High Earth Orbit

The Future of Space Hacking

2012-04-12T16:20:55Z

Today is Yuri’s night where the world celebrates the first human spaceflight on April 12, 1961. Over the past 50 years we have had varied successes and advancements in our space technology. I believe that today we are on the brink of a new space revolution.

The 1960’s was the birth of modern computing. The transistor radically changed the size and cost of building digital computers. At the time, there were only a few computers in the world, they were extremely large, complicated, and you were fortunate if you could get any time on a machine. It was difficult for people to imagine the broad availability of computing. They were for precise calculations of unique problems.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Clearly that has dramatically altered from room-sized, multi-ton hand built machines to ubiquitous, handheld devices with more power and connectivity than was ever imagined. This access to nearly unlimited computing power revolutionized commerce, communications, and inspired entrepreneurship from garage hackers to multi-billion dollar companies that are built on ideas and code.

I believe that we will see the same trajectory of the space industry. Satellites have been large, expensive, and limited to a few institutions that could fund, operate and utilize them for unique problems. But that’s changing.

We’re beginning to see the advent of hobby space engineering. Startup companies inspired by the X-Prize foundation brought the attention to the public. But the revolution is quietly and methodically moving forward as the components and capability for rapidly developing and deploying satellites dramatically decreases.

NASA is testing launching off the shelf commercial Android mobile phones into orbit called Phonesat. You can now buy books on how to build your own satellite platforms from O’Reilly. UpdateAnd the government and agencies are hosting open events for the technology and science communities to collaborate on fast paced, iterative solutions such as the SpaceAppChallenge.

There are still physical boundaries that make access to space difficult and expensive. When you need to throw something at 7.8 km per second, it is not going to be easy. Fortunately with the increase in commercial satellite activity there are opportunities to piggy back on other payloads. At $10-12k it is still expensive for a hobby. But consider that the first Apple Lisa computer cost $9,995, in 1985. That’s $22,600 in 2012 dollars.

There is a lot of childhood excitement and vision captured in our goals for the future of space. One day we will again walk on the Moon and likely on Mars and hopefully other bodies. In the meantime, I’m excited to see the new advent of an open and innovative space engineering culture.

FourSquare and OpenStreetMap

2012-03-02T14:31:50Z

Earlier this week FourSquare announced that they switched their website maps from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap data hosted by MapBox. In what has been a growing trend of broader adoption, FourSquare remarks the utility and success of OpenStreetMap. Additionally it’s another movement in the recent switch2osm campaign since Google began requiring paid licensing for high-usage of the once completely free Google Maps.

Currently the switch is only for the website, which I admit I have used less than a dozen times and the mobile application will still be using the native Google Maps libraries. There are a number of valid reasons for this, not least of which is that Google is not yet charging for mobile maps usage, though I imagine it only a matter of time before they do and also for developers to build comparable mobile mapping libraries for OpenStreetMap.

Value of the Basemap

There are several intriguing aspects of this announcement as well as the reaction. First is that the change of the basemap, while intriguing to the geospatial and data communities, is likely highly irrelevant to most FourSquare users. Would there have been much news had the switch been to Microsoft Bing maps? Probably not. The interest is clearly impacted by the community, and general good will, of the OpenStreetMap project. Each adoption by a major company further verifies its value, as well as solidifies its continuity as organizations build their own business with OpenStreetMap as a core component.

Second is that there have been a number of companies whose primary, or recent, goal has been to be a trusted provider of OpenStreetMap basemaps. CloudMade, started by one of the founders of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast, was created for exactly this purpose. Additionally MapQuest has been using OpenStreetMap as a tactic to increase adoption of their long-standing mapping platform as well as insure themselves against likely increasing commercial data provider costs. However it was an extremely recent technology, albeit from a longer established company, to be the one to provide the OpenStreetMap basemap for FourSquare.

Development Seed’s MapBox is truly a compelling creation of technology and innovation. They have done extremely well adopting the best of breed software, and the development team that built it, with Mapnik. And they combined it with new technology to make it fast, and a differentiating and compelling story for developers by using Node.js. Technical details aside, the design and thought into the representation of OpenStreetMap clearly was a key differentiator in FourSquare using Mapbox to serve their OpenStreetMap tiles. And I’ll also add that Development Seed is a local DC and East Coast company – something I don’t doubt was interesting to the New York based FourSquare in pushing against the typical Silicon Valley technology scene.

Of course, in the end it is just a basemap. This is the background canvas that contains the actually valuable information that FourSquare has gathered and users engage with. The switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap does not in any way change the value or usage of the FourSquare application and community. Technically there is no real difference – it’s possible to restyle most any basemap today, and I imagine the switch from one provider to another was a relatively trivial code switch. FourSquare, or others, could just as easily switch to a new basemap if it was important to them as a business or their community.

More than a Basemap

What I am most excited about, and believe FourSquare has an almost unique potential to enable, is the adoption of OpenStreetMap as more than just the canvas for visualizing check-in’s and user activity. OpenStreetMap’s true value is that it is an open, editable, relational database of geographic data – where the basemap is merely one way to access the information. What makes OpenStreetMap the future of location data is that the information can only get better, more up to date more quickly, and better representative of unique and varied views of a person’s place.

