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.

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.

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.

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.

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.