High Earth Orbit

Crisis Cartography

2013-04-22T15:45:20Z

The technology and methodology of digital interactive cartography is nascent but evolving. The fields of human-computer interaction and GIS are converging from both the consumer market: “where is my nearest good restaurant?”, as well as from the enterprise: “where should I open a new restaurant chain?”. Designing useful interfaces requires understanding user workflows, iterative development and testing. Too often this effort can be retarded by conflicting viewpoints, changing market and business models or even lack of imagination.

While the consumer and enterprise markets are slowly iterating through concepts, there is nothing so significant as a crisis where minutes and meters can mean the difference in saving a life. What can we learn from the agile and emergent development of tools during short-lived response events which provide insight into further research and development. This post are some notes from my talk at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Los Angeles.

Crisis Cartography – AAG 2013 from Andrew Turner

Familiarity and Expectations

During a crisis people use the tools that are available and ideally familiar. This often means repurposing in a way that was never intended but yields innovative new applications. For example during Hurricane Katrina people caught in New Orleans could not call 911 or other emergency numbers. Instead they would text their family members in remote states such as Michigan who would then call back down to Red Cross with the address of the person that was stuck in the flooding. By contrast typical mapping and analysis would take days to gather data such as shelter locations, flood modeling inundation zones and finally the proposed response. With people knee deep in water this restricted and limited capability had demonstrable and severe impact on the efficacy of the response.

Subsequent disasters demonstrated the effective repurposing and development of cartographic tools such as the New York Public Library historic map warper to instead rectify un-classified CIA maps of Haiti that were used to derive road networks in OpenStreetMap. Then using consumer-grade hiking GPS units this data was made available to search and rescue teams from Virginia to find the locations of trapped individuals. What had been designed for researchers and public volunteers provided an easy to use, on-demand, and flexible mapping interface for people around the world to provide overnight support to responders that were deploying on the ground.

This cycle of prediction, warning, response, relief and reconstruction is a well known pattern in disaster management. Unfortunately current typical cartographic products are either static aggregates that provide only cursory assessment at a coarse geographic area, of little use in actual response and planning; or they are disjointed, out of date, and paper-based. During a disaster there is cognitive overload from the inundation of information and with a static product no way to filter or zoom into a particular area of interest. It is a by product of a bygone process of unidirectional information flow through a priori information channels.

Fortunately the information landscape is dramatically evolving. In the past few years alone the ability to dynamically share data, collaborate and develop maps has enabled new mechanisms for understanding and response. In reflecting on the Haiti response, particularly relating to the public information sharing, numerous emergent technologies as well as traditional organizations were able to innovate and provide better access to important data and support. This will be an increasingly imperative capability as the types of data, and expectations of response are changing as well.

In recent American Red Cross surveys, they discovered the following surprising traits:

Emergency social users are also most likely to seek and share information during emergencies. While they look for the hard facts—road closures, damage reports and weather conditions—they share personal information about their safety statuses and how they are feeling.
Three out of four Americans (76 percent) expect help in less than three hours of posting a request on social media, up from 68 percent last year.
Forty percent of those surveyed said they would use social tools to tell others they are safe, up from 24 percent last year.

Opportunity

Simply, the people involved in the informational aspects of crisis response are changing. Technologists, domain experts, diaspora, and numerous other citizen communities are now actively and intensely engaging within moments of a disaster to build maps and gather geographic data. And the people in the affected area are leaning to their daily tools such as mobile phones, twitter, maps, and Facebook to find out and share the event as it unfolds.

The result is that cartography, and in particular interactive geographic analysis and visualization, is evolving. Ushahidi is a well-known platform for gathering and publishing crisis data from eye-witness reports and aggregated media. Emerging from the 2008 Kenyan elections, it is a simple example of the need and creation of a new tool for public and media to temporally animate, investigate and track realtime reports.

However there are still many shortcomings of the current tools. While there are clear positive impacts they have had – the combination of ad-hoc technologies that are separated from user-interaction design or disaster management workflows results in a lessened benefit from the thousands and millions of volunteer hours that are being contributed and could benefit saving lives.