Several years ago Dennis and I had a conversation just after the initial launch of FourSquare about the potential of using OpenStreetMap. At the beginning, FourSquare only worked in specific cities, and in his considering how to expand it everywhere the options were between having a blank database and having an OpenStreetMap populated dataset. Obviously the tremendous potential was having the then nascent community of FourSquare users using and updating OpenStreetMap data. Unfortunately for usability and I assume business reasons (e.g. build your own database that you can own) FourSquare didn’t adopt OpenStreetMap at that time.

However, imagine if FourSquare adopted just this technique. Leverage their millions of users to improve the OpenStreetMap database. OpenStreetMap itself suffers from the common platform issue of being everything to everyone. This is confusing for new users that want to contribute to know where to begin. They may just want to include the road in front of their house – or the park down the street and the great coffee shop they frequent. Unfortunately the interface for performing these activities often requires understanding of British terminology of places and an overwhelming choice of categories, tags, and drawing options.

FourSquare by contrast is forced to be simple and focused. Users are quickly engaging and disengaging with the application that should capture the data and reflect it to the user for verification. Because my activity is being tracked, FourSquare can know that I’m on foot in the US and in an urban area, so don’t start by showing me hiking trails, or highways but show me restaurant and relevant places of interest – allowing me to dive deeper if I want to but making it simple for the casual user to improve the data. I believe that only through simple and focused user applications will OpenStreetMap broadly enter into the common use and be able to reach the end tail of location data.

Of course, this assumes FourSquare, specifically the investors and board, don’t see their user collected place data as a key and protected dataset. There have been enough POI selling companies in a dying market. There are now businesses such as Factual, and still CloudMade, who are focused on making this data openly available – though themselves as brokers to the data.

Despite continuing to cross numerous impressive adoption hurdles and over seven years of development, OpenStreetMap is still a young project. Its adoption by FourSquare is indeed another momentous occasion that heralds optimism that it will continue to grow. And as companies like Development Seed, CloudMade, MapQuest and others adopt OpenStreetMap as a core to their business – providing not just services but truly engaging with the community and providing focused context and value, OpenStreetMap will only get better.

Google Maps Terms of Service and Pay

2011-10-27T17:23:11Z

Today Google announced that they are enforcing free usage limits on the Google Maps API. Beyond the free limit of 25,000 views per day, sites will start having to pay $4 per 1,000 views. They will automatically charge your credit card based on these usage fees and it’s not clear if you can set a “cut-off” limit or if it will have the similar suprises as overseas cell charges.

I find this is a bit of a surprising action from Google. In 2005 they changed the mapping and geospatial web by providing a powerful, easy to use great API (eventually), and primarily free of charge slippy map platform. The term “GoogleMap” became synonymous with being able to pan and zoom through the entire world without any reloading of the page or poor user experience. Since then, there have been millions of sites that have used GoogleMaps to provide simple map views and location services. Assumedly this information has been of huge value to Google in understanding interest, spatial-context, and generally eyeballs to Google tools and content.

Google has also worked to monetize maps, often subtly through sponsored map markers, and other times more directly through in-map ads. Each of these decisions brought discussion and disent but it was difficult to argue with the fact that the tool was still free to use. Google has clearly put real value in content and engineering into Google Maps. The quality of geocoding, data availability and power of the API has always been extremely capable and arguably the best of breed.

Now, with a very direct pay requirement being imposed this will dramatically change the adoption of GoogleMaps. Developers will have to consider very carefully how they will afford the potential – and optimistically likely – fees that the service will require as it becomes successful.

Fortunately, there are still a few really good alternative options for developers of sites if they can’t afford the usage fees. MapQuest has really embraced the future of open by supporting and integrating OpenStreetMap into their sites. Microsoft Bing maps are very capable and there are many more – not least of which is a developer “rolling their own”.

This interesting change by Google also validates abstraction libraries such as Mapstraction. Mapstraction provides a common API where a developer can easily switch between map provider libraries without having to rewrite their code – something that would likely cost much more in the short term than paying for usage fees. On GeoCommons we use ModestMaps to be able to switch to any map data provider service.

I’m very interested to see the general developer reaction to this change.

Geospatial Preservation at Society of American Archivists

2011-08-30T15:17:36Z

Cross-posted from the GeoIQ Blog

Last Week I participated in a panel with spatial archival experts at the at the Society of American Archivists. Led by Butch Lazorchak of the Library of Congress, and also joined by Steve Morris from GeoMAPP, and John Faundeen from USGS, the panel was a full spectrum discussion of “Geospatial Data Preservation” ranging from the Library of Congress’ $10 million acquisition and access to the infamous Waldseemüller 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia of ‘America’ USGS’s environmental conditions for storing historic satellite imagery to GeoMAPP’s work in gathering time-stamped state geospatial data. Butch in particular provided an inspiring overview on what’s special about Spatial – density of data, representation vs data, and the difficulty in capturing interactivity of more modern digital maps.

The Archivists were a new community to me – people that are passionate about the capturing and storing of data – often until the end of time! But they also vary in their core missions – often diverging on the utility of the captured data and information. Very few seem to be really thinking about archives as a useful resource today and only focusing on the long-time storage and eventual access of the data by some unknown entity. As one member of GeoMAPP said: “All of the Archives are storing this superseded GIS data in dark archives and aren’t really providing access to the datasets and don’t have web mapping interfaces”

Clearly, we think a bit differently about archiving – choosing to focus foremost on access to data which will result in improved archiving of data, distribution, and analysis on utility and benefit. My presentation Maps as Narratives: Making Spatial Archives Accessible

focused on the concept that maps have been, and are increasingly a vital resource for people in their daily lives and work. By providing users tools to access and use historic and realtime data, we can then capture this data and provide it to other users and data repositories.

