Vanessa Lawrence, CB, Director General and Chief Executive, Ordnance Survey delivers the keynote address.

I can’t actually believe it’s your 10th birthday. What I can tell you – it’s been 10 years of total professionalism from this organization. And I can really say that. It’s something that I’ve been very proud that we’ve been associated with and I’ve seen it develop – it had wonderful staff involved with it, and I was very excited when about 3 or 4 months ago Nick said “They’d like you to come and be a keynote speaker at their 10th birthday” and I said, “That’s a must”. So despite lots of other things going on, I’m delighted to be here. I’d very much like to really congratulate everyone that’s been involved. Obviously I know that I wasn’t able to get to what I heard was an excellent leaving party for David Medyckyj-Scott. But we did send him a little something to remember us by, I hope. What I can say is that I’ve always been pleased when I’ve heard such fantastic statistics about the use of the data in so many different departments, by so many different people .What EDINA has managed to do, more than sometimes the industry really, is get to such a wide audience and to make sure that the data is able to be used in their research work in so many disparate areas. And I’ve met vets and agriculturalists and archaeologists and whatever, who have talked to me about how essential our data has been to their project. And so very much congratulations that its got much wider than just geography, geology, environmental science – which might have been where it might have just resided if we hadn’t had your enthusiasm to take it into other places. I understand and you may have…I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier I had hoped to be here earlier…but, I know you may have already had tons of statistics on usage and things like that – but my understanding is you’ve now got 106 higher education institutions using it, 44 further education which I know came later but I’m delighted to see that number growing. There are 46,370 active users – 46,000 active users! That’s really brilliant. And since January 2000 you’ve had 157,963 users. And what I’ve also been totally impressed by are, to my knowledge, there was only ever one breach of security, and what was amazing was the instant reaction that was taken by Edinburgh – by the University in question, who within about 9 hours of it being discovered, before Ordnance Survey knew about it, the Vice Chancellor had called me and I did know the Vice Chancellor. And it was just dealt with so professionally, so thank you – even in times of adversity it’s been a great working relationship.

Now for a bit of a surprise. Because…let’s go back to 1996 – and I think it’s about 1996 – I scrabbled around at 5 o’clock this morning to try and find out if it was 1996. I’ve just been handed a whole lot of papers – some of you will have been in a similar situation when you’re family home is sadly being broken up and various members of the family say- ‘That pile is yours dear’, and they end up in your house, and you know that some time you’ve got to spend several Sundays going through them. Well this morning I just destroyed the whole pile that’s been sitting on my landing because in there I know there’s a file that has my name on it, because in what I believe was about 1996, in a completely different hat as AGI and also having some commercial knowledge, I was bought in by what I believe was probably the ESRC, because I’d been on their research resources board, to work with a young lecturer who had just come up from Plymouth University who was now at Leicester called David McGuire. Some will remember became the technical director ESRI worldwide, and is now the deputy Vice Chancellor at Birmingham City University. And basically we were asked to go along and talk to this rather, and I’ll say it, rather aggressive body called Ordnance Survey to try and get the best deal for education, for higher education. So, what goes around comes around – I started off by actually helping to meet with Ordnance Survey, to try and make this deal work. That was when I was in the private sector. So I was delighted that – without my involvement much later on- the deal came to fruition. But a lot of people were involved – Daivd Unwin and other people in those early days – so that’s great.

And of course now it’s developed – and it’s now very professional, and we have a wonderful relationship with JISC, and obviously Landmark and BGS and SeaZone have also joined. So from our perspective it’s very successful. It’s very clearly a way that we’re able to work with the academic community, and you probably know that we’re very keen on making sure education is supported whether it’s school education or university education. And from what we see, it meets the user requirements very well. What we’ve always said is that it’s a very professional service, and in fact only in November I was talking to government about, you know, ‘You must talk to EDINA about this’. And that was because they’re talking about portals and spending millions on portals and surveying people. And I sort of said ‘hold on, government, it’s up to you’, because you know, it’s one of those things – but I said ‘for goodness sake go and talk to people who really are experts at this, not try and recreate it yourself, I think’ Well that’s my view anyway.

Your service and technical achievements are very high. I was terribly impressed I go on your website today and it tells me there’s going to be a 2 hour possible disruption – it doesn’t even say there is a disruption – it says, you know, in a date next week. And I just thought, how professional that’s great. And we very much value that relationship with you. Obviously what’s also good is it hasn’t stayed still. I hope we’ve been able to contribute a little bit – I know you’ve done a huge amount of development, we’ve worked with you for new products and there are plans to include more products, which is great. Following what we’re seeing is a growth in usage of location information, and what we’re seeing is the growth in the numbers is testament to that hard work you’ve put in.

