Visualising Data

Apologies for the silence in the last couple of weeks due to jury service and catching up with the Browne Review and CSR announcements.

Over the last couple of years the push for release of public data has borne fruit and the Greater London Authority held a really interesting seminar on 27 October to show how data can be made visually informative and help identify social, economic and policy challenges.

There were presentations on the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore, GLA's London Datastore and UCL's research at CASA including SurveyMapper, It's a memory thing and MapTube. There was also a demonstration of two new Google products under development - Public Data Explorer, with a limited number of data tables to look at for the moment, and Fusion Tables which allows upload and customisable sharing of datasets.

An advantage of having public datastores is that web and digital media developers can help provide collective effort to analyse and display data, such as this interactive visualisation on carbon emissions in London from DECC local authority statistics.

JISC Grant Funding 14/10: JISC Greening ICT Programme

JISC Greening ICT Programme has funding of up to £1,050,000 available within three strands:

Strand I - Rapid Innovation in Green ICT

Strand II - Estates Led Sustainable ICT Projects

Strand III - Exemplars of ICT Enabled Transition to Environmentally Sustainable Campus

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12:00 noon UK time on Wednesday 17 November 2010. Projects starting from February 2011 for up to 18 months. All projects must be completed by 31 July 2012.

There will be an online briefing on Wednesday 13 October 2010 between 10.00 and 12.00 noon. More details at JISC Grant Funding 14/10: JISC Greening ICT Programme : JISC.

JISC Grant Funding 11/10: eContent Programme

New JISC call for developing eContent - more information at JISC Grant Funding 11/10: eContent Programme : JISC.

An information event will be held in London on 28 October. Deadline for proposals is 10 December.

Funding for retrofitting public sector buildings

the RE:FIT scheme from the London Development Agency is described as “cost neutral” programme to retrofit public sector buildings for energy savings measures. The University of London and Newham University Hospital NHS Trust have recently signed contracts under this programme.

More details at:

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/Detail.aspx?ReleaseID=415570&NewsAreaID=2

http://www.lda.gov.uk/projects/refit/

Funding call to test the Strategic ICT Toolkit

JISC have issued a call for higher education institutions to test the Strategic ICT Toolkit. Deadline for applications is 28 October 2010 for projects to start in January 2011.

More information at
Grant Funding 9/10: Call for expressions of interest to field test the Strategic ICT Toolkit.

JISC future grant funding

Future calls by JISC in Greening ICT will cover capacity building, rapid innovation and exemplars for sustainable campuses. See the link for Roadmap of future grant funding.

Green IT news

A couple of articles which I found recently and may be of interest to anyone perusing this blog (not many!):

Greg Taylor has started a blog on server virtualisation http://bit.ly/bpEkDJ at the Chartered Institute for IT (formerly the British Computer Society).

Destinations Green IT at http://www.destinationgreenit.com/ contains news on green IT issues with sections for the public sector, servers, printers etc. along with vendor and manufacturer content. The pages aren't updated very frequently so it may be worthwhile subscribing to the RSS feed.