Particular to internet feeds, and social media we can’t easily predict what data will be useful. Neogeographers create visualizations of twitter streams, photos, foursquare checkin’s, friend locations. How do we know which of these are the modern correspondances of tomorrow’s US President or Global business leader? Through easy mechanisms for sharing data and maintaining links we can begin tracking this information in it’s varied forms, providing better insight and archiving of data for later reuse, whether it is tomorrow or in 100 years.

Geospatial Archiving – Society of American Archivists

View more presentations from Andrew Turner

Endeavor Shuttle Launch STS-134

2011-04-29T14:15:12Z

I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend the #NASATweetup to see the last launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor – STS-134. Along with 150 other lucky selected people including even @dens, the Obamas, Gabi Giffords, Seth Green, Levar Burton and numerous inspiring astronauts we’ll be at the countdown clock with a front row seat the second to last launch of the entire shuttle program.

Endeavor is carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station that will perform some inspiring science on measuring dark matter radiation. There’s also a host of spiders, aggressive bacteria and other science experiments that will be run on the iSS. I’ll have more photos and stories up soon.

Automatic Road Detection – the Good and the Bad

2011-02-04T15:14:08Z

Yesterday Steve Coast announced that Bing had released a new tool for doing automatic road detection using satellite imagery. The concept is definitely interesting as it provides a way to rapidly generate road data over the entire globe without need of manual tracing.

However, I remarked that it was particularly interesting that Steve was working on this. Several years ago, when OpenStreetMap was still an ambitious but unproven concept many people argued that road detection was a useful, and perhaps necessary, mechanism for actually capturing all the road data. Steve was quite adamant that while it was possible – and he demonstrated it – it wouldn’t work for other reasons.

OpenStreetMap is more than just a set of lines that render to nice maps. It is a topologically connected, classified and attributed, labeled network of geographic entities. Each road consists of intersections, road classifications, names, speed limits, overpasses, and lanes. OpenStreetMap has provided a very rich set of linked, geographic data.

And beyond the data, it has built a community of invested members that careful capture, annotate, and cultivate the data in OpenStreetMap. This means that the data is captured, but also updated and maintained (ideally) with new information, changes, and other entities such as parks, buildings, bus stops and more.

So Steve convincingly pointed out that automatic road identification was interesting, it would circumvent these other benefits of what OpenStreetMap was working on: rich connected data, and a community of volunteers that would build and maintain the dataset. Road detection has a tendency to generate a large amount of data in an area that no one is actively working on the data. So you can gain what appears to be good coverage but limited local knowledge on intersections, names, and other metadata.

I don’t think that these are insurmountable problems. The act of capturing GPS data can be tedious, inaccurate, or not readily possible in remote areas. Road detection can provide this data and users can work afterwards to improve the data, either remotely or using even simpler mobile devices that a user can annotate features without having to capture the entire geographic road line.

So my comment the other day was about pointing out an interesting change in message and strategy. I applaud the work of Steve and the Bing team in developing new tools, but there are many other pieces that warrant consideration. Steve even asked often if the bulk import of the TIGER/Line data was good or bad for the US community. In the end, I believe it was the right thing as it provided a canvas of data using open data that provided a validity to skeptics that OpenStreetMap was viable and valuable.

Now that OpenStreetMap has become increasingly adopted by the world’s largest providers and users of data it is time to evaluate new tactics for gathering and maintaining data. However this can’t be at the expense of what made OpenStreetMap a success for the past 5+ years.

Innies and Outies – Map Sidebars

2010-12-16T15:11:08Z

This morning MapQuest launched their US support of OpenStreetMap at open.mapquest.com. In playing with the interface, I noticed how MapQuest added a tab at some point for showing and hiding the sidebar of search results and other associated design choices and differences.

MapQuest uses an “Outie” tab (highlighted in the screenshot below). The design choice was clearly to make it very explicit for users to show and hide the sidebar as it protrudes into the map interface. The pan and zoom controls are on the right-hand side, so when you toggle the sidebar, the controls stay in the same location. Another interesting aspect is how the map resizes. In MapQuest, the same geographic center and extents remain in the screen center – so as the sidebar closes the map shifts to the left and expands slightly.

Curious about how this varies, I checked in Google Maps. They chose to be much more subtle about their sidebar toggle. It is an “innie” that is subtly hidden within the header. Closing the sidebar turns the selection to an “outie”, but still remains out of the way in the header. A particularly interesting decision is that the map remains in the same location – so the zoom pan controls move but new areas of the map are exposed. So while the user doesn’t have a context shift (points on the map remain in the same area of the screen) the map now needs to be recentered so that the focus area can be kept in the center.

Lastly, looking at Bing maps it’s a bit of a hybrid between the two. The sidebar tab is in the header like Google, but hiding the sidebar re-centers the map like MapQuest. The controls in Bing are in the header, so they don’t need to shift when the sidebar is toggled. What’s perhaps a little confusing is there is also an “X” close button next to the sidebar tab that clears the search results. It’s not really clear why you would want to clear results – and instead there should be an option to go back to the “table of contents” or similar concept that shows simple links for directions and more.

