Last minute opportunities made it a good idea to head the O’Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego. I’ve wanted to go several times in the past - ETech is an enlightening look into what cutting edge techniques and concepts companies are using - typically outside of the norm.

As my global network of contacts grow, it’s always great to meetup with people that I’ve digitally conversed with often. Jeffrey Johnson,aka Ortelius, is going to meet up and show off some of his very cool Aerial Imaging with RC Airplanes, part of the Open Aerial Map project.

The first day I’ll be sitting in on a part of Marc’s Food Hacking Workshop - though this past Thursday I got a very in-depth tutorial on proper cooking concepts and culinary design.

So if you’re at the conference, make sure and find me. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader on figuring out how to do that.

My trip to San Francisco was timed to ensure attending one of the “thematic” Foo Camps - this one on Collective Intelligence, held at the GooglePlex. The concept of an emergent intelligence from a group is not new. It is the basis of democracies and also more recent books such as “The Wisdom of the Crowd”. However, the evolvement of the web has made engaging a huge amount of users not only possible, but incredibly easy. And the ability to monitor nearly every single action they take moves the question from “what if you could harness the collective”, to “what do you now do with all this data”?

From what I gathered at the conference, it is very early stages for the web crowd on discussing these ideas. The fact that there was a very small representation of sociologist or anthropologists that no doubt have a greater understanding of the general concept is indicative of typical technologists having difficulty engaging traditional experts and gathering experience being applied to new techniques. There was an interesting mix of business/market analysis, developers, designers, and technophiles. Because of this broad representational range there was a difficulty in having a common conversation since the taxonomy of collective intelligence is not well understood.

I’ll go into this more in follow-up posts, especially as applied to Geo, but there are many varied aspects of CI: collaboration, collection, explicit and implicit, superlinear vs. mechanical turk. Each has incredible power and capability, but it’s ineffective to apply a broad brush stroke of design and understanding across the entire gamut.

Kim Rachmeler, VP Customer Service at Amazon, Inc., summarized it best in her “award-winning” quote:

The network knows what the nodes do not.

There were a number of notable projects, a few summarized here:

Beth Noveck showed the very excellent Peer-to-Patent review system that is leveraging public analysis of patents in order to help alleviate the mess the USPTO is currently in. Blaise Aguera y Arcas had an excellent demo of SeaDragon, scaleless image zooming - and hoping that we can do something similar with OpenStreetMap. More CI based, Eric Horvitz had interesting concepts on selective sharing of user-gps tracks for route and traffic prediction building. Humans as sensors.

There was also discussion about “reputation”, which really is like saying Collective² Int. - identifying experts and then using their intellingence to solve problems or make suggestions. Which gets to more underlying questions about whether a “crowd” can really be smart, or if it is just extra power behind a few smart kernels.

I did find it particularly humorous of the potential the underlying purpose of the conference on “Collective Intelligence” was in fact to get together a number of intelligence people to garnish their ideas.

Last reminder, proposals for the O’Reilly Where2.0 conference are due December 3. So make sure and get your submissions in!

The ‘topic’ this year is “Location is Relative”. Claus Dahl said it best during his presentation on Imity two years ago: “It’s not the fact that I’m *here* at this hotel, it’s the fact that I’m surrounded by all of you that makes this location important” (paraphrased)

Are you buiding a business based on proximity? How about hyperlocal search and collaborative routing? It’s not enough to assume your users are driving a car and want to get from A to B the ‘fastest’. Maybe they want to go the greenest/prettiest/easiest/funnest (ok, that’s not a word). How does someone find out what’s interesting around them? Whether it’s a concert, friends, construction, transportation, or shops?

Two of the finalists in the latest LBS contests both included “find products near me”, and Dash networks demoed a similar functionality coming up in their internet connected PND. But what’s the next step with “near me” search?

PND’s advertisements are ubiquitous this Christmas shopping season. Nearly every “Black Friday” circular sported a Garmin, Miro, Magellan, or other Navigation aid on the front page. Why this new rise in public interest of GPS? What will be hot next Christmas?

Crowdsourcing is getting hot - OpenStreetMap led the way in large-scale community driven mapping, but now both TomTom and Googleallows you to submit corrections. Where is that data going and how to you enable community-mapping?

Where2.0 next year will also feature a day of tutorials. So if you have some new tools or techniques you want to share, you should submit a proposal to teach other attendees about it.

For more inspiration and ideas, check out the CFP suggestions.