Crowd Sourced Data

At the heart of the volunteer technical communities, and arguably the capability they are the most suited to support is creating, curating, and making data accessible. Using tools designed for casual bike-riders and pub connoisseurs has actually proven remarkably effective. Fortunately there was designed flexibility meant to accomodate peculiar attributes such as wheelchair accessibility or tree diameter meant that it could be used to house a humanitarian data model.

The US State Department is supporting microtasking analysis of imagery for IDP camps and structural damage. How do you train new volunteers to do remote sensing analysis and data input in a repeatable, and accurate way?

On the ground, US wildfires have demonstrated the potential for crowd-sourced photography as well as geolocated Tweets to provide updated fire progress, impact and evacuation. What are the interfaces for visualizing official models compared with potential fire models from uncertain data? And how do you account for the over-abundance of information from singular sources, “the Racerboi8 problem”.

Dynamic Visualizations of Dynamic Events

What are mechanisms for defining more structured and even dynamic information? During Hurricane Sandy High School students at IMSOCIO called gas stations to get the current availability of fuel and power that was published in a KML feed and map. How do we visualize this data to reflect recency (i.e. is older data have questionable accuracy), or trustworthiness (did the station owner not want people to over-run his shop so gave false information)?

Can we even detect an event through implicit information such as the increased viewing of imagery over specific areas such as identifying the location of the meteor through map tiles.

Mobile Citizens

Most importantly, even going back to 2005, people are increasingly connected through mobile devices. These new personal tricorders offer a continuous connection to people, alerts, and access to maps that can provide important information in evacuation as well as response; but they require a different interface for viewing and annotating this data.

And sometimes Paper is still an incredibly important medium. During a disaster text connections are surprisingly resilient, but power may not be. Having tools for personalized, and even ‘zoomable’ paper map may mean someone being able to find shelters or meetup with family members such as through Safety Maps.

Room for Exploration

Crisis events compel people to go above and beyond their normal efforts in order to help communities in a time of need. Maps serve a fundamental underpinning for responders and citizens alike. Cartography has the opportunity to evolve in order to address these important issues, and create new, innovative methods and technology that also have broad application.

Faith in Services, Trust in Data

2013-03-22T13:43:03Z

Earlier this week Google announced Keep, their new service for quickly storing notes from your phone and online. As others have pointed out, it’s similar to the popular Evernote. Feature comparisons aside, the launch of new services providing common, even essential, access to my information highlights a disconcerting trend.

Faith in Services

Underlying these product decisions is the manifestation of the products that we use. Historically we purchased physical media that we would hold and use as much as we wanted. Despite a company going out of business, ending a product or even upgrading the version we could choose to keep using the product as we had originally acquired and intended. Whether that was Word Perfect or Windows 95, we were in control.

With the advent and ubiquity of connectivity and the Internet, we have become more reliant on services – popularly referred to as The Cloud. There are numerous benefits to this architecture such as scalability, reliability, accessibility, and maintainability. Users can access information from almost any device whenever they need it without worrying about location, versions, or upgrades.

Consequently we put our faith in the service and the trust that there is connection to the internet, the service will be working, that our information is not leaked or shared, and even that the company or product continues to exist. We are now reliant on decisions for which we have little or no control.

Reality of Providers

Evernote has a vision to create a 100-year company, a nearly unique perspective for a new information technology company. It is the kind of pledge that instills a confidence that considers building a long-term relationship with users and exhibiting through products and services.

By contrast, invested and publicly traded companies have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits and increase shareholder value. They are legally required to change their products and business to contiuosly get the most money possible. Users are not shareholders and as such are beholden to the decisions to improve revenue. This is not bad per se, but can have consequences in products that live or are shutdown that may seem arbitrary to users.

Google is well known for this behavior, as recently in shutting down Google Reader, though even more relatedly the Keep-similar closing of Google Notebook that was part of a regular “spring cleaning”.

Beyond mere existence of these services we are still reliant on the stability of the service provider. The recent launch of SimCity was plagued with service failures due to scaling and security. And there are many more intentional service related restrictions, particular if the service provider is a hardware manufacturer with clear incentives to lock you into their physical platform.

