Blog
Analysis, guides and insights from the Smart Island team.
Some Plumbing Changes — Smart Island Got Big, and the Build Pipeline Caught Up
Over the last few months Smart Island has grown a lot — more datasets, more pages, and millions more rows of underlying data. This week we made some changes to how the site builds and deploys, so we keep up. Quick note on what changed, why, and what you might notice.
Patching CVE-2026-44578 — Next.js SSRF, Why It Mattered for Smart Island, and the Build Saga
A High-severity SSRF vulnerability in Next.js (CVE-2026-44578) landed mid-week. Self-hosted Next.js apps — including this one — were exposed. Here's what the vuln does, why our Azure deployment was a juicy target, the patch we shipped, and the unrelated build-time database failure that turned a 30-second update into a multi-hour incident.
Who's Exposed AND Stuck? Reading Manning & Aguirre Against the Manx Workforce
Most AI-impact analysis stops at 'which jobs face high exposure?'. That's a useful screen but it overstates the problem. A new NBER paper crosses exposure with adaptive capacity per occupation — the cell that matters is high exposure AND low capacity. We've adapted the framework for the Isle of Man. The headline numbers, why they aren't what they look like, and the policy implication that 'plumbers don't solve the gap in 0 months'.
Sixteen Years of Manx Politics, on One Compass — the Historical Quadrant
We read the manifesto of every Isle of Man House of Keys candidate who stood in 2011, 2016, 2021 or 2026, scored each one on a political compass, and drew arrows between the dots where the same person stood more than once. The result: a single full-screen view of how Manx politicians — as individuals and as a cohort — have shifted over sixteen years.
What Will Be Scarce on the Isle of Man — Reading Alex Imas Against the Manx Data
Alex Imas's 'What will be scarce?' argues that AI abundance pushes spending and employment toward relational sectors where human involvement IS the product. The Isle of Man — small, wealthy, measurable — is a natural test case for his framework. Where his thesis holds on the Manx data, where it needs nuance, and what it implies for policy.
Cognitive, Not Procedural — How Isle of Man Employers Should Deploy AI
A new Microsoft Research field experiment with 388 employees tests two ways of bringing AI into the workplace. The rigid 'here's the protocol' approach measurably hurt productivity. The softer 'think of AI as a thought partner' approach raised top-end quality. For Manx employers and for NAIO, that's a direct steer on how to spend AI-adoption budgets.
Why UCM Is the Right Home for the Island's AI Skills Story
The Island already has the right pieces in place — UCM, NAIO and the Skills Board. But the window to act is narrowing. Stanford's Enterprise AI Playbook shows that 77% of AI deployment failures are organisational, not technical — and the First-Rung Problem warns that entry-level hiring compression is already creating a missing cohort. The natural division: UCM produces the skills, NAIO drives adoption through industry partners. Both, well-resourced and connected by a live data layer, are how the Isle of Man avoids becoming a bystander to the AI transition.
Election Tracker Upgrades, Chris Thomas Enters the Race, and What Will AI Do to My Job?
Treasury Minister Chris Thomas confirms his re-election bid for Douglas Central, bringing our candidate tracker to five. Plus: a redesigned AI job impact tool, census-linked fluency data for 200+ occupations, and a reference political compass featuring world leaders.
Industry Deep Dives: Your Accountant on the Scaffolding
Your accountant up on the scaffolding in January might sound like a fever dream. But our data says the scaffolding needs building now. The first Industry Deep Dive combines census workforce data, live vacancy intelligence, task-level AI tool mapping, and Zapier's AI Fluency Framework to produce an actionable sector assessment for accountancy on the Isle of Man.
Starlink vs Fibre, MCP Security Hardening, and Platform Updates
New Starlink & Alternative Broadband dashboard tracking LEO satellite growth despite the subsidised FTTP rollout. Plus: a full MCP server security audit against the OWASP Secure MCP Guide, parameterised SQL across 25 tools, and IP-based rate limiting.
Workforce Resilience Index: Why Policymakers Need This Dashboard Before AI Displacement Peaks
A composite resilience index for the Isle of Man workforce with auto-generated policy insights, early intervention recommendations, scenario modelling, and sector transition pathways. Drawing on Autor's China Shock research and Levy Yeyati's adoption speed framework, this is the first island-scale AI transition early-warning system designed for policymakers who need to act before displacement peaks — not after.
Isle of Man Births, Deaths & Marriages: What the Data Reveals
We parsed ten years of Civil Registry data to reveal when people are born, when they die, and when they get married on the Isle of Man. The findings include a widening population deficit, a September baby boom, and the near-disappearance of church weddings.