I was really excited that we’ve been able to work with you on Digimap for Schools. Basically that was again another one of…I can remember being in a meeting and saying ‘for goodness sake let’s talk to EDINA about this’. And I’m delighted that this is really now virtually there. And really from my point of view, it’s going to give schools exciting ways to really engage now. And it’s very, very interesting, because last week when it was showcased – and I’ll show you where in a moment – the teachers were really engaged that they were able to get down to MasterMap level and start to talk to students about the real local area that they’re in. And what we’re going to see I think is people getting very excited –certainly I do a huge amount of work with children, and they’re always very excited if you can bring it down to what they understand. Thankfully, no longer is school geography like it was in my day where I was brought up in a particular situation where we didn’t get to go very far in the UK at all. So I did not understand why things happened in Wales that were different from what happened in my local area, and I can remember actually telling my next door neighbour that I didn’t care either – and so, you know, I was only about 8!, but you know, I used to rabbit on about things and that wouldn’t happen now – you’d talk about your own local area and what affects you, which would just bring it much more to life. And I am delighted that it really means that you’ll be supporting everything from primary schools right through to the end of their educative career really. So, I think it’s going to be great.

I was very excited by the huge response we had at the BET show – this is a picture that’s been sent to me in the last day. The BET show concluded on Saturday, it’s the biggest – the British Education Technology show. It’s got, you know, sort of every teacher that’s involved in IT tries to get there if they’re not impeded by the snow, and it was absolutely, total excitement. So that’s good. Congratulations and let’s, you know, this was a bit of a soft launch last week, and I know in the next couple of months things will no doubt kind of come to fruition.

So, besides it’s your birthday, things continue to change elsewhere. And what we’re seeing is that change always happens everywhere. And people don’t always be able to envisage what’s going to happen – I don’t think 10 years ago you could envisage that 10 years on you’d be serving that number of people and there’d be such high adoption. What we also see though is that around Ordnance Survey is still a real love for what we do. And lots of people still talk about it, and I was in a rather lovely position at Christmas to be able to send the staff a poem that’s just been written about Ordnance Survey that was read out on Radio 4 one Saturday morning in November. And it’s just a fabulous poem about how much this person loved Ordnance Survey, and tonight we’re very privileged to hear from the author of Map Addict who is somebody that I am quite excited to meet because basically he obviously is a complete addict of mapping. Is Mike in the audience at the moment? Ah!

Mike: Hi

Vanessa Lawrence: Hi nice to see you. I’ll catch up with you later – I’ve even got my book with me. Ok *laughs*. Ok – so, what we’re seeing is people very much have a love and an underlying love for Ordnance Survey. And as many of you know Ordnance Survey underpins so much for peoples’ daily lives. Whether it be the provision by the utilities of the service to your home, whether it be the emergency services or whether it be the provision of your home delivery service – much of that is underpinned by Ordnance Survey and what we see is a huge growing usage in every sector of business. Whether it be people adding value to the data to make products where our data is embedded and so you suddenly see it like on a TomTom for instance, you know for in-car navigation, or when you’re perhaps trying to get an insurance quote off the web, or whether it’s working out because of the traffic time and the time you want your delivery whether it’s going to be cheaper for you to have your online shopping delivered between 10 and midnight. People are using Ordnance Survey information in many different ways.

