I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on their monthly call.

But, before I start, please remember that these proposals are not mandatory. If you don't want to share your location, then please don't share your location. This is an optional feature which shouldn't be used by people with a strong need for privacy.

We were primarily discussing the nascent Geographical Microsyntax proposals.

Firstly, I love the idea of being able to share my location. I want my friends to know I'm in town for a gig. I want people to think I'm cool because I'm seeing some experimental theatre. I want to virtue signal that I'm giving blood.

Similarly, I want to be able to find social media posts by location. What's happening right now in Paris? Did anyone else hear that sonic boom in London? Which cool people are also at this gig with me?

But, I do think these proposals have some issues which need to be addressed.

User Research

The primary thing missing from the proposal is any form of understanding what users want to do with a geotagged post.

You see a post like:

Hanging out with friends. I just checked in to Leicester Square.

What do you expect to happen when you click that link?

• See who is at the location?
• Read more information about the place being discussed?
• Find all posts at that specific address?
• Discover posts which are close to there?
• Something else?

What other things do people want to do with geotagged posts?

• Find all posts within 5Km of me?
• Discover users who have posted near me?
• Get emergency alerts for the city I'm in?
• See what's trending in a specific country?

Without knowing what people might want to do with this information, it's rather hard to design a service which meets their needs.

To micro or not to micro?

Where I disagree with the proposals is the idea of using inline text as a form of microsyntax.

Proposals like "I am in /London/ eating ice-cream" or "Checked in to Leicester Square L:N123456" fail for a couple of reasons.

Things like #hashtags and @mentions developed organically on social networks before they were eventually adopted by the platforms themselves. It is rare that a top-down diktat can be used to tell people how they should be formatting their posts.

More importantly, people are crap at formatting things consistently! Every event I go to has people using #Event alongside #Event2026 or #Event26 or a hundred variations.

Even if users could format it consistently, names are ambiguous. Is 🌐:Paris the one in France or Texas?

I'm strongly of the opinion that text is for text, not syntax.

Openness 🆚 Centralisation

Saying that you're on a specific point on the globe doesn't always provide useful information. Even with altitude, it isn't always possible to work out if your in the Starbucks or the Costa next door. Do you want to say you're in a train station, or a distinct platform, or even a specific train journey?

There are various services which offer unique IDs per loosely-defined place.

Google Maps provides a Place ID for every thing that it knows about. There's a similar service from FourSquare. But both of those are closed and proprietary systems - they can only be updated by the company that creates them.

Wikipedia's Wikidata has IDs for lots of places, similarly OpenStreetMap has nodes with names which can be used to identify locations.

But all of these suffer from the same flaw; they are centralised.

If Google kills its service then all those Place IDs die.

This has happened before. Yahoo used to run the Where On Earth IDentifier service but discontinued it.

While OSM and Wikipedia are great projects, they're still centralised. If you're banned from OSM, you can't create a new node.

So, to my mind, the primary way of identifying a place has to use a fully open, globally agreed, and unrestricted standard.

Location Plus Plus

The obvious choice is latitude and longitude as defined by WGS 84. It allows for arbitrary precision anywhere on the planet.

No one can stop you issuing lat/long just because a country is under sanctions. The standards community can't revoke your access to it. The co-ordinates are well understood by almost all software.

There are some alternatives. Google's Plus.Codes build on top of lat/long to make something more human readable. But, crucially, human readability is not the issue here. This is metadata which should never be shown to a human. If a user interface wants to format a lat/long they can do so as a Plus.Code or any other format.

GeoJSON

There are dozens of competing ways to mark up a location.

It seems sensible to me that, given most major social media protocols use JSON, adding GeoJSON would be the simplest way to add geographic information to a post's metadata.

At its most basic, a single "Point" can be shared like so:

{
    "type": "Feature",
    "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [-0.13005,51.5103]
    }
}

It can have as much or as little precision as needed.