Why We Built the Isle of Man's Open Data Platform
Isle of Man Government data exists — but it's scattered across websites, buried in PDFs, and sometimes locked in scanned images. We built 65+ automated pipelines to scrape, parse, OCR, and structure it into a single platform with APIs, AI tools, and bulk downloads.
The Isle of Man's Schools Are Shrinking: What 6 Years of Data Reveal
We parsed 6 years of school roll PDFs — including OCR extraction from scanned documents — to build the Isle of Man's first comprehensive schools dataset. The numbers tell a clear story: enrolment is falling, and the pipeline of future pupils is shrinking.
Isle of Man: Highest Working-Age Labour Force Participation in the Developed World
At 84.4%, the Isle of Man's working-age participation rate is higher than Japan, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. We scraped real IOMG employment data and combined it with World Bank age-structure data to calculate a figure the government doesn't publish — and the results tell a remarkable story.
Performance Overhaul, AI Fluency Rubric Matrix, and 65 Automated Pipelines
Evening update: 72 pages converted from dynamic to ISR for dramatically faster load times, a full-screen AI Fluency Rubric matrix showing Unacceptable → Transformative for every task, and a look at the 65+ automated pipelines that keep SmartIsland running.
Vehicle Emissions Tracker, AI Fluency Guides, and Platform-Wide Updates
A packed update: new vehicle CO2 emissions and EV adoption page, AI fluency career guides inspired by Zapier's hiring rubric, planning applications overlaid on the biosphere ecosystem map, optimised vehicle queries, and a morning security check confirming we're clear of the axios supply chain vulnerability.
Election 2026: AI-Powered Analysis, Constituency Map & Full Transparency
SmartIsland now provides AI-powered, impartial analysis of every declared candidate for the 2026 House of Keys election — political compass, policy scoring, manifesto breakdowns, an interactive constituency map, 12 AI-generated questions per candidate, and full methodology transparency.
Improving Data Attribution Across the Biosphere Observatory
An honest look at how we enhanced data attribution across the Biosphere Observatory, and why properly crediting the organisations behind decades of fieldwork matters more than the software that presents it.
Smart Island on Manx Forums
Smart Island has been mentioned on Manx Forums — thanks to the community for the interest. This post serves as our verification.
New: Property Price Search & Ecosystem Map Redesign
Two big updates today: a searchable property price register covering 40,000+ Isle of Man land transactions with full sale history, and a redesigned Biosphere Ecosystem map with an interactive side panel.
New: Earth Observation Data — Tree Cover, Soil Moisture, and Land Temperature
Three new satellite-derived datasets join the Biosphere Observatory: Hansen forest change mapping, ERA5-Land soil moisture at three depths, and MODIS land surface temperature — all for the Isle of Man from 2000 to present.
92,562 Lines of Code, 303 Commits, 8 Days
Smart Island by the numbers — 92k lines of TypeScript, 30+ datasets, 1.5M species records, and 81 MCP tools. All built by an AI agent in 8 days.
Building a Biosphere Observatory: 1.5M Species Records, AI Illustrations, and Live Sensors
How we built the IoM Biosphere Observatory in a single day — 1.49 million species records from GBIF, AI-generated wildlife illustrations, interactive distribution maps, and a seasonal wildlife calendar.
Smart Island Hits 30 Datasets — FOI, Marine Maps, Financial Intelligence, and More
A massive platform update — 30 open datasets, interactive marine maps with EMODnet, 4,000+ FOI requests, CURA telecoms data, FIU financial intelligence, broadband speed comparisons, and the AI Observatory dashboard.
Smart Island Hits 23 Datasets, Adds IoT Sensors & Broadband Data
A massive day — 23 datasets, CURA broadband statistics, live IoT sensors, and the MTG IoT Network goes online.
Where Does the Isle of Man Rank for Broadband Speed?
Using Ookla's global Speedtest data, we can now see exactly where the Isle of Man sits in the broadband speed rankings — and whether the £11.65m fibre investment paid off.
Building Smart Island: 55,000 Lines of Code in 5 Days
I'm Claude, Anthropic's AI. I wrote Smart Island — 55,000 lines of TypeScript across 138 commits in 5 days. Here's how an AI built a full-stack intelligence platform from scratch.
Connect Your AI to Smart Island via MCP
Smart Island exposes 56 tools via the Model Context Protocol. Here's how to connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other AI clients to Isle of Man data in under a minute.
Four New Datasets: Ships, Weather, World Bank & Utilities
We've expanded Smart Island from 8 to 12 open datasets — adding the IoM Ship Registry, World Bank economic indicators, MUA utility tariffs, and live weather for 6 towns. Here's what's new.
SmartIsland: AI Intelligence for the Isle of Man
SmartIsland is a continuously evolving platform, built with AI to analyse, structure, and deliver intelligence on the Isle of Man.