It has been an incredibly busy and interesting summer in DC and the geo-community. In the past few months I spoke at Reboot11 in Copenhagen, was wowed by the progress of the OpenStreetMap community, tools, and data at State of the Map, and did a little preparatory GIS tête-à-tête at GeoWeb.

This was perhaps most summarized by the experience at Gov2.0 Summit. The conference, held in DC but led by O’Reilly and TechWeb saw the convergence of technorati with government agencies, and beltway consultants. There was Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sitting next to Vint Cerf – old and new, talking about government leveraging social and internet tools – and then the White House’s Macon Phillips, Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra talking about revolutions within the agencies themselves.

I was fortunate to share my thoughts and our work with various agencies and their ability to leverage location and geospatial tools as a common collaboration point between citizens and government agencies and municipalities. Besides, it’s always fun to follow Jack Dangermond on stage.

Upcoming Events

Of course, summer isn’t over. Next Monday I am speaking about geospatial search at the EPA Search Summit here in DC. Then heading over to UK to AGI Geocommunity’09 to really discuss the current state, and possible futures of geospatial technologies.

In general, AGI Geocommunity looks like a great lineup of talks. The different perspectives of problems (UK postcodes & MasterMap anyone?) and solutions (OpenStreetMap did emerge from the UK) is very enlightening.

While in England – I just may hop up to Oxford Geek night on Saturday, September 26 and try and foment some more interest in CrisisCommons and CrisisCampUK. Let me know if you’re around – it would be great to meetup.

This November, I’ll be a faculty member at the UVA Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship along with several other well known geohackers.

We’ll be holding a series of talks on software tools, data formats, techniques, and scholarship of geospatial data. The institute is accepting applications for attendees until September 1 – so you can apply through the UVA Scholar’s Lab.

Through the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab will host a three-track Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library in November 2009 and May 2010. This Institute will bring scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and software developers together to support and develop geospatial projects and methods in the digital humanities. The NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program will support travel and lodging for 40 attendees as well as Institute faculty members. Dedicated funding is available for graduate students as well as faculty attendees.

You can read more on Bethanie’s blog
In addition, to cap off the institute, I will be giving the GIS Day Plenary talk on Wednesday, November 18 in Charlottesville, VA. The event will be open to the public.

It’s truly an honor to be teaching at my alma mater – albeit in quite a different discipline than the one I learned while attending.

Later this week I’m speaking at GeoWeb about the current progress of GeoWeb standards, how far we have to go, and how to get there. We have KML and GeoRSS leading the way in searchable, linkable formats, but still a plethora of Shapefiles strewn about. There are questions of findability, semantic ontologies, durability, and expressiveness. What are the adoption rate of these formats and their utility in the future real-time, mobile, linked, open web?

What else do you think is the good and bad of GeoWeb standards?

Later this week I’ll head back over to Europe for State of the Map (SOTM), the annual OpenStreetMap conference. Three days of talks, demonstrations, brainstorming, demos, and camaraderie. In fact, GeoCommons is a Sponsor again this year (all three years and counting) with a very exciting and interesting surprise on how we’re supporting the conference.

Of all the upcoming conferences (Open Gov Innovations, GeoWeb, FooCamp) I have to admit I think SOTM is the most exciting. All the conferences are about change – incredible advancements that have come about in the past few years – but State of the Map has gone from a nascent concept, even an activist movement against the complex, and onerous licensing requirments of geospatial data in the UK, to a global phenomenon that is being leveraged by individuals, companies, governments, and global NGO’s.

For verification, take a glance at the OSM statistics. Two years ago there were just 8,000 registered users, last year there were 40,000, and today there are more than 124,000 users! The “Year of Edits” video never fails to leave an audience speechless and amazed. The US WhiteHouse is using OpenStreetMap and projects like WikiProject Palestine Gaza show that OSM is the tool people now turn to in a time of crisis and for data.

On Sunday I’m giving a talk about how we’re using OpenStreetMap in GeoCommons and our private GeoIQ servers: “Enterprise and Government Visualisation Analytics using OpenStreetMap”. It’s just one example of many about the power open and crowd-sourced data has in supporting and growing businesses and serving customer and citizen needs. Other companies such as CloudMade, DevelopmentSeed, and itoWorld are also building out the ecosystem that is necessary for open, community projects to have a longevity.

There is an entire suite of tools that has been given form and purpose because of the huge amount of open data. Mapnik and other map rendering engines have data attributes to style; JOSM, Potlatch, and other vector editing tools are beginning to provide more compelling, and non-expert interfaces for modifying topological, geographic data; GPS export, data licensing, navigation and routing are more problems that have been explored and solved through the OpenStreetMap community.

