellers with full access to relevant information.  Also when buying and selling property the whole legal process of searches and transferring title is very cumbersome and expensive so there must be a technologically better way to do all this online!

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts with us Amanda.  There are certainly some appealing properties on SHO - the images I added I found searching for sites that are near the beach.  And if there was a way to make the transference of property titles cheaper and easier then you'd be helping out the whole market – so that's a fantastic suggestion...  Any one out there have any suggestions on how it could be achieved?

Nestoria Interview: Luke Metcalfe from The Full Wiki

ATTENTION: fact fans and mash up fans alike – this interview is for you. 
The person whose knowledge we've been tapping is Luke Mecalfe, founder of The Full Wiki, which is probably the web's largest reference mash up, and NationMaster, which is probably the world's largest hub of international statistics.

You've pretty much built a business around statistics, can you talk about how you got started down this road and what kind of model you originally planned for?

Yeah that's exactly right. Statistics is central to what we do. We've done this with NationMaster and our trending topics on The Full Wiki where we sort out all Wikipedia categories according to popularity.  (Warning: this is highly addictive.)

I've always felt there's a huge information gap on the web. On the one hand, a powerful, data rich web which is largely inaccessible to ordinary people (downloadable spreadsheets, XML dumps, APIs). On the other hand you have individual stats, plucked out by experts and special interests, that find their way into news and advertising. Our goal is to empower ordinary people with information that's otherwise outside their reach; to allow them to discover information for themselves.

The Full Wiki map of all the reported UFO spottings mentioned on Wikipedia.

Do you have a background in managing statistics or are you just a fan of facts and figures?

I studied Computer Science and Law. But right from when I started as a webmaster 14 years ago, my big fascination was the data. For me, it harks back to when I was 5 and got my first computer. The most enjoyable thing was that something you coded could give back a result that you couldn't foresee from the code. That's the closest thing to magic, at least for a computer geek like me.

What are some of the most unusual statistics you've combined, or seen users combine?

Oh good question, I have to get back into a NationMaster frame of mind after working so hard on The Full Wiki. The first thing that pops to mind is when we released a correlations feature on NationMaster, everyone had their eyes on the murder rate. The top correlates ended up being newspaper circulation and orange juice consumption.   Ingredients for breakfast chat then?

This interviewer opted for percentage of income tax paid per person vs. amount of spirts drank per person

What's your opinion on current moves to try and open up access to government data?  

I think it's excellent. Incompetent governments can manage spin but it's not so easy to manage the fine detail.
Stats are still heavily curated before they reach ordinary people though. There's a large role to come for tools to aid in the interpretation of that data.

And are you waiting with bated breath for new data to be released so that you can include it?

To be honest, there's so much to do with what's already out there, I am spared the anxiety of waiting on institutions. That would feel too much like having clients for me.   What really fascinates me is the potential of community generated content. Wikipedia is a fantastic encyclopedia but the reality is most articles don't get read from beginning to end. So on The Full Wiki we show the data by other dimensions; timelines, maps, top charts. It brings the info to life.
 
The Full Wiki has been mentioned on this blog before, how did you come up with the idea for this particular way of looking at information?  And are there any other ways you can think of to view wikipedia?

Yeah, a huge proportion of the population is visual . Every publisher knows you get more readership if you include pictures.
Our brains weren't designed to convert squiggly lines into abstract concepts. So now the web is mainstream, it's moving to more human forms of information ingestion. We imagine images (hence the maps) and follow narratives (hence the timelines). We decide which things are important right now and which not  (hence the trending topics). We use conversations to learn (hence the question and answer format of our quizzes). All of these features are making use of plethora of wiki content.

How do you manage all the information you have, and how do you make sure it remains up to date?

We specialise in doing large scale data cheaply. We use the Google approach of having large numbers of cheap redundant servers. It's a real tightrope ensuring on the one side that you can make use of the largest dataset possible while still creating features iteratively and staying fairly up to date. It requires equal doses of pragmatism and discipline.