If the place being checked into has a name, it can also be added - this could be used for display purposes within the message

{
    "type": "Feature",
    "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [-0.13005,51.5103]
    },
    "properties": {
        "name": "Leicester Square"
    }
}

The properties can be as complex as the sender wants. For example it could add Wikidata references, OpenStreetMap IDs, telephone numbers, or some cool new thing which hasn't been invented yet.

Here's a maximalist example of checking in to a park:

{
    "type": "Feature",
    "geometry": {
        "type": "Polygon",
        "coordinates": [
        [
                [-0.1303791,51.5099976],
                [-0.1295305,51.5100444],
                [-0.1297077,51.510947 ],
                [-0.1308786,51.5105859],
                [-0.1308893,51.5105793],
                [-0.1303791,51.5099976]
            ]
        ]
    },
    "properties": {
        "name": "Leicester Square",
        "WikiData": "Q848912",
        "OSM": "4082589",
        "GooglePlaceID": "ChIJPcTFENIEdkgR94E58rgB69o",
        "PlusCode": "9C3XGV69+4X",
        "Quinfrob": "🌐89451_𰻝",
        "address": {
            "road": "Leicester Square",
            "neighbourhood": "St. James's",
            "quarter": "East Marylebone",
            "suburb": "Covent Garden",
            "city": "City of Westminster",
            "ISO3166-2-lvl8": "GB-WSM",
            "state": "England",
            "ISO3166-2-lvl4": "GB-ENG",
            "postcode": "WC2H 7NA",
            "country": "United Kingdom",
            "country_code": "gb"
        }
    }
}

What's Next

My personal opinion is that the following needs to happen:

• Talk to some users - find out what they might use this for.
• Work with privacy advocates to reduce possible harms (for example, being able to redact a location from a previously shared post).
• Discuss with developers about how they'd work with this metadata.
• Clients should start adding GeoJSON metadata to their posts, even if it can't be displayed yet.

You can read the minutes of the meeting and I'd encourage you to join the next call.

When I sign up to a web service, I don't want to faff around uploading an image to use as my avatar. I want that service to look at my email address or social-sign-in and automatically pick up my preferred graphic.

Here's how I see it working.

1. A user signs in to a service with the email address username@example.com
2. In a similar way to WebFinger, the service makes a request to:
   • example.com/.well-known/avatar?resource=acct:username@example.com
3. If the request's Accept header has a MIME type of image/*, then the server immediately returns an image.
4. If the request's Accept header has a MIME type of application/json, then the server can return a WebFinger-style document with "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar" and, perhaps, a list of different images, formats, and sizes.

This makes it incredibly simple for people to use the same avatar everywhere.

It also means that if you're designing a service which publicly shows usernames, you can make avatars available without an expensive API call. For example, Twitter could make user's avatars available at: twitter.com/.well-known/avatars?resource=acct:edent

But what about...?

This is a sketch of an idea. I'd like to know if people think it is useful before I take it any further.

I don't think it breaches privacy - a user's image is public on all services anyway.

Users should still be given the option of changing their avatar if they want.

A service shouldn't expose the user's email address - they should proxy the image.

Anything else I should have thought of?

Updates

To stave off some common points raised.

• No this isn't like Gravatar. That works by being a 3rd party service and using the MD5 of your email address.
• No this isn't like Libravatar. See above.
• No this isn't like WebFinger. That only returns JSON.
• No this isn't like h-card. That requires a server to parse HTML in order to find an image.
• No this isn't like BIMI. That's expensive and only supports SVG.

W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me.

A brief primer.

• The world is a sphere.
• We can reference any point on the surface of Earth using two co-ordinates, Longitude and Latitude.
• Long/Lat are numbers. They can be as precise or as vague as needed.
• Humans can't remember long strings of numbers, and reading them out is difficult.

W3W aims to solve this. It splits the world into a grid, and gives every square a unique three-word phrase.