And of course then there are constant changes. And you will have seen that at the moment there is a lot of discussion about Ordnance Survey. And I tend to summarize it that there are 3 things going on: for those that – I should think the majority of this audience does know what has been announced – but in case you don’t, let me give you a little bit of a run through on it. Basically, on the 17th of November it was announced on twitter that that afternoon the Prime Minister would be making an announcement that some of Ordnance Survey’s data would in future be completely free, and free for commercial re-use. This was something that obviously certain sections of the population have been campaigning for and by making this announcement obviously it’s very clearly given a direction of what the Prime Minister very much wanted. Later there was a press conference supporting him was Tim Berners- Lee, who you probably know, knows Ordnance Survey very, very well, and is a very firm supporter of Ordnance Survey and has been to Ordnance Survey many times, and I’m privileged to know him very well. And Professor Nigel Shadbolt who I also know very well from the University of Southampton. And they are leading on the making public data public project which their website today actually went into beta live, and basically this is about releasing over 2,000 data sets from government that are by-products of government policy – perhaps it’s rubbish recycling or it might be about – as has been well mentioned in the press – cycle accidents and things like that. And basically what Tim and Nigel saw – which absolutely I could totally understand – was that they needed good quality locality data. And they wrote to the Prime Minister, and clearly said basically we want it from Ordnance Survey. And so the Prime Minister made the announcement and that happened on the 17th of November. What was essentially announced is that there would be more data available and that there would be data available relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information. It did say that government would consult on that information and see whether that’s what the public wanted. And it did also say that it would harness world class expertise from Ordnance Survey. Also, it emphasised that we will continue to maintain those databases. It very clearly saw that by releasing this information your drive improvements across the accountability of the public sector and good examples being used is – you’re an individual, you have friends in a neighbouring area, they seem to have a better recycling system than you have in your area and you’ll be able to compare recycling rates versus your locality and things like that. And then you’ll be able to write to your local MP or your councillor and basically this is that it will strengthen democracy and the engagement of the citizen in participating in democracy.

So, what we saw is a lot of people very much backing this – you had the chief secretary to the treasury, you had Stephen Timms who is the Minister for Digital Britain, you had John Denham who is the Secretary of State for Local Government and all coming out with very public statements that day about this data being free. What then happened was on the 23rd of December slightly later than I had hoped for sure – the consultation document came out, this is freely available on the web, I’ve got 3 copies here for anyone who would like one – and this consultation document was written by consultants for the government. And it asks people some really good questions, and it’s really, really important that whoever you are that you respond to it. And the only key message I have is please respond as quickly as you can – government policy tends to be developed over a period of time, and the clock hasn’t stopped ticking. So it’s really important that people don’t think ‘Ah, the deadline’s the 17th of March’. And I know I am a complete, you know, I would always be guilty of this, I would get mine in on the 17th of March. But if you really want to be heard – of course you’ll be heard on the 17th of March, but you’ll be heard even louder the quicker you get it in is what I keep hearing. So it’s really important that people can respond to this, and if you…I’ve only brought up 3 copies because I didn’t think the plane needed to be weighed down by them…but if you want more copies you only need to give me a business card and they will be in the post to you tomorrow, ok? These are just made at Ordnance Survey – I suspect somewhere in the HMSO world there would be an official bound copy, but, you know, certainly no one’s send me one yet.

So, what does it say? Well it basically says that data is being made available for free and we want to discuss the different business models with the public that Ordnance Survey could operate under. And it all comes down to how does the public want Ordnance Survey to be funded going forward, and I suppose from the staff and the unions, they are very clear: all we want is a very sustainable Ordnance Survey. Because what we do know is irrespective of the business model, there are necessary users of our data that absolutely - there are times when I receive letters to show that they actually save lives – so the sustainability of Ordnance Survey is probably the only thing that Ordnance Survey has a view on, and to ensure that whatever model is chosen, that the model would be able to be run not just this year, but next year, and in 5 years time. Obviously the world does continue to change, but we have been around since 1791 and we do not want to be in a situation where there’s underinvestment in Ordnance Survey data, which would damage the quality of the data and damage what the public gets to use, whether it be an emergency service being deployed or whether something that’s going to be pretty important to us all – the successful operation of the 2012 Olympics – which at the moment, vested in my job title via the national geospatial intelligence agency in the IOC, is the responsibility for the preparations of the geospatial data for the Olympics. So it’s really important that good quality data is there and sustainable.

So basically this has 3 diagrams in it and then there’s a lot of explanation about those diagrams and how could they operate. Diagram one is the current business strategy that was effectively announced by the Minister in May 2009, and if you go onto YouTube you can see it. And that one clearly basically is a model where really it’s of a customer pays model. And really the idea of free data and free commercial reuse is not included in that model. The way people get data free would be through the OS open space application which I’ll talk about a bit later on. Then in option 2, basically this is where large scale and small scale data is for free – there would be a…it’s called data co but don’t read anything into the co bit, data organisation which would manufacture the data and then basically people would be able to get hold of that data at that stage, or it could be taken through to the product company, which it’s quite possible would then be able to operate commercially but it’s not completely defined as to whether it can – but it would mean that everyone has the data for free, including product co, including everyone else in any country who wants to then add value to it. And then the third is basically, this has the, what the Prime Minister announced as mid-scale data, postcode data and boundary data free. But this one the high specification, the vector data, is paid for by the customers. So that again is another different model. And of course you’re welcome to suggest other models – these are probably not the only three you could run but I’ll just bring it to your attention.

