Steve Bennett blogs

My passions: open data, maps & cycle touring.

I’m a web mapping and open data expert, software engineer, project manager, business analyst, technical writer, system administrator, technical analyst, project administrator and opinionateur with lots of experience in the Australian academic, government and open data sectors. My free time is filled with cycle touring, open data, maps, and general technological exploration.

I’m currently available for freelance or consulting work: check out my portfolio.

I’m stevage1 on Twitter, and my Gmail address is stevage.

My StackOverflow Careers profile.

Steve on the web:

(Ok, I don’t update this anymore. Try the portfolio).

• 2015: http://opencouncildata.org – standards for local councils to follow in releasing open data.
• 2014: http://steventuring.wordpress.com, my outdoor adventures, especially cycling ones.
• 2014: http://hipstermelbourne.org, a collaborative effort in celebrating and mocking Melbourne hipsterdom.
• 2013: http://researchmaps.net, material and support site for our Mapmaking for Academics course.
• 2013: http://cycletour.org, a route planning site for cycle touring in Victoria.
• 2013: http://emscycletours.site44.com, a map of all the trips my cycle touring buddies have done.
• 2013: “Immigration in proportion” video for Govhack 2013, co-created with Andrew Wise. (Official competition entry).
• 2013: http://thingsihateaboutgit.tumblr.com, an outlet for Git criticism.
• 2013: http://qartography.tumblr.com, an outlet for map-making experiments.
• 2009-: A gazillion edits on OpenStreetMap, plus some work on Potlatch2, the Flash-based editor
• 2005-:A gazillion edits on Wikipedia, including lots of photos and maps.
• 2008: Wrote most of the documentation for the ARCHER project.
• 2003: Rendered landscapes with Terragen

Steve in the news:

• 2015-04-03: “Data Visualization: Science on the map“, Nature Toolbox. (About teaching mapping tools to researchers.)
• 2015-01-28: “Open data helps Melbourne keep cool, leading global moves“, The Mandarin. (About connecting environmental sensors to City of Melbourne’s open data portal)
• 2014-08-19: “An open data vision“, The Age. (About our GovHack entry “Living, Breathing Melbourne”, and being data guru in residence).
• 2014-07-16: “Building, not breaking: when hackers are let loose in government“, The Mandarin. (My dodgy GovHack entry ‘Can I boat here’ gets an undeserved mention.)
• 2014-04-07: “The hoopla around hipster hotspots“, The Age blog “The Crunch”
• 2014-04-07: “Mapping the hip haunts of the fashionably uncool“, The Age. (About our Hipster Map of Melbourne)
• 2014-03-19: “Data hackers make Melbourne hipster map” (with audio), ABC 774. (About our Hipster Map of Melbourne)
• 2013-05-22: “Melbourne’s bicycle black spots: how we did it“, The Age blog “The Crunch” (About mapping workshops held at The Age)

Steve in print:

Sometimes my Wikipedia photos or random quotes find their way into books or journal articles.

• Hello World: Travels in Virtuality, p216. Sue Thomas 2004. Interviewed about experiences in LambdaMOO.
• Aquaculture: Farming Aquatic Animals and Plants, p542. John S. Lucas, Paul C. Southgate 2012. My photo of Sydney rock oysters, taken at Croajiongolong National Park.
• Food and Package Engineering, p35. Scott A. Morris. My featured picture of Luna Park’s Scenic Railway.
• Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, p96. John Broughton 2008. A reference to a (probably now non-functional) user script I created to improve the History View for Wikipedia editors.
• How Wikipedia Works: and how you can be be a part of it, p490. Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates. Section “Guidelines for Reuse” (p460) apparently includes text I worked on.
• Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and The Twelfth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, p38, Volume 17. 2000. Includes a quote from my time on LambdaMOO, interacting with a bot called Cobot.
• La France des Rois, p90. Catherine Grive. This low-budget coffee table book includes my poorly done panorama of the Château de Blois with passersby appearing several times.

There are also many low-quality books consisting almost entirely of Wikipedia articles, with varying levels of editing applied:

• Traveler’s Guide to Great Ski Resorts: Southern Hemisphere, Featuring Africa, Australia and New Zealand. There is at least one of my photos of Mt Buller.