So the location 51.50799,-0.12803 becomes ///mile.crazy.shade

Brilliant, right?

No.

Here's all the problems I have with W3W.

It isn't open

The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.

If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.

You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

It is the antithesis of open.

Cost

W3W refuses to publish their prices. You have to contact their sales team if you want to know what it will cost your organisation.

Open standards are free to use.

Earthquakes

When an earthquake struck Japan, street addresses didn't change but that their physical location did.

That is, a street address is still 42 Acacia Avenue - but the Longitude and Latitude has changed.

Perhaps you think this is an edge case? It isn't. Australia is drifting so fast that GPS can't keep up.

How does W3W deal with this? Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.

Internationalisation

Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?

Is "cat.dog.goose" straight translated into French? No! Each language has its own word list.

There is no way to translate between languages. You have to beg W3W for permission for access to their API. They do not publish their word lists or the mappings between them.

So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

You're not allowed to know what word lists W3W use. They take a paternalistic attitude to creating their lists - they know best. You cannot propose changes.

Anecdotally, their non-English word lists are confusing even for native speakers.

Cultural Respect

Numbers are (mostly) culturally neutral. Words are not. Is "mile.crazy.shade" a respectful name for a war memorial? How about ///tribes.hurt.stumpy for a temple?

How do you feel about ///weepy.lulls.emerge and ///grouchy.hormone.elevating both being at Auschwitz? Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

This is a classic computer science problem. Every sufficiently long word list can eventually be recombined into a potentially offensive phrase.

Open Washing

W3W know that the majority of technical people are not fooled by their attempts to lock down addressing.

They include this paragraph to attempt to prove their openness:

If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals, businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else can continue to rely on the what3words system.

I don't know how they propose to bind a successor organisation. They don't say what licences they will use. If they go bust, there's no guarantee they'll be legally able to release this code, nor may they have the time to do so.

There's nothing stopping W3W from releasing their algorithms now, subjecting them to scrutiny by the standards community. They could build up a community of experts to help improve the system, they could work with existing mapping efforts, they could help build a useful and open standard.

But they don't. They guard their secrets and actively promote their proprietary product in the hope it will become widely accepted and then they can engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

This is not a new argument

My mate Leigh wrote about this three years ago. Lots of people have criticised W3W.

Andy Allan @gravitystorm@gravitystorm.co.uk

@gravitystorm

.@what3words is bad technical idea, and ethically terrible too. But all VCs like patented economic rents so the juggernaut rolls on. #geomob

---

But W3W have a great PR team - pushing press releases which are then reported as uncritical news.

The most recent press release contains a ludicrous example:

• Person dials the emergency services
• Person doesn't know their location
• Emergency services sends the person a link
• Person clicks on link, opens web page
• Web page geolocates user and displays their W3W location
• Person reads out their W3W phrase to the emergency services

Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services! No need to get a human to read it out, then another human to listen and type it in to a different system.

There is literally no need for W3W in this scenario. If you have a data connection, you can send your precise location without an intermediary.

What Next?

W3W succeeds because it has a superficially simple solution to a complex problems. It is a brilliant lesson in how marketing and PR can help a technologically inferior project look like it is a global open solution.

I'm not joking. Their branding firm says:

Edelman helped what3words frame their story to be compelling by tapping into human emotion. We also created a story for CEO Chris Sheldrick about how having an address can drive social transformation and business efficiency, securing profiling and speaker opportunities. Through paid social campaigns we re-targeted these stories, getting through to the decision makers that mattered most. We articulated their purpose narrative and refined their strategy to engage investors and excite the media.

It takes too much time to refute all their claims - but we must. Whenever you see people mentioning What3Words, politely remind them that it is not an open standard and should be avoided.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Your periodic reminder that W3W is a closed and proprietary system, with opaque licencing, hefty pricing, and poor internationalisation.
It does have a very good PR team though.