Much like the emergence of Pan-Zoom bars have become the defacto standard in web mapping interfaces – the sidebar has also become nearly ubiquitous. So it’s interesting to see the slight variations as interaction designers experiment with what users will find easy to understand.

CrisisCommons receives funding from Sloan Foundation

2010-12-14T21:18:34Z

It is incredibly exciting to announce that today we found out that our grassroots project, which started as an idea and meeting at an open government unconference, is getting some incredible support to grow and sustain over the next few years. I’ve shared our experiences, and the support that has been growing from academic institutions, companies, foundations, and within our own community.

Today we announced that CrisisCommons is receiving $1.2 million in grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, through the Woodrow Wilson Center, to spend the next two years providing support between the volunteer technology community and crisis response and development organizations.

Over the last year of supporting numerous local CrisisCamps in developing mobile, data, analysis, mapping and other tools supporting the response to the Haiti earthquake, Pakistan floods, Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, and other regional crisis events we’ve learned a lot of lessons. In particular, there is consistently a “crisis crowd” that seeks to provide aid and assistance through expertise, information sharing, and technology development. However, organizations have difficulty in conveying their needs, or adopting solutions that fit appropriate security, quality, and usability metrics.

Through this support, CrisisCommons will be building out technology infrastructure support, in coordination with the Oregon State Open Source Lab, that will host projects and CrisisCamps. Research fellows will be made available to develop analysis and recommendations in event response and development that will help shape the future of volunteer technology community response and adoption in crisis events. And members of response organizations will be convened with the many open-source projects to collaborate, share experiences, needs, and develop better partnerships that will hopefully positively impact how crisis response occurs.

The community has been amazing, and the response to each and every event and camp unique and compelling – it’s just the beginning. We couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome from a completely emergent and very organic phenomenon. Thank you!

Read more about the grant on the CrisisCommons blog.

Heading to WhereCamp5280

2010-11-18T14:36:14Z

I’m enroute to the mile-high city of Denver that boasts a plethora of geo-talent for WhereCamp5280. Today there is a ‘hackfest‘ at CU Denver Campus, then on Friday a full day of discussion, brainstorming and defining the future of geo.

It’s almost half-way between Where2.0 and WhereCamp5280 is stacked to be an interesting discussion of the current state of affairs in what has been called “the year of location”. And given the cadre of people that will be coming to WhereCamp5280, such as Waze, MapQuest, WeoGeo, Safe, Google, USGS, ESRI, numerous other geo-geniuses, and of course, a cadre of FortiusOne engineers – we definitely should have some fascinating discussions. I hope if you’re nearby you can make it too!

Humanitarian Disaster Coordination Workshop

2010-11-16T22:32:44Z

This week I attended and spoke at the Humanitarian Disaster Coordination workshop held at UVA’s Darden School of Business. Focused primarily on the role of logistics in response activities, organizations such as DHS/FEMA, UPS, US Coast Guard, American Red Cross, and academic institutions like LSU and Michigan State University shared their experiences in supporting the emergent, dynamic, and chaotic operations of distributing resources. The topics for this workshop primarily focused on Demand Signal Visibility – who needs what, where?

I found the world of crisis supply chain operations fascinating in the complexities of moving something like tents to remote areas of China or even locally like Louisiana. There is a very complex landscape of Federal, State, and Local government, VOADs (Voluntary Organizations Acting in Disaster) such as Red Cross, FBOs (Faith Based Organizations) such as Salvation Army, and the Military. And that’s not even considering the complex organizational and operational processes within these organizations. Clearly the effect is a working, but highly inefficient and potential fragile operational capacity in responding to disasters. The flood of unwanted in-kind donations (as high as 90% of donated goods need to be discarded because they are unusable), competing interests, conflicting operations, and communications issues result in frustration and a concern that in a catastrophic disaster – particularly within the United States – that we would be ill-prepared to respond effectively.

However, these organizations are very interested in understanding how they can better coordinate and collaborate. There is a clear realization of the need to put in place better plans before a disaster occurs. The entire purpose of the workshop was to convene the different communities of government, military, NGO, private industry, and academia in order to share difficulties and brainstorm solutions.

Emerging Trends

In particular, my talk shared the emerging drivers, trends, and issues in information sharing and collaboration in humanitarian activities. Major events from Katrina, through Haiti earthquake and reconstruction have highlighted that citizen engagement through digital media is dramatically changing the on-the-ground needs sharing and response capabilities. Traditional crisis response organizations currently utilize a very top-down approach, be that at the “local” level of first responders in the country or region – but also through national efforts led by FEMA – that is being faced with these trends but currently not clear on how to incorporate the data. “Social Media” is currently primarily supported through external affairs and is considered a publicity mechanism. However, as was made clear in the recent American Red Cross Survey, 74% of the polled adults expect less than a 1-hour response to their need when published through a service such as Twitter or Facebook.