Trust in Data

The point is that we must realize the vitalness of protecting and accessing our data. Whether my personal notes, email, photos, business plans, or any other information that I have, it is imperative that we retain ownership and rights to the underlying data. Users should be able to hold their data with permission to access, use and reuse regardless of future business decisions.

Services are a value-add. They make my data more useful and perform amazing capacity such as character recognition, entity extraction, geocoding, analysis, and recommendations. But these cannot come at the detriment of control and access to the information that exists independent of a particular product.

Consumers are relatively new to technology, and there is a constant flow of marketing, features, and new products to try. These are easily appealing and exciting while overlooking to the potential implications of investing into a particular service. I hope the culture evolves to where access to the data is not an esoteric or unrelated conversation but is a forthright requirement of any new service.

OpenDataDay and Hacking for DC

2013-02-25T14:30:55Z

I often say that Washington, DC is a city that thinks more about the world than it does about itself. Situated as the Nation’s capital, headquarters to a multitude of multinational organizations, and even home to people from all over the world, DC works at large scales that cover other cities, regions, and countries. Even the governance of DC itself is subject to the politics and power of unelected officials.

So it is a bit ironic that the international OpenDataDay Hackathon, hosted locally at the World Bank brought together so many smart and technically talented people to work on local DC datasets and solutions.

You can see the summary and links to all of the various projects on the OpenDataDay DC hackpad. There is a wealth of interesting links, problems, ideas, and output; from mapping the locations of trees by species, to analysis of DC public school vs. charter school performance and walkability.

Beyond just this one day event there is a burdgeoning community of people that are data astute and gathering together to perform some really great projects. DataKind is hosting a follow up DC DataDive on March 15-17, 2013. Data Community DC is an umbrella of at least four other meetup groups discussing data visualization, data science, data business and the R analysis platform.

And if you want to focus on DC, then the new Code for DC chapter of the Code for America Brigade has a few focused projects looking at social services, neighborhood councils, education, and even fire hydrants. Sometimes it’s necessary for us to spend our time and volunteer efforts locally in the communities where we live.

Everyblock closes

2013-02-07T18:47:30Z

In 2007 at the beginning of the popular emergence of local maps and amidst a changing journalism industry, an innovative platform was launched that provided a uniquely local and up to date view of cities. Everyblock, a news feed for your neighborhood, was built as an open-source platform that used government open data feeds to provide a user friendly dashboard of the various activities, crimes, 311 service supports, and even chat messages and social media posts.

Unlike most other sites, Everyblock really considered how people could access and understand the numerous data that permeated around their home every day. At the time I was working on Mapufacture which took a more abstract view of the same data and I always appreciated the care and experience the Everyblock team put into making the information accessible.

Communities and Their Tools

Unfortunately today NBC, whom acquired Everyblock in 2009, decided to shut the site down without any warning. There are likely justified reasons why NBC did not want to continue to support the site. Adrian shares his views on the shutdown and the community are sharing their suprise and thoughts on the official post. Clearly people that enjoyed and even relied on Everyblock as a way to access important local information are now left without this key resource. This is obviously not the first, nor the last, time that a web site that people loved and expected to work was shutdown and they were required to move to an alternative.

Underlying this particular example is something more concerning. Everyblock was a site that was designed to build community and as an interface to local, civic and government life. In some ways it could be considered as a basic public good that served a need unmet by other official and commercial sources. Additionally it provided a forum for citizens to share their experiences, needs, ideas and issues. I always thought there was a lot more opportunity in Everyblock to create real collaboration for neighborhoods to solve their local issues.

People are generally more mobile. I know very few people that now settle into a single place for decades, let alone in the neighborhood that they were born. We are moving, shifting, and finding ourselves consistently in new areas where we don’t understand the local issues or have an opportunity to meet all of our neighbors. Social networks reinforce maintaining our existing connections independent of distance which subsequently can ‘fill your dance card’ and leave less time to connect with the neighbors.

In addition we are constantly engaged with technology and the web. By providing an avatar for the real world in our online social networks, Everyblock reconnected us to the place where we live and our children are growing up. Perhaps Everyblock didn’t reach a ubiquitous engagement that may possible or desired, but it was a well crafted platform that was useful even if it only had a single user.