Do you have any plans to branch out your business or are you sticking with providing easy access to statistics?  (There's a comedy angle to Ask The Brain, do you have any more plans for more comic offerings for example?)

Anything to do with making information accessible interests me. And yes, stats, analytics, data mining - these are always involved in every project. But not necessarily on the front end. There's an elegance to being able to hide all that from the user as I did with Ask The Brain, Fact Bites and The Full Wiki.
Yeah I'd love to do more comedy. You can make points and tickle parts of people's brains in a way you can't with straight reference. But I think the mission to enlighten would always be there. I need the audience to be able to take something away with them when they stand up from the chair, or increasingly, when they roll off the couch.
Web analytics is much easier than when I did AskTheBrain. I enjoy having a conversation with my audience via the statistics that they generate for me. I respond regularly with site updates.

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  

I'd love to see some software that combines the scalability of relational databases and algorithm customisation with the visualisation of RapidMiner and Labview. A Labview for data freaks.  

If there's anything else you'd like to talk about?

I'm on a soapbox here a bit I know but I wanted to say: The news agonises over slight changes to stats: unemployment figures, crime rates, interest rates. But there are fundamental changes to our society that the stats really make concrete. Like adoption rates and pet ownership.  The web is  the empowering tool to allow people to look up these long term trends when they want. It shouldn't be just about what's happening right now, because that can deprive you of context. We're all about providing the context.

You're the interviewee, so we want you on a soapbox!  Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts with us.  Plenty there to distract us from gainful employment for the next hour or so...

Interview with Thomas Turnbull from Green Map

One of the really nice things about open source mapping is that it's being used to make the world a better place - OSM helped out recover Haiti from under the rubble of its earthquake and non profit sites like Green Map allow communities to map their local area in a way that's useful to them.  In the interest of finding out more about one of our favourite feel good topics, open source maps, Nestoria Australia spoke to Thomas Turnbull from Green Map.

Thomas is an open source web developer living in Brooklyn, New York. A geographer by training, he worked in Scotland for a few years teaching people about composting before moving to New York to work for Green Map. Through Green Map he became passionate about open source technology and grass-roots mapmaking. He now works for Zagat, a restaurant review website, and continues to serve on the board of Green Map.

Thanks for talking to us Thomas, can you just give those who've not come across it yet a brief update on the Green Map project?

Green Map is a non-profit founded in 1995 to work with groups all over the world to map green living in their community. Green Map has worked with over 700 communities in 55 countries to map a wide range of points of interests, such as bike routes, recycling points, parks and green businesses. Mapmaking was traditionally a specialized skill. Green Map works to make it a participatory process that anyone can do.  Mapmaking is a really powerful way for people to understand their community and a surprisingly useful way to make improvements.

Can you talk about the work you do, specifically for Green Map?

While I was working at Green Map I was leading the development of their online mapping platform. Drupal has thousands of add-on modules to add more features to the website, such as mapping. On top of these modules I then did a lot of custom development to get the site working exactly as we needed so that people could easily map their neighborhood.

I now work elsewhere, but am still on the board of directors, where I mainly advise on technology as they build out a mobile website and iphone app.

At Nestoria we're big fans of everything open source, can you talk about your own interactions with the open source community?

My first real interaction with open source was in 2007 when I moved to New York to work for Green Map. They needed to build a website where all the different communities making maps could log in to access the mapmaking tools, share ideas and publicize their maps. They decided to use Drupal for this. Drupal is an open source content management system, a tool to build interactive community-driven websites. As a freelancer I had been coding my own content management systems, but suddenly I was introduced to this tool built by thousands of people all more talented than I. As I started to work with Drupal I discovered that Drupal was more than just a piece of free technology, it was also a huge community of people who were passionate about the code that they were writing, and who wanted more people to use it. In the years since then I have got deeply involved in this community, attending the monthly meetups, helping to organize local Drupal camps that are attended by over 300 people, and recently going to Copenhagen to present at DrupalCon. Drupal's new slogan really captures what it's about: "come for the code; stay for the community".

Do you know of any examples where other people have done cool things with what you've contributed to the open source community?