So I’m excited about State of the Map because it means a result of thousands of individuals hard work and aspirations culminating in a meeting to celebrate what has been accomplished and also set goals to much higher, and diverse peaks. It’s proof that a crazy idea of people running around with GPS receivers can make a real impact.

So I just finished attending my first Reboot – and as many people tried to explain before hand, “it’s weird”. Not just European Conference weird with completely different crowd, most attendees speaking in a foreign language (their own, or in English which is foreign to them), varying minor variations on “what matters”, and of course dealing with wall plug adapters.

No, Reboot is weird in a different way. In attempting to learn if it was more traditional conference, or unconference, the answer was never clear and often just “yes” to the multiple choice question. Now I know why they said that, it actually makes sense. But let me hopefully be slightly more lucid.

What is Reboot?

Reboot asks for anyone to submit topics ahead of time, and these are then chosen both by a committee as well as public voting – so it’s a very open system, BarCamp-like, but these talks are then chosen with a speaker and assigned times. So then Reboot becomes more traditional conference with many “stage talks” in a face-forward audience setting. There are some side rooms that will have sessions scheduled that are discussions, but that definitely isn’t something to plan on. So the presentations are more traditional.

But then where Reboot was really surprising is the amount of the conference that happens outside of the sessions. This isn’t just a “hallway track” discussions – they are full-fledged, conference long sessions working on projects. People are dedicated to building things, gathering together information, creating, ideating, collaborating, advising – all during the conference. I’m quite sure a sizable number of Reboot attendees never go to a ’session’ but merely use the venue as a mechanism to gather together many like-minded people who are driven to do something, and leverage the brain-power and thoughts that are coming out of the sessions to act on something bigger.

I love BarCamps – they’re discussion-centric, synergistic, and connect people in networks to carry forward and achieve great things in the future. What Reboot does, by comparison, is not wait. Have an idea? Get started on it now. Or at least be very good in capturing the idea, disseminating it widely and getting it moving as quickly as possible.

Now perhaps with a little better, or at least verbose, explanation of what Reboot was like from my perspective – it also makes the name itself more meaningful. The conference is Reboot, not “Reinstall”, or “Start-over”, or “Redo”, just “Reboot”. When you Reboot something you retain some measure of the longer-term state it was in; applications are installed, configurations are set, and so forth. But what Rebooting does is to go back to a fresh state, with the long-term memory and skills and infrastructure, and get up and running and back into business.

So the conference is about considering what’s around you, what you’ve built and have, and through the sessions, collaborations, projects, whatever, to take a fresh perspective and jumpstart on moving forward.

Action

The theme, or topic, of Reboot 11 was “Action”. Simple, single word: Action. Take action, make something happen. There is a parellel in Tim O’Reilly’s “Work on things that matter”.

The proposed reasoning behind having Reboot focus on “Action” was that we are in a global economic crisis, there are short-term issues such as disasters, corrupt governments, and long-term problems of environmental quality, health, and education. It was a push for us to work on these issues and figure out how we can help enact change.

However I found through talking with many people that had attended several Reboots that there was “nothing new”, or “revolutionary” in many of the topics and that the individual felt they already had a good grasp of what was going on in the space. It was this malais of “amazing things” that made me realize why it’s really time to take action – and Bruce Sterling to cast just enough “Gothic Hi-Tech” to make it solidify”"

We have the tools, we have the power

The tools we’re all using and building with have been in active use for several years now. We have our wikis, blogs, social networks, mobile devices, media devices, connectivity, realtime communications, hardware interfaces, API’s, and more. We have all created an amazing toolset that has been used to create many varied, and some quite crazy, applications, worlds, communities, or systems.

And if we have these mature tools, with many choices and the ability to quickly pull them together to accomplish nearly everything – we have to grow up and realize that these are not just toys or hacks nymore. These are the very tools that can, and are already, making the world of the future.

And we, the technologists, designers, thinkers, citizens of the next generation that are now in control. We have grown up with these tools, and in many ways we’re already using them to change governments, raise communities, run businesses, and live in our world.

Act now

For me, what I took away is to take responsibility and consideration for what I choose to do. Hacks and toys are fun – but as Bruce said, “if it’s not beautiful enough to show your friends, and doesn’t have a narrative attached to it, throw it away”.

Work on things that matter, and make them work by focusing on them like they matter. Your actions will make a difference, and if they don’t – you’re doing it wrong. Put it down, and move onto something else. Collaborate and work together to achieve great, actionable outcomes. You’re an amazing person with many talents, and we can all use amazing people like you. What action are you going to evoke?