Open Sharing: The internet has provided a global, connected network that dramatically lowers the barrier to free exchange of data. Administrative policies focused on open-government, combined with general acceptance that shared data improves the quality and grows value is leading organizations to more readily share their data – particularly with open-standards.
Realtime Data: Inexpensive, connected, and prevalent mobile devices are dramatically increasing the number of ’sensor nodes’ that are publishing data continuously to the web. Social media, resource tracking, news, weather and climate sensors are all providing continous streams of data that have a huge value in providing situational awareness and communications.
Analytics: In order to understand the deluge of information, analysis tools are being put closer to users – particularly domain experts and locally situated groups that
Social Networks: People are connecting and collaborating through online networks, bridging social, family, professional and local communities. They’re able to communicate in real-time about issues they care about.
Crisis Crowds: Around any crisis, communities of interest – diaspora, family, and general good will – is causing people to want to actively participate in helping the survivors.
New sensor platforms: Mobile phones, Texting, broadband internet allow anyone, anywhere to be sharing data and providing information and feedback. In addition, inexpensive digital devices are allowing people to build ad-hoc balloon imaging and other sensing platforms.
‘Citizen’ Engagement: Combined, all of these capabilities are actually allowing the local, affected populations to have an immediate, positive impact on their response. Neighbors and communities are able to assist one another and coordinate with official response organizations.

Work we’re doing

Groups like CrisisCommons have a lot to offer as it combines members of these response organizations with technologists, private industry, and citizens in developing agile and supportive capabilities. In the workshop it became clear of the potential and growing need to utilize digital media as part of operational support and not just as public outreach. Integrating aggregation, analysis, and curation tools of the huge flows of data are vital to organizations so that they can understand their own operational picture as well as the broader ‘common operating picture’ across the entire disaster.

At FortiusOne, we’ve built GeoIQ to integrate dynamic data such as Twitter and Flickr with logistics information of shelters, hospitals and other infrastructure to provide these common operating pictures both within organizations as well as on the ground through field-deployed systems. GeoCommons has served as a tremendous repository of data and information analysis that augments these operations by providing to the general public the capability to contribute and share these analyses.

Disaster response is changing quickly – information technology playing a key role in quickly augmenting local and remote capabilities. The future is in combining these with actual logistics of materials through the international and national responders to be more effective and supportive.

Map Tiles to go

2010-10-12T13:46:12Z

Back in February of this year we worked with the World Bank, USAID, and CrisisCommons to deploy a large amount of map imagery and tiles to the Haitian Government and clusters working in relief. We included a forked version of crschmidt’s haitibrowser to work offline on USB sticks.

One of the issues we encountered were the vast amount of pre-rendered tile images that needed to be moved to the device. The overall size was not that large – in the hundreds of megabytes. It was the number of files that caused issues in copying and replicated these USB sticks in order to aid in the proliferation of data.

I’ve long been an ardent supporter of SQLite and Spatialite as Open Data containers for geospatial data. It’s a portable, offline, open standard, relational data store that provides great access and compression. About a year ago we even added Spatialite support to GeoCommons – so anyone can convert data to a SQLite database.

Almost exactly three years ago, Mikel put OSM on the iPhone after realizing that Apple was using SQLite to store the tile cache for maps. It makes simple sense to put blobs of images inside a table schema for fast storage and retrieval.

Earlier this week Development Seed released a command-line toolset called MBTiles to bundle tiles into SQLite. You can get the source code here. It’s great to finally have the beginnings of a set of tools to better utilize SQLite for storing and sharing tilesets.

Chris Schmidt has shared his ideas and added broadening support to TileCache in support of storing tiles in SQLite so that anyone using TileCache can now easily load tiles offline.

I’m excited to see more adoption of easy mechanisms for interchanging data – raster and vector. We have a couple of ideas and things brewing in how to combine these tiles with other vector data as well as rendering that could really provide some good mechanisms for open spatial data stores.

GeoIQ relaunched and GeoCommons streamlined

2010-10-02T13:30:42Z

This week was many months in the making. Since Spring of this year, the engineering team at FortiusOne has been very hard at work writing a major refactor of GeoIQ, the underlying platform behind GeoCommons. Originally, GeoIQ was actually three web applications that communicated to one another over HTTP REST interfaces. In many ways it was an elegant solution but also an element of pre-mature architecture. HTTP is not a good medium for very high-rate communications and we found a lot of redundant code in the corresponding Finder, Maker, and Core applications. Besides this, the separation of functionality was a decent user experience detriment. Besides the plaform refactoring we also had a major refactoring of the visualization of (the app formerly known as) Maker.

The end result is a much more streamlined, and maintainable platform. On Sunday we deployed this update to GeoCommons and already you can see an improvement. In addition, implemented a number of new capabilities that we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks. The first one we’ve released is temporal visualization. Similar to spatial panning of the geographic area, you can now pan and animate through time as well. We’ve extended the brewer process to ask users to let us know which attributes to use in the visualization. More on that to come.

Another major effort of our work in relaunching the GeoIQ platform was sharing an early edition of the GeoIQ API. ProgrammableWeb covered the news and highlighted the data management, thematic visualization, and analysis methods that are available. It is all based on REST so should be straight-forward for developers to dive in and start building applications. We’ve also completely wrapped the Map visualization with a JavaScript interface for control on the interactivity and styling of the map and controls. You can now programmatically create your choropleth maps with animated twitter streams – or whatever you want – in a few lines of code.

We already have a number of clients building on our API, so we thought the rest of the World should too. You’ll start seeing some major organizations launching GeoIQ enabled sites and tools in the next few months – prepare for an onslaught of open geodata and collaboration.

Give the new GeoCommons a try. We’re excited to hear your feedback, ideas, and thoughts on additional things we should be providing for you.

