Eureka moments happen from time to time which change the way we live and interact. Simply Brilliant Ideas at the County Library, Tallaght on the 17th October looks at some brilliant ideas and how the have changed or are changing our world today. In five short focused presentations speakers from diverse backgrounds and experiences will share their ‘light bulb’ moments and will encourage the audience to think imaginatively and outside the box.

Simply Brilliant Ideas, 17th October at 12 noon County Library, Tallaght

Who will be speaking at the event?

Lars Jerkland from Google will talk about the latest buzzword in computing ‘Google Cloud’ – what is it how does it work and what does it mean for the future of computing?

Chris Burton from Vodaphone, who have over 315 million customers worldwide, will share his vision for where mobile phone technology will take us over the next few years. Vodaphone has just launched a social networking service called Vodafone People which will also form part of the new Vodafone 360 service. With this service they will integrate a host of social networking services so that users can see at a glance what their friends are doing without having to switch between different applications on the phone.

Nickey Brennan, President of the GAA will share the amazing of the development of a world class stadium in Croke Park from 1896 to today. Standing as an iconic landmark on the Dublin skyline this stadium of dreams holds the hopes and dreams of so many players and fans and draws millions of people to the theatre that it is each year. Hear how could grass roots organisation delivered one of the world’s greatest sporting venues to the capital city.

Preethi Nair, Asian Woman of the Year and Publicist of the Year always wanted to be an author. Having been rejected by a number of publishers she set up her own PR and publishing agency and under the alias Pru Menon managed to gain substantial press coverage and a three book deal with Harper Collins. Preethi will talk tell the story of duping the literary world and leading a double life to get her novel noticed. Fascinated? You should be.

Innovation so fresh you can almost smell the paint drying!

The Draft County Development Plan is a necessarily detailed vision of the county. Even with the best of efforts it can be a complex read and difficult to interpret exactly how places which you have an interest in are proposed to be shaped into the future.

South Dublin County Council are pleased to announce the availability of the South Dublin County Draft Development Plan on-line.  On previous occasions the Council has had extensive volumes of information available including textual reports and maps.  Interested parties could buy printed copies, download on-line documents, or visit the council office and libraries to review the detail of the proposed plan.

In addition to offering all of this, South Dublin County Council now provides an even easier way for interested parties to interpret what is being proposed in the Draft County Development Plan.  Our on-line development plan viewer takes the information from many sources and presents it on a interactive map. You can zoom in and out, and pan the image to navigate to parts of the map or you can search for a street or house.

The information tool

When you have landed on a point that you want to find out more about in terms of what is proposed simply click the information tool and click the point on the map.  The viewer then responds by giving you a pop up window with information from the draft development plan about that exact spot.

The amount of information which is displayed is determined by what you select under the development plan layers tool which ‘floats’ over the map.  You can turn on or off as much information that you wish to see.

Registering your opinion

You can follow the link to register your details which will create a user account on the viewer.  You can log in once your account is created and verified.  Now you will have a new tool available to you to highlight a site or area on a map.  Once highlighted, you can enter your submission text in the area provided and submit your observation.

Finally, once a valid submission has been made the development plan viewer system will email a copy of your submission to you including both text and map of the area with your site or area highlighted.

This innovative approach lets interested parties interrogate and comment on the draft county development plan, making it easier to access information which they have a particular interest in and more effective at ensuring the interested parties comments are received most appropriately with full mark up of the map detail.  In technology terms it combines database technology, mapping technology, email technology across the medium of the internet to provide an end to end solution.

Did you know that you can accurately predict your commute in real time using a text service which South Dublin County Council provide?

Previously we blogged about the use which the traffic management section within South Dublin County Council make of real time traffic information from a network of cameras located throughout the county road network.  In addition the traffic section use advanced automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) as vehicles travel along many of the county’s roads.  Vehicle number plates once logged are fed into a database which gives accurate journey times.  This information is used by our dedicated traffic management staff to make improvements in commuter journeys and assist the control systems to ease congestion on the road network.

The council has gone a stage further and now literally sitting at your breakfast table, you can text the traffic centre the name of a road and the direction you will be travelling.  The Council’s traffic systems will respond by texting your mobile phone with a traffic update - journey times for segments of route along the requested road.  This clever and innovative use of traffic information occurs in near real time (allowing for calculations to take place - matching of vehicle journey times, etc.).  The results which get returned to you are accurate within a couple of minutes of the present traffic situation.

Why not give it a go?

For convenience, the number to text is a short code number - 51678.  This is a standard rate text number so will cost no more than €0.15c from any operator (operator charges vary). For example if you propose to travel along the lucan bypass into the city, you would text N4 East to 51678.

Below is a complete list of the roads and the commands.

N4 Lucan Bypass

“N4 East” towards Dublin
or “N4 West” away from Dublin

N7 Naas Road

“N7 East” towards Dublin
or “N7 West” away from Dublin

N81 Tallaght Bypass

“N81 East” towards Dublin
or “N81 West” away from Dublin

Belgard Road (R113)

“BEL South” towards the N81
“BEL North” towards the N7

Fonthill Road (R113)

“FONT South” towards the N81
“FONT North” towards the N7

Outer Ring Road (R136)

“ORR South” towards the N81
“ORR North” towards the N4

Finally and perhaps most importantly - Never text or operate your mobile phone while driving.  It is irresponsible, puts other road users lives at risk, and frankly is against the law.