Git and go

The Everyblock code is open-source and the OpenBlock Project is an attempt to build a community around the project. However there are many other components that go into a site such as the data feeds, community management, and general infrastructure and monitoring. Creating an instance for a city is a big effort that also requires a long-term strategy. I’m curious if this becomes a government run service or if local technologists such as Code for America Brigade could become reliable and sustainable provides of this type of service.

I am truly sad to see Everyblock go – and very thankful to Adrian, Wilson, Paul and Daniel for their vision and work to make Everyblock a reality and inspiration for what is possible.

2012

2012-12-31T22:31:50Z

“Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
– Charles Dickens

A Year Changes You

A year ago I was helping run a startup, determining how we would sustain and grow our business in a competitive market. At the same time we were a happy, childless (yet expecting) couple enjoying complete freedom of schedule. Within twelve months our lives have dramatically changed.

We sold the company and I’ve change from a track of decreasing company size back up to a large company. I no longer have to worry about making payroll, taking out the trash, and maintaining server uptime. Fortunately this relaxing of responsibility coincided with the biggest gain of responsibility nearly anyone can have – a kid.

Over the past 6 months we could not have asked for a better experience. Sayge is continually happy and laughing, a model of happy child. The stability and support of a well-established company have allowed me the flexibility to shift my schedules to be the attentive and caring father that I want to be.

Live’s Lived

The year has also included unfortunate experiences. Corrie’s grand-father finished his 96-year amazing journey. Who else have you met that was at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, earned a Law Degree, an MBA from Harvard, served in World War II, was a representative in government, and successfully ran his family business for 40 years.

A long-time friend passed away far too young from women’s cancer. Rachel was an incredible attractor – able to easily bring and connect friends. She helped my sister get her first job at HHS and was a fearful Carcossonne player. I wish Sayge could have met her.

Living Forward

Perhaps the theme of the year should be “relative”. The dichotomy of life and loss, of success with stress. Responsibility is just beginning. There is much to accomplish and improve for our and the next generations.

Next year I’m excited about even bigger dichotomies – solving large, important problems in technology and society while making sure to enjoy and live through the simple pleasures and new experience of life. If we commiserated or celebrated this year – thank you, it was wonderful to be with you. And for those of you that I have not yet met, I look forward to celebrating with you in 2013.

CBC Spark Interview – The Future of Digital Mapmaking

2012-12-05T16:26:33Z

Earlier this week I was fortunate to interview on CBC Spark with Nora Young about the “Future of Digital Mapmaking”. We discussed a wide range of topics on the state and future of map making. Open data communities such as Openstreetmap, location ads, Google and Apple’s new platforms, augmented reality and more.

I truly enjoy thought provoking conversations that think more broadly about the domain and where it’s going. I hope you enjoy the interview and please let me know any comments or thoughts you have.

(direct mp3 download)

Guerilla Geography from Daniel Raven-Ellison

2012-11-15T12:58:55Z

As part of Geography Awareness Week National Geographic hosted a talk about guerrilla geography by Daniel Raven-Ellison. You can read more about Daniel’s work on his site or blog The Geography Collective.

Daniel’s talk was enjoyable and resonated with what made me adopt geography as a new career. He passionately seeks to experience and perceive places and to teach others. His Mission:Explore books provide intriguing experiments, particularly for children, to learn more about where they live, how they move, the history, culture, and environment of places. And particularly relevant to guerilla geography, about how they can impact and influence this space as a medium for expression and commumity.

He also riffed a bit on psychogeography and reminded me of Tim Waters’ sense tours where he advises people to stop when they see something interesting, close their eyes and smell or hear in order to leverage the other senses in really understanding a place. Or Christian Nold’s biomapping and sensory journeys. Daniel has done “urban earth” walks through major cities while taking a photo every 8 steps. The result is a visceral flow through living urban centers giving you a mere glimpse of the life, paths, and people that inhabit these areas.