CrisisCommons at Harvard and Sloan Foundation

2010-09-08T12:22:20Z

Last week, Noel, Heather, Chiara and I traveled to Cambridge to speak at the Harvard Berkman Center. Surrounded by open internet luminaries such as Clay Shirky, Dave Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, and many others, we shared our experiences in creating CrisisCamp and growing the CrisisCommons. Our purpose was to gain insight into what has become apparent as a yet unmet, but highly desired role of a volunteer crowd advocate to crisis response organizations.

CrisisCamps emerged and have been successful by having connected with the inherent desire for humans to help one another – and preferring to do so in a way that is more meaningful than just donating $5. They want to give of their time, expertise, and capabilities. The last two decades have additionally provided a global information network that has embraced open communication, open source, and open information. The CrisisCamps were venues that hosted people that were willing to spend their spare time, and many times take time off of work, to contribute to the larger community response.

Along the way, we learned many lessons. CrisisCommons was created as a way to capture the knowledge and relationships that were passing through the various response and volunteer communities. We’ve held events such as CrisisCongress to convene the many leaders of the local groups. Together we identified the successes, failures, and gaps in our approach. The goal was to identify what the potential role and methods of CrisisCommons and CrisisCamps should embrace.

Insight Redoubled

While presenting this history at the Berkman Center, the room of normally very loquacious individuals sat in focused attention. Some with knowing and understanding looks, and others with new interest and inquisitiveness. As we stopped to ask for questions we were urged that we had spent much more time thinking about the problem and were providing valuable knowledge on the current response and volunteer landscape and potential to the audience. Where we had sought to get immediate feedback we were providing new information and insight to this experienced group.

Of course, after we had shared the history, evolution, and current plans for the future the audience was ready to share their own experiences (see Ethan’s thoughts)- many summarized as “You’ve done amazing work – and have seen the issues I’ve noticed during my career but have deftly avoided some of the larger pitfalls.”

A major issue that was discussed revolved around the specific role CrisisCommons has with respect to Volunteer Technical Communities (VTC) and Crisis Response Organizations (CRO). Is CrisisCommons an advocate of VTC’s, or is it more of a CRO that has relationships and responsibility with official organizations and also the ability to effectively communicate with VTC’s.

CrisisCommons needs to find a way to act and be perceived as a member of the major organizations without quelling the grassroots and emergent behavior that have made CrisisCamps successful and effective. Yet with more process and research, CrisisCommons can provide real guidance and shepherding of CrisisCamp and VTC efforts that would affect both real, needed, innovation to unmet problems as well as adoption and reliability of developed solutions.

Today we are headed to the Sloan Foundation to share our work and lessons learned. The Sloan Foundation provided funding to support the research and meetings such as CrisisCongress that brought all the active leaders to one place to discuss these larger issues and set a direction forward. We’re truly grateful for their support and look forward to learning what they see as the future of CrisisCommons.

State of the Map US

2010-08-09T13:08:52Z

Unfortunately I missed State of the Map in Girona, Spain this year. I seem to be making every other one – which means I’ll be attending the first State of the Map US being held in Atlanta this coming weekend.

The United States had a much later start in OpenStreetMap than Europe and other parts of the world – but we also have a long history of open-government data that created less of a demand or need for grassroots mapping. However, the benefit of this culture is that the US government, from the local and state levels, all the way to the Federal level, are interested in utilizing OpenStreetMap and connecting with the community.

I’ll be speaking on Sunday about the necessity, and benefits, of moving beyond merely open data to instead focus on collaborative data gathering and mapping. Through our work on GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and deployments of data sharing to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Haiti and how citizens with organizations need to engage together in dicussing the need for data, methods for collectively gathering, and ways to open share and capture feedback in order to improve the overall quality as well as impact of open data.

OpenStreetMap has understood this from the beginning in promoting through “mapping parties“. These parties had the explicit goal of mapping a region and training new mappers, but implicitly they created a community of like-minded local citizens that self-identified their desire to spend time and energy in working together to gather and open data. It is basic initiatives like this that are vital at the local and regional levels.

If you’re near Atlanta, or can come by to the conference, hope to see you there. And regardless, think about how you can connect within your community of interest to start a dialogue and collaboration around open data.

Á la carte Media

2010-08-07T19:39:36Z

In 2000 I cancelled my phone landline because I was carrying a cellular phone that antiquated my physically fixed, low-tech, voicemail-less and (at the time) expensive land-line. Amongst my friends they considered an interesting, but quirky idea to only have a cellphone. Today one in four households in the US are strictly wireless.

So back to media. Why should I pay a 200% cost to view media on a fixed schedule – even though I have a cable DVR for an additional $15/month that still adheres to an antiquated idea of recording only when a program is shown. I have the ability to access on demand, mobile, high-quality media when and where I choose to watch it, free of time constraints.

In addressing this potential, the concept of carrying forward the “rental” model, in both price and usage restrictions, is laughable. If I can’t sell or lend the media, why not just stream it to me on demand and ensure that your licensing costs are met on volume.

Of course, my options on what I can subscribe to are limited. Through NetFlix I can watch movies and some television series – Hulu has another set of programs and Hulu Plus will make older archives more available through more devices. But as we approach the Fall season and popular US based sports start – ESPN allows me to watch some sporting events online – but will they start charging? Will home cooking shows, or other nice networks start their own online subscriptions – each for $10 per month?

