OpenStreetMap is a global project whose aspirations to ‘map the planet’ – because maps & data created by government agencies are not always free to use - were dismissed as ‘impossible’ when OSM started just over a decade ago.

Built by a community of GIS professionals, humanitarians, community activists and others who contribute and maintain data about roads, cafés, railway stations, phone boxes, defibrilators and more, OpenStreetMap makes maps that are open and free to use for any purpose.

In this conversation, Brian describes how developers can use OSM to integrate mapping services into their applications without incurring licensing fees, and why the public sector is a bit late to this party. He explains why OSM can often provide a much more up-to-date picture of dynamic cityscapes than ‘official’ maps that must undergo lengthy QA processes, and outlines how teams of OSM volunteers routinely support relief agencies by swiftly recreating maps that natural disasters have made useless.

The conversation also covers how to be an OSM volunteer, and what we’ll be discussing in future programmes, including ownership and licensing of map data, the economic value of opening up this data, and projects OSM is involved in around journey planning and routing and the creation of Welsh language maps.

Councils unhappy at paying agency rates, care workers who feel underpaid and undervalued, and care recipients suffering the consequences, could all benefit from a new co-design project currently being put together by the public sector crowdfunding platform CC2i.

CC2i is working with SME Labour xchange to develop a concept, already proven in the hospitality and logistics sectors, for local authorities hiring social care workers. Essentially, the digital platform enables identification, training and matching of candidates who are unemployed or underemployed but interested in working full or part time as a carer.

If successful, ‘Carers xchange’ could increase significantly the capacity of a notoriously hard-pressed sector. The initial business case, which will be further developed during the discovery project, suggests a saving to local authorities of £5 per care visit.

Last year, CC2i worked with 50 local authorities to co-fund and co-design digitally enabled projects, including projects in social care, alongside a range of SMEs.

Care xchange requires three councils to invest £10,000 each, plus time inputs for investigation and collaboration over a six month period.

Further information can be found on the CC2i website.

Observers surprised that some of the projects selected for funding under the programme – eg managing missed bins, providing taxi licensing services or dealing with FoI requests - are not at the forefront of innovation are missing a key point.

The Fund is not about blue sky innovation, but rather about ‘fixing the plumbing’ of everyday services by making it easy for all councils to replicate a good digital solution that has been proven elsewhere.

Take missed bins. Many councils have worked out good solutions for the particular context, collection practice and supplier set up that operates in their patch. But such solutions cannot easily be replicated elsewhere because typically they won’t integrate easily with back office systems and processes operated by other authorities and the technologies used by their contractors. 

Local Digital Funding is for creating, testing and documenting solutions in such a way as they can be easily plugged in anywhere, rather than being reinvented endlessly to accommodate 300+ different local set ups.

Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled Tuesday 18 December 2018.

The move will overhaul England’s waste system, putting a legal onus on those responsible for producing damaging waste to take greater responsibility and foot the bill.

The announcement forms part of the government’s ambitious new Resources and Waste Strategy, the first comprehensive update in more than a decade. It will eliminate avoidable plastic waste and help leave the environment in a better state than we found it for future generations.

Dr David Greenfield of SOENECS and Joe Tibbetts of CLGdotTV unpick the climate change threat and consider some possible solutions. All against the background of the 2018 Climate Change Summit in Katowice, Poland and Antonio Guterres the UN secretary-general in his address to the conference delegates beseeching the 190 countries attending to speed up the pace of negotiations on climate change and to be willing to make compromises. "To waste this opportunity would (waste) our last best chance to stop runaway climate change," Mr Guterres said. "It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal."

When we talk about Smart Places more often that not we mean cities or large towns. But remote communities cannot remain viable unless they can encourage people to stay and even, difficult to imagine, people to move there. Sustainable communities need sustainable businesses not only to provide employment and provoke inward investment but also to encourage that sense of community that we now recognise as being essential. Today none of this is possible without broadband, IoT and the whole connectivity thing.

