Last night I spoke at Ignite Where2.0. The community and ecosystem of Where2.0 continues to utilize cutting-edge technology to provide consumer and business services and needs. You can locate activities, friends, stores, media and more and have it integrated into mobile lives and online personas.

These are all great advancements, and are blurring the lines between the online digital data and our interaction with the real world. However it’s vital that we realize the real potential application of these technologies and what our legacy is on the entire world. How can we engage with global citizens, understand their needs and desires, and collaborate on building channels of information and tools that serve our individual and collective goals.

Almost two years ago I moved from Michigan, with stints in California, to Washington, DC. I moved at an auspicious time in our nation as the highly contentious presidential election approached at the same time concerns on transparent monitoring of democratic elections and process loomed. Social media and streams such as twitter, smartphones, voice technology and visualization provided the components to demonstrate how we can enable citizens to share their experiences, their problems, and for us to openly see problems and victories as they occurred.

This same concept applies just a well around the world. Open platforms such as Ushahidi have helped bring citizen reporting in elections in India, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan – each to different outcomes – but still in a way that harbinges a more open and transparent government process.

Now through my experiences with CrisisCommons, working with multinational organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations, and the federal and local governments, it’s clear to see how the leading edge of the Where2.0 community can have an amazing and unparalleled impact in providing understanding and change in global and local issues: Environment change, food security, humanitarian development, education, and disaster response.

In looking at the various open government initiatives, the questions arise in looking past the press release to the realized value of sharing data with businesses and citizens. I was struck my the foresight of the Arkansas AGIO team in the realization of how sharing data as broad and wide as possibly helps mitigate their vulnerability to disaster by enabling responders open access to vital information that would assist in response.

This concept is apparent in how OpenStreetMap was successful in Haiti. With the lack of official, government supplied data the best solution was to crowd-source the information from varied sources and rebuild the national data infrastructure, external to the government itself. While it has been unpredictably successful, the value continues to be the open access of the data by any and all organizations, and the eventual adoption by the government itself in rebuilding its capacity. The hope is that the government continues to openly collaborate with the global community in managing and maintaining this data so that the situation doesn’t need to reoccur.

In summary, the community is making a difference. The tools we develop in WhereCamp, IRC, open-source communities, and from companies are changing the capabilities of crisis response and development. My message is to urge the larger community to continue to think how their solutions can have a more broad impact.

If your technology can help a consumer find a great $4 latte, that’s good for your business. If it can also help a child find clean water near their village, that’s good for the world.

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.