We could quickly end up paying much more in á la carte programming if we pay per subscription – something that “cable packages” tried to address by bundling together stations at a discount price. However they suffered from the choice to toss in the lesser watched channels to encourage the edge customers or beef up station count numbers for advertising.

So while we’re entering a time of on-demand, individualized stations we have the liklihood of higher overall costs. I already pay much more in internet access across all of my devices than I ever did for cable alone. But the improved access and enjoyment of that media will allow me to choose and indicate the value of accessing that media – when and how I choose to.

CrisisCommons and Congress

2010-07-15T15:53:51Z

A little more than a year ago, a small group of volunteers coordinated to host the first CrisisCamp in Washington, DC. At the time, we just wanted to pull together first responders, technologists, government, NGO, and interested citizens to discuss crisis mitigation, response, and humanitarian relief efforts. The two-day event was a complete success in connecting these communities in dialogue and projects that led to field deployed projects. In the last meeting of CrisisCampDC we discussed the potential future of these camps – and on a whim I registered crisiscommons.org, installed MediaWiki and Mikel provided a logo.

For the next 9 months, side projects occured and interesting conversations continued, but without a single coherent focal point. What happened in early January completely changed how we thought about volunteer crisis response. In the hours and days following the Haitian earthquake thousands of volunteers around the world began brainstorming and contributing to projects that would hopefully have a positive benefit to the response and affected communities.

CrisisCampHaiti

By Thursday we had decided to host a CrisisCampHaiti in Washington DC and very quickly similar groups decided to hold events in 4 other cities. The CrisisCamps provided a focused venue for developers, volunteers and organizations to coalesce and collaborate on developing needed solutions and information that would assist on the ground efforts.

OpenStreetMap had already been identified as a key resource in the response – starting first with the use of unclassified 1990’s paper maps, and then increasingly with the availability of high-resolution and up-to-date commercial satellite imagery. This provided for a very simple task for general volunteers with a computer and internet connection to begin tracing road networks and infrastructure. Videos like iMapHaiti.com got new volunteers up to speed and mapping within 10 minutes.

The technical expertise brought to bear was powerful. Mobile phone apps such as Tradui for translating between Kreyol and English; We Have We Need, a place where relief organizations can quickly post their most urgent needs and have them matched by generous donors during a time of crisis, and more.

Developers conceptualized and created green field applications, others worked on adapting existing tools to new uses or connecting them together – such as an Ushahidi to OpenStreetMap bridge that would allow for people on the ground to send mobile messages that could update the actual map data.

The outpouring of effort was amazing. In essence, the realization was that people wanted to contribute. And instead of sending $5 via a text message they wanted to donate their even more valuable time and expertise to provide true value and support.

Crisis Continuity

These efforts have been widely discussed, and the power of thousands of connected, capable, and caring technical and helpful people immediately pointed at a problem is compelling. However, what is not immediately apparent is that these efforts, tools, and communities are not completely ad-hoc and spontaneous. They have evolved through joint experiences, social networks, technical exchanges, and personal needs. The tools were developed around an initial kernel of a problem, and then modified, evolved, cajoled, and carried from one event and use to the next. Jesse & Mikel have espoused this concept before.

It is this continuity through many experiences and efforts that forges the applications and organizations. Following the initial surge, a core component of the community continues to talk about lessons learned, how to expand the tool, integrating with other workflows. An interim solution in one event slowly becomes more integrated as part of a response with new features, languages, and capabilities along each step.

This is primarily possible through openness: open-source, open-data, open-collaboration. Open Source software means that any solution developed can be reapplied and improved upon as new requirements and capabilities are needed. Open data guarantees that there is a free flow of information before, and during an event that can reach to any and all responders and volunteers as appropriate. Unforeseen needs can be met by modification and analysis of the data. And finally Open Collaboration means that people freely exchange needs, solutions, and ideas that ensure best options are available.

The continuity is further expressed in the tools and data remaining in the affected areas for citizens and government to utilize. There is less of a vacuum remaining after organizations withdraw as local groups can take ownership of the tools as well as stay connected with the community to build capacity.

CrisisCommons

What has been missing is a community that provides support and coordination of these various efforts. New projects will start and be deployed. But how do NGO’s and response communities identify which tools are available, reliable, and meet their operational requirements? How do they work with the volunteer communities to identify needs, provide ideas and specifications and adopt these tools as they are developed, tested, and supported?

A goal of CrisisCommons is to provide this role. Through international communities as well as local and regional organizations and camps that understand relevant risks and responses to provide for pertinent and continued support.

Organizations such as the World Bank, MapAction and others clearly have identified the potential of working with organizations such as CrisisCommons that can be an interface to the moving surges of volunteers, companies, and tools that they can leverage in reconstruction efforts.

There is a change in how the public is engaging and supporting in crisis response. They are able to augment capabilities and provide surge support. But it is necessary to recognize that the capability to respond and engage quickly and effectively occurs through continuous evolution. In preparation, prevention, and mitigation of disasters we can apply our tools and knowledge. In reconstruction we can modify and integrate the viable solutions into sustainable operations.

CrisisCongress

There are still a number of questions that have yet to be answered about this type of model. This week the first international CrisisCongress is convening with individuals from around the world to discuss the models of volunteer crisis response and technology. Through our discussions, shared experiences and problem solving we will have a clearer vision for how to continue the successes we have had and grow the capability for people to respond and help in moments and places of crisis, whether across the globe or in their own community.