There are loads of fantastic Green Maps that have been made by different groups around the world using the mapping platform that I built for Green Map. Some of my favorites are Baltimore and Cape Town.

Currently there's only one I know of in Australia, in Rosehill NSW.

It's also amazing to know that I wrote a few lines of code that are being used for the White House website.

What are some of the diverse range of maps that you've made and that are appearing on the Open Green Map interface?

 Some of the Green Maps cover a wide range of points of interest, such as the Baltimore map. Others choose to focus on something very specific. There's one map of Clackmannanshire, the smallest county in Scotland, which shows all the voluntary organizations there. It blew me away to see how much was happening in such a small area.

Another of my favorites, given my background in composting and my life in New York, is the NYC Compost Map.

Do you have a wish list of things you'd like Green Map to have/ do that there just hasn't been the time or technology for yet?

The biggest limiter for Green Map has been funding. The last two years have been very tough for non profits. We have loads of ideas of new tools that we would like to build, but it is tough just to cover day to day expenses, let alone to start new projects.

What do you think about the current trend for pinning information to maps - do you think this is the 'way forward'? Especially online?

The rise of smart phones over the last few years has made location really important. If I'm looking for a place to eat this evening, I don't care if it's had 200 five star reviews if it's on the other side of town. If I'm looking for a place to recycle batteries I'm willing to go a little out of my way, but not if I can't reach it by public transport. The projects that interest me most at the moment are those
like Yelp and Foursquare that are able to combine location with time-sensitive information and user interaction.

We love finding unusual a clever mapping tools and mashups online - do you have any you can recommend?

One mapping mashup that I saw recently was a map that uses data from the Census Transportation Planning Package from 2000 in the US. It shows commuting patterns by zipcode overlaid on a Google Map.

Trulia is a US-based real estate search website. They're doing some amazing stuff with mapping. They have so much data and use it really well - for example in letting you search for property in particular neighborhoods or zipcodes. Their map that shows property price movement overlaid on a map is impressive.

Cloudmade's style editor is also amazing. It lets you customize the colors of OpenStreetMap-based maps through a really simple user interface.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add that I haven't asked you about?

There's a great tutorial on mapping with Drupal at

For people who want to learn more about Drupal in general: find your nearest meetup, or go to http://drupal.org to learn how to set it up.

Thanks for sharing with us Thomas.

Find out more about Thomas on his website or by following him on twitter.

 

Nestoria Interview – Michael Rochford on the National Public Toilet Map site

One of the websites mentioned by a lot of our interviewees when asked for examples of cool map based mashups is the National Public Toilet Map. People like it for a lot of reasons, but a lot of the enthusiasm for it is because it works really well, and provides a useful service, as well as being a whimsically entertaining idea. So the logical next step was to ask Michael Rochford of Human Solutions, which is the company who built the site, to talk about it with us in more detail. It's taken a while for our interview to get OKed via the right channels, who want to keep the tone of their publicity just right, but all possible toilet humour aside, this is a really innovative example of mapping technology working for people in the community. And everyone I've mentioned it to has made a note of it because no one likes to get caught out.

How did the National Public Toilet Map come about? And was it a difficult project to get up and running?

The idea for the Toilet Map was put forward to the Department of Health and Ageing in the year 2000. The first version of the site used a typical drill-down mapping interface which most users found awkward, particularly on slow connections.

Human Solutions won a tender in 2004 to improve the user experience and the breadth and quality of the content. The revamped site provided multiple pathways to discover information, trip planning and a smoother user experience, as well as a Content Management System for providers to update their data.

Like any large scale information project, maintaining the enthusiasm of data providers is the greatest challenge.

How did you originally source the toilet location data? Was there any community involvement in the process?

The toilet data is collected from both government and private organisations, with about 1,200 providers contributing information on over 15,000 toilets. Providers can update their information through a simple Content Management System or we can import larger data sets.

The community was not directly involved in collecting toilet data, although we rely heavily on them for feedback on the information we provide and the quality of the facilities they use. They also drive much of the innovation on the site.