Daniel is building very simple and effective tools and experiments for anyone to engage with geography. It has large similarities and goals to my work in Neogeography which utilizes potentially more advanced, and often technical, tools but in similarly colloquial ways to share stories and personal experiences with location. What’s also interesting about his work is that he introduces the scientific method in subtle ways such as challenging kids to record the outcome of days they walk under a ladder and days they don’t in order to determine if there is in fact an impact on one’s luck.

Perhaps more controversial, but arguably important, he encourages children to “Meet your meat” that you’re going to eat. Visit the local farm to see the cows, sheep, or other animals and understand the flow of food through the land and from the environment that forms your meals.

I’m not sure if they’ll post his talk from this week, but you can watch his talk from NatGeo Live!.

Citizen Volunteer Technology for CrisisCamp Sandy

2012-11-06T17:50:39Z

After a disaster some people want to do more than just send money, they want to share their time, knowledge and expertise to provide potentially far more valuable assistance than just $10. This weekend, volunteer hackers and technologists convened at CrisisCamps in over 10 cities and virtually online to assist in developing tools to assist the ongoing response and recovery for people affected by Hurricane Sandy. Driven by requests for help from citizens as well as traditional response organizations it is clear that there is a shift into new capabilities for remotely helping in disasters.

Collaborating in realtime over Skype, IRC, Wiki, Hackpad, and likely more these volunteers in collaboration with HurricaneHackers worked on over a dozen projects to assist people in finding &reporting open gas stations, identify building damage, room sharing, getting kids back to school, and a lot more you can read about on the wiki. For the more visually inclined, Willow from Geeks Without Bounds made a great summary Prezi presentation.

What fascinates me about FEMA/Whitehouse work this weekend is that it was a given that a solution be crowdsourced. We’ve come a long way.

— Di-Ann Eisnor (@DiAnnEisnor) November 5, 2012

On Saturday I had the opportunity to visit the FEMA National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) and work directly with people from FEMA, the White House, and Red Cross. In particular I became involved in the problem where gas stations around New Jersey and New York have been running low or out of fuel and citizens currently cannot find where to get gas near their location or what they can expect to pay. This data should be available from the companies, and indeed HESS is a model that is openly publishing their fuel inventory data.

What was surprising were other unofficially official sources of data that are from volunteer organizations and users that are more accurate and more up to date than anything that was available through official organizations. All Hazards Consortium is an non-profit that is publishing daily exports of data from the point of sales for about 70% of the fuel stations. This is augmented with data from ImSocio, a group of Youth Community maping group of high school students in Somerset, New Jersey. They are individually calling stations directly and updating the information that is published in an open KML feed and maps.

Together, a non-profit and a group of volunteer high schools students working through the weekend, represented the some of the best up-to-date information that was broadly available. Additional sources of data included social media monitoring of hashtags like #findgas, #njgas, #nygas, mobile web collection interfaces, and communities such as Waze that published their drivers’ ‘chit-chat’ notes about gas station status.

Individuals armed with easily accessible open data and no programming skills can literally publish informative interactive web maps during their lunch break and then send them out to the world via social networks. — Chris Brown

FEMA has made it very clear that they want to enable as much local support and response as possible. They are in the business of coordination and the more that citizens and local organizations can help one another the better the resiliency. The concept of “crowd-sourcing” means as much for on-the-ground scaling as it does for web scale. And the “crowd” is not just full of amateurs, but experts in a variety of domains and experience that are offering tremendous support that can provide meaningful support to affected citizens. There is still a lot of learning. It was clear in discussions at the NRCC that these concepts are new and difficult to accomodate within the traditional response protocols, but there is definitely a desire to evolve and adapt to these new communities.

There will likely be more CrisisCamps coming up in the future that you can join. If you just have a computer and internet connection you can help.

Academy of Achievement

2012-10-29T21:30:45Z

Congratulations, you’ve succeeded at the first third of your life. How are you going to succeed in the next third? – David Rubenstein

If you read any of my posts over the last week you may have noticed a few interesting checkins and comments from well know places and people. I was incredibly fortunate to be an invited delegate to the Academy of Achievement summit in Washington, DC. It was a singularly unique opportunity to dine with US Supreme Court Justices, a personal tour of the capitol building from members of congress, and generally inspired by intelligence, capability and surprising humility of the world’s most accomplished people.