Google have today released a new version of the free photo editing system picasa which has a couple of curious and innovative features.  Of particular note is the ability to tag people in photographs.  Tagging has become the norm for people across social networks, bulletin boards, and file sharing sites to loosely categorise their content.  What Google have done is that they have introduced the same face detection technology which they have been providing with their web product into their desktop product picasa.

When you begin using this version of picasa, the system checks your photographs for faces and then as you click on images it shows you faces which it has detected i.e. people.  You then type the person’s name and some other details and the image is thus tagged with the persons identity.  It is really simple to do.

A little bit of magic then appears to work in the background.  In your new ‘people list’ in picasa you may notice a ‘?’ icon.  When you now click on the person it brings back the images which you have tagged as the person but also suggests other ‘finds’ that the computer has taken a guess at being the same person across your photographic library.  This is very innovative and clever use of technology.

You can read more about it, over on the google blog or watch the introductory youtube video below.

Using innovation to enhance the local democracy of a county is a relatively simple concept. The planning permission process which is the responsibility of South Dublin County Council starts with the County Development Plan. This sets out a policy framework by which each subsequent planning application is considered. In times past the planning process may have seemed very distant to the citizen however today, through harnessing of the power of the Internet and technology, the citizen can get involved at many different levels.

So, how can you you - the citizen be involved?

To begin with, how can you find out what developments are being proposed?

The screen shown above is the “search and view” function of the Council’s planning web page. It can be found on the South Dublin County Council website. You can easily filter the data by date, area, keyword or specific register reference. At a glance you can see who the applicant is and where the application relates to. You can see if documents or maps are yet available. You can click on the reg ref (planning register reference) to see the full details and access any documents or maps attached to the planning file.

When you open any planning application, you can enter your email address in the box provided and our systems will notify you about any changes that are detected on this application.

As soon as it is marked up on the Council’s digital planning register there is available to you an option to map the application. When you click on this option a map is loaded in a separate window showing the application and an other applications around it. Each site is linked. When you click a site the system will then provide you with a link to the detail of the selected planning application. This is very useful for enquiring about the planning history of an area.

How about viewing the actual planning file?

Using the online service and innovations that are available to the user, each application is presented with any documents which have been lodged or submitted in an electronic format.  The entire planning file is on-line. Should you decide to visit our offices, you will find the exact same documents - nothing more and nothing less.

The display tells you the description of the file, the type of file, and the size of the file.  Earlier this year the Council began to use the latest in compression technology so that we can reproduce the colour the documents related to a planning application.  This requires a browser plug in which is linked to the document type.

The downloaded file is an exact reproduction of what you would get on the planning file in the offices of South Dublin County Council.

There are lots more that you can do on-line at www.sdcc.ie.  Why not stop by and spend a while.  It might surprise you how easy it is to interact with your local authority.

Making the modern world is a fascinating chronological insight into the people, the events, and stories of how we’ve arrived at what we know as our modern world. While the entire site is fascinating, why not check out the ‘icons of invention’. In here you can trace science, technology, and medical innovations. For example, long before the iPod, Apple’s first venture was into the personal computer market way back in the mid 1970’s - we’re not talking Macbooks but the Apple I computer (1976) - a personal computer based on a circuit board which you could plug in components and peripheral devices.

As a site chronicling innovation it is most definitely worth spending some of your time there.

There are a group of dedicated staff within South Dublin County Council who enthuse about traffic.  Yes - it may be the curse of some peoples existence however these staff work tirelessly and constantly strive to make improvements to the county’s road networks and consequential improvements in commuters quality of life.

The work of the traffic management centre is just one event which will run during innovation week (October 14th - 20th, 2009).  At this event you will be able to visit the traffic management centre in South Dublin County Council and experience at first hand the innovations which our staff are using to make improvements in traffic congestion around the county.  Booking for this event is essential.  Further details can be found on www.southdublininnovates.ie or booked directly by following this link.

 Apart from the internal working of the Traffic Management Centre, there are publically available online services which can be accessed which build on the work which takes place in the traffic management centre. 

For example you can go to the traffic management section of the South Dublin County Councilwebsite and view traffic cameras which are used for operational purposes live on the web.  The images which are displayed are streamed and are published in real time.  The traffic management centre staff have access to more than 50 traffic monitoring cameras located at various locations throughout the county’s road network and a selection of these are permanently broadcasting to the Internet.

more on traffic innovations in a while.

Today for a press gathering in respect of the forthcoming innovation week (October 14th to 20th, 2009), South Dublin County Council introduced “7 Online Innovations” - a presentation of but 7 of the innovations which are in use on a daily basis within South Dublin County Council. 

The innovations are customer and citizen centric.  The list isn’t intended to be exhaustive but to be a teaser as to how we as an organisation innovate and harness the power of other global innovations which are freely available to be utilised.

Navigate the presentation above or click the link below to browse on scribd.

7 Online Innovations - South Dublin County Council

Just released is the innovation week brochure (October 14th to 20th, 2009).  This is your guide to all the events throughout Dublin county by all partner organisations.  Navigate it below or click the link to read it on scribd.

Innovation Dublin Brochure