So that all happened on the 17th of November and the 23rd of December, and then we had a little bit of a surprise because on the 7th of December we got included in something else and our chairman and myself both had said it was a bit of a surprise. We found ourselves in a portfolio which was an asset portfolio, inviting private investors to invest into organisations – there were many organisations there were 16 from BBC worldwide through to British waterways, Land Registry, the Met Office, ourselves. And thankfully I was not the only chief executive that was in the dark. But anyway, you can read about this if you’d like to, it’s on the web as well. It’s under the smarter government part of the website and it’s in appendix 4, so that also came out. So Vince Cable did something that slightly surprised me, I didn’t know he was involved in Ordnance Survey too much, but he actually asked a question the day after in parliament. He says, “The chief secretary says that government are to give away free of charge data from the Met Office and Ordnance Survey. That sounds straight forward- but those organisations survive by selling data, so if they have to give their data away for free, how will they function as organisations? Especially now the government plans to privatize them. How can the government privatize organisations that do not have any income?” So, you know, obviously that’s just another thing in the mix. So please be nice to people from Ordnance Survey. If you’re a staff member can you imagine how you’d feel, ok? Now I will tell you the unions and the staff have been outstanding. Everyone realises the seriousness of this and everybody has got on doing what I’ve asked them to – which is continue to do their jobs day in day out in a world class way. And obviously government will make their decisions in response to what the public has said, and in response to any private investors and then it will be our job to run it the way we’ve been asked to.

So just to kind of tell you a little bit about other things that have been going on very briefly. Basically, you may recall we launched a new business strategy under our last minister in May 2009. This was supported by ministers in the cabinet office and the treasury and also in communities and local government. And basically it was to promote greater innovation using our data, reforming our licensing framework, reducing our costs over time and supporting the sharing of information across the public sector and also creating an innovative treading entity.

In terms of the reforming of our licensing framework, basically that work has been completed and it was done in consultation with people throughout government and some partners and some customers, but it’s ready to go out on consultation but we’ve been asked to stop going out on consultation until the other consultation is finish. So absolutely nothing can move on that. Reducing costs over time - basically 180 people left Ordnance Survey at Christmas as we were asked to do in order to fund the innovation areas of…I’ll talk about in a moment. And basically the staff have reacted incredibly well – they were all volunteers but it means that there’s a lot of work for people left because we’ve not been asked to do anything different or less – we’re trying to do it smarter of course. Sharing the information across the public sector, that has happened because some of the licenses have changed and then we’ve had a slightly dormant innovative trading entity and there’s nothing to report on that.

But on the innovation there’s lots to report. Basically we widened the access to OS OpenSpace, which for the people who don’t know what it is – it’s a sort of web based way that you’re able to get hold of our data. If you’ve got a website or you’ve got a friend with a website – you can now embed our data into your website. And for up to approximately 200 users a day of the mapping – so you might have 8,000 users of your website but 200 users a day – it’s completely free. And we also give a little bit of support, we’ve just come out with a little way that even I could manage to embed our web data into a website because we have come out with something that’s like a wizard that tells me how to do it. So, you just do next and next and next and it’s all very simple and I was very pleased when I managed to do it, so that was good.

We’ve also launched something called Geovation. And Geovation is the way that, it’s not owned by Ordnance Survey, it’s being run by independent friends of Ordnance Survey – Steve Feldman and also somebody whose been involved a huge amount in doing work in charities. And it’s about getting more people to use geography within their ideas. And what we found is people are contributing all kinds of ideas and collaborating with others to solve problems, and there are lots of new exciting ideas being put on the website. And we’ve been very pleased at how this network is just growing and growing. What we have seen is that we decided to run something called a Geovation challenge with up to 21,000 pounds of prize money – and basically the closing data for that has now closed. But what we’ve seen is a very high quality of submissions and basically on, I think it’s about next Tuesday, the final results will be revealed. And there are people who came up with a live public transport map, community jobs that need doing, mapping sporting venues and things like that. And people have clearly worked hard to get on the shortlist and you can see on the website if you’re interested who the shortlist is, or you could pop along to the Royal Geographical Society next Tuesday to help decide some of the winners. So it’s going to be a bit like a Dragon’s Den, but there will be a community project which everyone in the room can vote for and they’ll get 1,000 pounds too. So it’s really, really exciting.