The Academy of Achievement is an organization celebrating its 50th anniversary connecting and recognizing individuals that have undoubtedly achieved renown. Nobel laureates, public heads of state, Pulitzer prize authors, and numerous other world changing leaders of our time. Once a year they gather to induct a new class of honorees who then share their experience and insights to the next generation of leaders and changers, or as they referred to us “troublemakers”. The class ranged from well-respected leaders such as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Congressman Edward Markey, and Judge Sonia Sotomayor to innovative creators such as Sal Khan, Nobel Laureates Roger Tisen and Adam Riess.

There were extremely impressive colleagues in the delegates as well. You can read about Khaled’s work providing communications to the rebels in the overthrow of Gaddafi. Bassem Bouguerra left his engineering job at Yahoo to rebuild Tunisia; Humairai Wakili built an NGO to incubate women-owned companies in Nablis, Palestine; and Josh Nesbit‘s use of mobile phones to dramatically alter access and capabilities for medical support around the world are just a few examples of the delegates who are so impressive they challenge you to evaluate what is worth working on.

Held this year in DC, the entire summit was shaped by the current US politics and pending elections. Regardless of the of the ideology of the speaker, nearly everyone shared their frustration and concern about the deep divide by the US leadership. Yet despite this current concern there is admiration of what “America” is – more than a country or set of single laws, but of an idea that is permeating more of the world each day and particularly by the people that are currently shaping their own countries.

The Academy of Achievement publishes the talks online through iTunesU and on their website. Over the four days of intense discussions I’ve had many new inspirations and reflections that I will be writing about more.

Any event that ends dancing with Aretha Franklin, Colin Powell and others is undoubtedly an amazing experience.

London 2012 SuperMap

2012-07-27T18:51:45Z

Today begins the 2012 Olympic Games held in London England. Five years ago in 2007 I was heavily involved in the initial project to build specifications and prototypes for the “SuperMap”, the mapping platform for the LOCOG (London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games). Mikel and I through Mapufacture and working with Nick Black and Steve Coast then at ZXV Consulting put together some innovative concepts on how to engage citizens, media, and government in the lead up to and during the Olympics.

The SuperMap, in essence, is building its own slice of the GeoWeb. Multiple data sources such as Olympic news, construction details, events, and schedules need to be brought together and updated rapidly, and made available to internal staff, partners, and the public. To accommodate the diverse needs of its users, data should be made easily available to global users and developers to enable them to add more information, spread knowledge, and personalise their interface to the Olympic SuperMap.

We proposed combining the realtime data aggregation and personalized capabilities of Mapufacture to enable anyone to build custom maps and itineraries that would be accessible via web, mobile, and paper interfaces. We proposed working closely with the OpenStreetMap community to map the current and evolving landscape of the London area as the Olympic venues were built to have up-to-date maps that also had consideration and buy-in from locals in the area.

Our suggestions also included a robust API (application programming interface) to allow developers and organizations to build specific and intriguing applications that would serve various types of users and interfaces.

There were a large number of interesting and unique opportunities for the London 2012 Olympics to improve community involvement with the games, raise environmental awareness, leverage new technology to improve the engagement and experience of visitors and global spectators.

It was a large and ambitious goal and one that still barely exists on the web now five years later. The hope in working with LOCOG was the potential focus, timeline and desire for engagement would jump-start these ideas. In the end, at least they have a slippy map and a few mobile apps.

I wish everyone the best in the games. In particular I’ll be rooting for a few amazing of the people I’ve worked with.

Life’s Opportunities and Successes: A Company and A Son

2012-07-18T17:06:17Z

Two amazing events in my life coincided last week: our company was acquired on Monday, and our first son arrived on Friday. Together these were tremendously fulfilling occasions that I am fortunate to experience. These events are point times within a much longer continuity of stories that spanned months, and even years of effort, learning, frustration and hope.

The real success behind these events are the people that worked together to make them so successful. Together we developed deep trust and shared perspective that permitted us to overcome personal and external differences that otherwise would have prevented us from success.