Rapier Systems are based in Dalgety just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh and work with councils like Angus and cities such as Perth and Dundee  but it was their work on the west coast at Drimin, looking across the Sound of Mull, that made us call them in to tell us what they were up to.

Richard Watson MD at Rapier will be at An Audience With CLGdotTV No 4 - This Smart Life on 6th february (look here) If you want to talk to Richard there may well still be a few seats left in the audience, call Ben Webber on 07718 929374 to check availability. Be warned, this may look like an ordinary event but each session becomes a CLGdotTV programme and you should arrive prepared to make a contribution from the floor. In This Smart Life your words spread out around the world and our programmes are watched by thousands of people. 

Follow us on Twitter @CLGdotTV. Follow our front page on connectedlocalgovernment.tv 

As Head of Commissioning, Vulnerable Adults, for Essex County Council Rebecca Jarvis recognises that more needs to be done to prepare patients and their families for leaving hospital. Poor support can lead to deterioration in health and wellbeing and at worst, a return to hospital.

Amy Ricketts, a senior designer at FutureGov is leading a project with the Council to design the sort of support that might improve outcomes, including the holy grail of keeping people out of hospital.

This conversation takes a detailed look at the early stages of the project, including discovery work with patients and their families in hospital as well as with a range of project partners including an Essex hospital, the local CCG, and voluntary and community services.

It describes the way that patients and families are typically passive agents when it comes to discharge, and how the interactive digital tool now being tested could allow them to take more control leading to better, more sustainable outcomes. The tool works by suggesting different ways individuals can manage specific needs post-hospital and connecting them with the appropriate sources of support.

Putting in the infrastructure for connectivity is today’s equivalent of the Victorians putting in sewers – you have to make the infrastructure investment to reap the rewards - says Roy Grant, who is Head of Super Connected Cities & Digital Innovation, City of York.

STEP, the City’s Department for Transport funded smart transport programme, is the first city-wide development built on the fibre network. As York has ‘run out of tarmac’, the historic city needs tech solutions to solve problems of congestion and poor air quality

These will require engaging residents, visitors and businesses in projects that will encourage behaviour change, impacting when people travel and how they choose to do it.

Over the coming months, CLGdotTV will be broadcasting a number of programmes about different aspects of York’s smart city programme.

On 6 February Roy Grant will chair Health & Well Being - The Caring Home a panel programme in ‘Audience with GLGdotTV No4 This Smart Life' talking about social care developments enabled by the fibre network. One of these is fitting IOT sensors to dwellings, bringing many potential improvements for residents, while also making it less expensive for local authorities, social landlords, and health and social care organisations to deliver their services.

‘St Albans Unlocked’ is blazing a trail with huge potential benefits for the health and wellbeing of local communities.

Linda Chandler and Amanda Derrick are working with an app called Soundscape, developed by Microsoft to help people with visual impairments find their way from A to B.

Soundscape (an app which is free to download) describes for users the location and key facts about the road crossings, buildings and other landmarks around them as they move about. But it needs these to be marked accurately on Open Street Map, on which the app is built.

Volunteers in St Albans are adding data to OSM to ‘unlock’ the locality for Soundscape users. These need not only be people with visual impairments. The app could support anyone who finds getting around challenging (eg those with mild dementia), as well as being enjoyed by local residents and tourists alike.

For local authorities, a solution to the problem of maintaining information about local assets, that engages communities and supports vulnerable locals, has got to be worth exploring further.

In our first podcast in this series, Dylan described the benefits of a city having an approach to ‘smart’ that is genuinely shared between the council and other public services, particularly health.

In this and each of five following podcasts we will discuss one of six aspects the city has identified as being key to building a smarter Leeds, which you can read more about on Data Mill North's Smart Leeds page.

Three of these aspects, connectivity, digital skills and data, are cross cutting. Three others focus on vital areas of public service delivery: health & wellbeing, housing and travel & transport.

In this podcast, we focus on connectivity.