And what about all the additional data - opening times etc. - how was that sourced and how many search field options do people have?

The additional data is sourced from the providers, and provides users with 18 different options to narrow their search or inform their results.

Was the trip planner function part of the original build or has it been added more recently?

The trip planner was added in 2004 when Human Solutions took over the Toilet Map contract and has been enhanced over time. It utilises base maps and routing services from Sensis.

What about the GPS compatibility, was that an original intended feature?

GPS compatibility was added as part of a minor update in 2006 in response to user needs. We have extended the supported formats and provided GPS information across all parts of the site since then.

How does the updating process work at the moment and how regularly is the site updated?

All content is checked annually, with most providers receiving an email asking them to verify their data. Some of the data is verified from other online sources and from feedback from users of the site.

How do you think people are using the site?

For many users, information on the Toilet Map is discovered via search engines such as Google. We have indexed every page on the site to facilitate this form of discovery.

For those who go to toiletmap.gov.au, most use Find to locate toilets near an address or locality or use the trip planner to organise a journey. Browsing maps is a less popular option, although users can switch to a map view at any time.

Others use the iPhone App or the mobile site to locate nearby facilities.

Do you get a lot of people signing up and creating personal lists of their local areas or do you find that people are more frequently using it to plan longer trips?

Both the trip planner and My Toilets are popular. Toilet lists are popular with community and tourist organisations, as well as specialist groups like bushwalkers and bodies like fire services. Users can also save a map of a locality with toilet information attached.

The trip planner has received great feedback in allowing people to travel without the uncertainty of where suitable facilities might be located.

Do you find there's much call for the mobile applications?

The mobile applications have been surprisingly popular, with many users  taking advantage of the immediate response to their needs.

I know that a cross section of the community are affected by this type of problem, but I was wondering how you'd got the usability right, because I imagine some of your core users might not be too internet savvy.

On the contrary, many of our most important users rely very heavily on the Internet for both information and entertainment and have found the Toilet Map a useful addition to their planning and information gathering.

Having said that, accessibility and good design are always important to the user experience, and benefit all users of a site as well those new to the Internet.

What kind of things have you done to try and make people aware of the map's existence?

The Department of Health and Ageing has mounted a number of publicity campaigns, including bookmarks distributed through the Australian library network and flyers in high circulation magazines. Flyers are also available from doctors’ surgeries and other health services.

Continence Awareness Week, usually in early August, also provides a good opportunity to promote the toilet Map.

The site is often co-promoted with bladderbowel.gov.au, a site that provides information on bladder and bowel health for people with bladder control and bowel problems, their family and friends, carers, health professionals, service providers and researchers.

As always, word-of-mouth from happy users is the best form of promotion.

Are there any plans to add to the service? An Augmented Reality addition to mobile applications for example?

The Toilet Map is always evolving in response to users’ needs and changing technology. Augmented reality is a possibility, but we can often get better value by leveraging features that come with our mapping services.

The Department recently released the Toilet Map data for public use, providing opportunities for new and innovative application of this information.

The iPad and other slates also offer opportunities to innovate the delivery of spatial information.

Crowd-sourcing toilet information and enhanced mapping services are being considered for our next major release.

Is there anything else you'd like an opportunity to mention?

The Toliet Map is a response by Government to a segment of teh community with specific information needs.  However it benefits travellers parents and others by providing useful, up-to-date information that enhances their travel experiences. 

 

Michael Rochford started designing user interfaces in the mid 1980’s whilst an undergraduate at the University of Tasmania. In 1987 he established Human Solutions as a specialist in the design, presentation and management of information. Pre-Internet the business concentrated on interfaces to dynamic information gathered from a variety of sources, working with banks, telecommunications companies and government.

In the mid 1990’s the nascent public Internet provided Human Solutions with an opportunity to deliver really up-to-date information. However the transition from physical media to online authoring and delivery took a few years.

The last decade has seen the internet dominate the discovand delivery of information, as well as a greater need for spatial data, which is reflected in the evolution of the Toilet Map and Human Solutions.