What we’ve seen with OS OpenSpace is the application where you can put your mapping on the web. Basically what we’ve seen is just an exponential growth in that where more and more people are using it now, and what we’ve seen is about 3,000 websites are now kind of powered using it – which is great. And we’re seeing it being used everything from a small garden centre I came across. I came across a hairdresser using it, and these would be non-traditional users of our data I think, who have decided to put a bit of mapping from Ordnance Survey into their website. But mainly it’s in the outdoor leisure areas and what we’re seeing is daily visitors clearly going up, and clearly going up at times of leisure – like at the beginning of the week and the end of the week. And so there are nice websites like the Mountains of England and Wales and there are various scout groups – multiple scout groups – who now have it embedded within their website. Some councils have decided to start to use it which is excellent, and looking at displaying particular locations – many, many sports clubs, it’s just an exponential growth in that area. And then we’ve also had our first application which decided to come to us and say ‘Hey, we like the technology but we want to run a commercial service, we actually want to pay you so that your service is there all the time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week’. And basically it’s called Locator X– it was launched by Stirling Moss and Alan Hinkes, so they went to a lot of people to make sure people really knew about it- and what it does is accurately pinpoint where say family members are or whatever, and it’s for 50 pounds a year, and it makes sure that you’re able to locate a person who has opted into the service – so you can’t locate people who don’t know they’re being located. And what we’ve found is it’s a very easy solution, and lots of people are enjoying using it, and it’s really taking off. And it’s so easy – you just enable your phone, enable perhaps your child’s phone, and you’re able to pay your subscription and very quickly be able to locate them and know that they’re still within the sports hall or whatever. And so we found that to be something people are very keen on. What I think is amazing is the people like the Suzy Lamplugh trust have gotten involved with it and also WhizzKids and now there’s a donation made every time a sale is made to WhizzKids, but Suzy Lamplugh trust very much endorses it so that’s good.

During this turbulent time, we’ve also been launching new products, we now have a 10,000 scale vector that a lot of people are using now for contextual mapping and seem to be finding it to be very useful. What we’ve seen is many new users coming to us – who perhaps thought master map was just a bit too much for them – and so we’ve been very pleased that people have decided to adopt this.

So a lot’s been going on. But there’s one last exciting thing –I had the privilege to break the ground on a site that – I’ve been at Ordnance Survey nine and a half years as director general and on my first day at Ordnance Survey, I had a little bit of a disturbing time. I had flown in from working in Tanzania on the Saturday, I’d found myself a flat on the Sunday and I started work on the Monday morning – in I would have to say a little bit of chaos. Before they allowed me in the building, they asked me to lay a plaque which is still there, and I looked at the building which I had known earlier but I hadn’t been to for 5 years. And there was no possibility that they’d hold any interviews near the building – and I kind of looked at the building and I quickly thought ‘Oh no, is this a modern working environment?’ and as I walked round the building during the day meeting people I realized it was huge and vast and then I soon realized that people told me, I said, ‘Why have the walls got polka dots on?’ and they said ‘Because its got asbestos’ – and anyway, that evening I drove past a site. And it said: site for corporate headquarters. And I came back the following morning and asked people who was going there and they said ‘Vodafone’. Anyway, unfortunately Vodafone never came to Southampton, and the site lay empty. Meanwhile Ordnance Survey had a fire, which some of you don’t know, but a man called Duncan Shiel and myself at twenty to eight one night put out 108 fires. We did however have 290 firemen arrive because the risk of if Ordnance Survey goes up, the asbestos problem is so massive. So anyway, this helped the minister of the day, who happened to have been an ex fireman, to very clearly say ‘I agree, new building needed’. And that was back in 2004, and I was delighted in 2009 to break ground at the place exactly that I had said we would go to on day 2. And I am even more delighted to say that we only broke ground on April the 3rd, and if you come anywhere near Ordnance Survey now, you would see on the M271 which isn’t very far away – this building. And you really will start to see it looking like this. The baffle wall which is that…one of the most innovative walls ever built in this country apparently and you’ll see why when you come and visit the building. But basically, with the exception of that, the rest of the building is built. And we take occupation on the 9th of August – we’re one week behind with build. That’s purely because of the snow. And I think it’s going to be really exciting – and by Christmas next year we will have left - or Christmas this year, we will have left our building.

So, we look forward to welcoming the whole industry to our new headquarters, our new way of working, the new culture a building will give us, and very much, really, facing our new challenges that we have in this new decade. Thank you very much.