At GeoIQ we formed a tightly integrated team that is able to accomplish industry impacting vision and technology for the world’s biggest customers. Since 2005 and through many iterations we built an online community and concept that sought to open access to data and tools for people to make important decisions; whether that was global climate change, international development, or the ever popular personal analysis in buying a house. It was a fun and exhilarating escapade that provided unexpected experiences.

A startup company requires diligent work, flexibility, and collaborating with people that have different needs and attitudes to come together to achieve something bigger than ourselves. I found the parallels between running a startup and building a family amazingly similar. You constantly seek to understand and control situations, but in reality you are preparing for whatever happens to be able to respond positively. The fun is learning to take advantage of those opportunities and weave them together to create a story to be proud of.

Personally, I am intensely satisfied with what we’ve achieved. Thank you to everyone: foremost my wife for enduring so many difficult and long days, as well as family, friends, teammates, and the community for making these experiences so rewarding.

Our newest and most important project

2012-07-18T17:05:18Z

Update: We’re happy to announce that on Friday, July 13 Sayge Clark Turner was born and is extremely healthy, and quite hungry.

As a very outward facing technologist, I tend to be very open with a lot of my information on location, work, and thoughts. I do keep personal things very private, but sometimes there are things that I am too excited to not share.

Corrie and I are eagerly expecting our first child in the very near future. Being in DC we found it fitting that he is due on July 4, 2012. And fortunately for those who are familiar with DC summer weather the sooner the better to avoid the heat.

I have a number of projects in mind and will share details as they are relevant. In particular I’m investigating a few concepts of “quantified children”. And all the discussion of location privacy sharing depending on context will become much more personal.

We’re looking forward to soon introducing you to our newest Neogeographer/Rocket Scientist/Environmental Engineer or whatever he wants to be.

Improving the OpenStreetMap Profile Page for more Social Interaction

2012-05-29T13:25:30Z

A few weeks ago at the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend that we hosted at the GeoIQ offices a small group of us chose to focus our time revamping the user profile page. Our goal is to improve the engagement of new as well as long-time users. There is a large number of new OSM members that have no, or a single, edit. Through the community the best way to engage users is to locally run parties and collaborate to improve their local areas.

Mikel recently shared his own thoughts and wish list in terms of making OpenStreetMap more social. A public community of 500,000 members should feel pretty vibrant to the world. And there is no shortage of incredible engagement among the numerous mailing lists, wikis, projects, IRC chats, meet ups, conferences, and general social media interactions.

Currently, the profile page includes a lack of very much information. Basic information on when I joined, when I accepted the new terms, and an optional description of myself. There is little to no information on my activity, contributions I’ve made over the years, groups I’m work with such as MappingDC, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap. That I have been active in mapping areas in New Zealand, Kenya, UK, and very active and located in Washington, DC. Arguably the page is nearly useless.

When signed in I can see some more information such as all mappers nearby me but the interface is a bit lackluster and not really useful for connecting with people or seeing recent edits I may be interested in seeing and updating.

Compare that with Richard Weait’s project where you can visualize the contributions, types of editors, activity, and more. While the data are arguably merely interesting it at least provides a measure of my engagement that I can be use for my own information and remind me to help out more, or provide others insight into my experience and where I might be able to offer help to others or receive help to become a better mapper.

Goals and Inventory

As a group we derived an overall goals of what the issues are and what might be possible. We posted our “UI Inventory” on the OSM Wiki to share some of our thought process.

A primary goal of the weekend was to really just get my hands into the code, understand the structure and get experience through implementing some new features. The platform is built in Ruby on Rails, so it’s fortunately very familiar to other projects I help develop.

Within two days we made a good first pass development of a new page that cleans up some of the general display, highlighting some of the user’s statistics. More prominently we brought out a “Stream of activities” the member has done such as written an diary (blog) entry, contributed a map edit, or friended someone. These are still a bit preliminary but laid the ground work for bringing forth more activities in order to convey to visitors about the user’s contributions and also for the user themselves to see and reflect on their efforts.

We’re early in this process, primarily sketching out ideas and improving some simple features and issues with the pages. If you would like to share your input, leave a comment or join the design@openstreetmap.org mailing list.

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.