Peek at the Sky

2010-07-14T00:54:45Z

So far 2010 has been incredible, and hectic. There have been numerous great projects, collaborations, and work that have prevented me from taking the time to blog. As I’ve noted in the past, Twitter defuses just enough of idea sharing that I don’t readily go to write articles. However, while these micro-messages relieve the immediate pressure of a concept they lack the general feeling of satisfaction that a more expressive and coherent article provides.

In quick summary of what I’ve been up to – as a means of providing a sort of excuse, preview, and immediate alleviating of the overwhelming feeling that “I haven’t posted in a while, so it’s difficult to start again”:

Besides a two week trip to India with Corrie, I gave a plenary lecture at the Library of Congress on Neogeography and digital preservation of geospatial data that will soon be online, spoke at the UK Socio-Cultural workshop on the use of community and citizen generated geospatial data in crisis response and development work. There is also some hopefully soon news on new countries opening up data.

At FortiusOne we’ve been fortunate to work with many great partners this Spring and Summer in providing open collaborative platforms that we’ll soon be able to share with everyone. In addition, we’ve been heads down building out a host of new features to GeoCommons that will really open the GeoWeb and provide more than just visualization. We also participated in the OGC testbed that experimented with the sharing and annotation of authoritative and crowd-sourced data, much of the lessons and capabilities that are already exemplar in GeoCommons, but we’ll be adding more features to enhance the interoperability.

DC continues to be an interesting place to live – and I’ve definitely had more exposure to government than I ever expected. The area is surprising in the innovation and connectedness that is definitely worth sharing.

While we’re about to launch a number of new capabilities, I’m also able to come up for a bit more air. My aim over the next few months is to dramatically increase my posts. Consider this one as a way to poke through the shroud that will enable more regular posting.

Corporate Social Responsibility – #thepromise

2010-06-10T11:22:55Z

I’m heading up to New York City for the day to hobnob with Edward Norton as well as ThinkSocial, PepsiCo, TED, and others at The #Promise conference, sharing our experience in corporate social responsibility and the potential impacts of using social media and technology in affecting global awareness and positive change.

I discussed our efforts more in depth on the FortiusOne blog – especially about our entire culture of open sharing and collaboration in GeoCommons as well as supporting communities like OpenStreetMap and CrisisCommons.

Next week I will be in London and Swindon in the UK at the Socioculture knowledge workshop discussing our work in a more academically rigorous venue.

World Bank Data released

2010-04-20T13:05:10Z

Announced today, the World Bank is openly releasing all of their indicator data. Previously, the World Bank had provided an API, but the full data downloads is a welcome move in the realization that access to raw data can enable many possible projects and analyses that a simple interface cannot.

The World Bank’s Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank data sources.

It is clear that an organization as wide reaching and impactful as the Bank has a vast amount of data across many organizations and groups. Pulling these data together, normalizing, and sharing them is a noble, and well done, effort.

Besides just the data catalog, the World Bank has provided an excellent inspection by country and indicator for actually moving through the data without having to be a developer. For example, the Central African Republic demonstrates the depth of information on economics, social welfare, health, business development, and the environment.

I also believe I see the indelible fingerprint of the excellent work of Development Seed on the design, and layout of a complex catalog of data, indicators, and communication. Having also worked with the World Bank on several projects, it’s interesting to see a large, multinational organization embracing innovative tools, open data, and information sharing in the pursuit of global development. There are also some more great announcements coming in the future.

And don’t forget to get your World Bank Data iPhone Application.

GITA CrisisCamp Phoenix

2010-04-19T17:18:43Z

Next week I’ll be at Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) conference joining a panel of illustrious peers that should result in quite a rousing discussion on open data, standards, viable business markets, and good ol’ neogeography. Peter Batty is moderating and includes James Fee, Ron Lake, Steve Coast, and myself.

I’m also giving a talk in the afternoon on Tuesday at GITA about crowd-sourced and volunteer crisis response. I will be discussing the history behind GeoCommons as a means for fast, collaborative map production and analysis, and the amazing work by the global communities such as OpenStreetMap, CrisisMappers, CrisisCommons, Ushahidi, and others as it applies to the advancement of geospatial technology and where it’s leading.

Camp Time!

In talking with the GITA organizers about the communities that responded to Haiti, and in general the ground-swell around technologists in crisis response, they were interested in supporting a CrisisCamp as part of the Conference. So I’m excited to say that there will be a CrisisCamp in Phoenix, Arizona on the Sunday, April 25th before the conference at the convention center. You can register at the EventBrite page

Obviously with so many geospatial people around, it’s going to be very map focused. It’s a great opportunity to look at some of the possible integration of the crowd-sourced data and community tools into more traditional, and analytic, platforms. In CrisisCampDC, volunteers such as Scott Broo did a slope analysis of LIDAR data in analyzing IDP camp placement and potential flood areas. How would GIS experts coordinate with the larger CrisisCommons community to identify and support these types of efforts. What are the other potential uses of LIDAR, remote imaging, surveying, mobile reported data, field analysis and paper map printing. And beyond just maps, we’ll be picking up on the number of CrisisCommons projects that continue to grow and evolve. And if you have ideas, suggest some or discuss on the CrisisCamp Phoenix Wiki page.

If you’re a technologist, volunteer, geospatial expert, NGO, government, or just interested, sign up and stop by and join the community! I hope to see you at CrisisCamp GITA Phoenix, or at the conference itself.