BBC News Technology

@BBCTech

Three-unique-words 'map' used to rescue mother and child bbc.in/2FBnJ5O

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Sadly, Hadley Beeman does not have a TARDIS (Well, as far as any of us can tell...). What she does have is an interesting new job for me. Take a deep breath, because it's a heck of a long title:

Senior Technology Advisor to the Chief Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

Sweet! So, what does a STAttCTAttSoSfHaSC do? Apart from scoring 25 points in Scrabble, obviously?

I'm going to help improve the health and social care system - within and beyond the NHS. Not all of it, and not necessarily the bits that you'll see, but some of the deep magick which runs the technology behind it.

My job will be to keep saying "Hey! Let's use internationally recognised, free and open standards. Y'know, rather than handing a single company a life-long monopoly."

I'll also occasionally point my Sonic Screwdriver at a bit of kit and say "If we reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, we may be able to replace this with Open Source Software."

This is akin to redesigning and replacing the engine of a plane, while it is in flight. Without losing altitude or causing the passengers any discomfort. While under attack from Weeping Angels.

If I'm lucky, the team will help set the course for the future of NHS technology. I'm not talking AI-powered iPhone apps to show you your polyps in virtual reality - I'm talking about your consultant being able to share data with your GP without resorting to SnapChat. Or fax.

Can we put user needs at the heart of technology standards decisions? Can we give Clinical Commissioning Groups the tools and frameworks they need to make smarter decisions about technology? Can we make things open and make things better?

There's only one way to find out...!

This is a temporary secondment. I'm grateful to the whole team at GDS for letting me go on this adventure. Much like the Meta-Crisis 10th Doctor (do keep up), this role has a limited lifespan. Looks like the 2019 season of "The Terence Eden Adventures" is going to be epic!

Allons-y, Alonso!

Yeah, yeah, so I only played a small part in the (no doubt) hideously complicated process - but I'm happy to take full credit :-)

Last year, the UK Government opened up a Standards Hub. They were actively soliciting for challenges that the UK Government could take on.

I was one of the first to respond.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

My suggestion for open formats in government has been published - standards.data.gov.uk/challenge/offe…

---

You can read my modest proposal on the standards hub.

The crux of my proposal was this:

Each user - whether they work for the Government or are a citizen - has the right to read documents. A user should not be expected to purchase new equipment or install new software, just in order to read an official document.

I don't think that's too much to ask. You may buy a computer every 6 months - but there are plenty of citizens who only have access to a Windows 95 PC. Or a Nintendo Wii. Or an eReader. Or who don't have admin rights to install new software.

Many of these devices are perfectly serviceable - and all are guaranteed to read either PDF or HTML. Open standards means zero extra cost for the citizen.

Next Steps

Based on my suggestion, two challenges were created:

• Challenge: Viewing government documents
• Challenge: Sharing or collaborating with government documents

After several months of wrangling, the Government announced a solution to both of these challenges - Open document formats selected to meet user needs.

When departments have adopted these open standards:

• citizens, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents
• people working in government will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when they move between formats
• government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people inside and outside of government

The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:

• PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents
• Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents

Cabinet Office and The Rt Hon Francis Maude MP

And, boom, just like that the open standard of ODF is mandated across government. In the future, you won't have to buy Microsoft Office just to read or respond to a government document. You won't need the latest and greatest computer, or cutting edge software.

Here's the thing. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't made my initial contribution. Perhaps someone else would have. The tide is turning away from the proprietary standards of the past and Governments around the world are embracing Open Standards.

But I did contribute. I did make my voice heard. And the world has changed a little bit for the better.

And now it's up to you. Find a challenge on the Government's website, contribute, engage, make your voice heard,

Huge thanks to Hadley Beeman for telling me about the Open Standards Challenge, and to Tracey Williams for keeping me informed of its progress. Much of real credit for this amazing achievement belongs to Linda Humphries for running the consultation, and to The Rt Hon Francis Maude MP for listening to such wise counsel.