I spent much of Geography Week and GISDay at the University of Kansas as an invited speaker on ‘Neogeography’. I was lucky enough to meet the coordinator, Josh Campbell, at FOSS4G, and invited to join the illustrious group of speakers, including Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk and Brian Timoney of The Timoney Group. GISDay has often been very technical, or rah-rah ESRI products. Josh had a goal this year to introduce innovations in geospatial technology through use of open-source software and open-standards. Although I will point out that Jeremy Bartley, a member ESRI’s ArcGIS Server development team had an impressive demonstration of their new ArcGIS 9.3 and the ability to integrate with web mapping platforms and open-standards.

Aimee Stewart gave a really intriguing presentation on LifeMapper, employing OGC interfaces and distributed computing for biodiversity modeling. I’m hoping she’ll submit a topic to Where2.0 2008. Jude Kastens‘ talk on flood mapping was very pertinent considering recent disasters and very threatening dams in Mosul and Three-Gorges.

My presentation slides are available here. They are slightly condensed, as they re-used some of my GeoStack slides from Where2.0, so left them out of this export. My goal was to address the increasing discussion, and questions around “What is Neogeography, and how does it fit with traditional GIS and cartography?”.

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To this end, and inspired by my visit to the historic maps showcased at the Festival of Maps, I gave a brief history of cartography (as I understand it) and how Neogeography can be viewed as a resurgence in ‘colloquial cartography’. I will write more on this later, but I was struck by many similarities between previous mapping efforts of ancient and medieval peoples and neogeography of today. Storytelling, ephemeral location markers, and emergence of new wayfinding schemes have repeated themselves with various rounds of technology and culture.

Based on this contextualing of Neogeography, I then offered a proposed, first draft, definition and illustrated various means by which Neogeography has led the way in providing an understandable, user-centric interface to powerful geospatial technology. This has been most recently, and very powerfully, demonstrated with Christopher Schmidt’s San Diego Fire map that employed MODIS satellite imagery, LandSat basemap, Flickr images, Google MyMaps documentation from citizens and news agencies, OpenStreetMap roads, and PictEarth Aerial images, to provide a usable, up-to-date, accurate, information on the occuring disaster.

An Evaluation

I was definitely concerned, going into the day, how my message would be received. I wasn’t sure of the audience, but assumed it would consist primarily of Geography Students and Professors, both of whom are typically ensconced in proprietary, ‘old-school’ solutions. Both because those are the tools they know and have data formatted for, and because they typically don’t have to pay for the potentially expensive licenses. And like typical academics, they rarely have to be concerned with general public-facing usage of their software or results.

The presentation went “well”, in a I didn’t fall over success, but I felt there was some broad understanding but not necessarily a deep connection with what I was saying and trying to convey. I did get follow up from the non-geographers in the room that they found my presentation really enlightening and gave them inspiration and material to start investigating adding geo* to their particular application. This is exactly the kind of person that needs to connect with Geographers and GIS experts. I guess the medium will be ’slippy maps’ and ’spinny globes’ and more importantly, common open-data standards such as GeoRSS and KML.

On Thursday I gave a 2-hour workshop/tutorial on Neogeography. This was another strange presentation to prepare for. I had to remove a lot of basic material from my slide deck. I could safely assume a Ph.D. Geography student knew what “latitude and longitude” meant, and how projections worked. However, they probably (and in reality didn’t) have much experience creating webpages, FTP, or Javascript. My personal goal was for the attendees to walk away knowing how to take the KML files they created from Brian Timoney’s tutorial and be able to display them online via Mapstraction or OpenLayers. We had success.

Two-way street

I really did enjoy the entire trip, simply because I enjoy talking with people and sharing ideas, but also because the exposure to a large group of GIS users was such an enlightening experience. Typically in my previous meetings and conferences I’m either surrounded by other Neogeographer-types or even non-geospatial people. I still think there is a long-way to go to convince GIS users where and how they fit into the new tools, and how Neogeographers have a lot to learn on how to properly, and powerfully, engage geospatial technology.

I live in the MidWest, specifically South-East Michigan. For four years I lived in a sleepy small town in the Commutershed of Metro Detroit. What this means is that there is little to no “Geek Community”. For years (decades?) the Metro Detroit area has seen a brain-drain of its brightest to sunnier (or at least better connected and funded) climes such as San Francisco & Boston. Almost anyone interested in technology is usually either locked up within a big corporation (or somehow affiliated with such), or has just left. The remaining live in the star of South-East Michigan, Ann Arbor. Did you that 4 of the Google Management team went to the University of Michigan - including Larry Page?

I moved to Ann Arbor in March and have since found a really great, if small, tech/entrepreneur community in the town. I’ve been wondering why there aren’t more tech groups, communities, hack-sessions, and whatnot. There are some, but they’re disjointed - and typically focused solely/primarily on ‘enterprise’ more than ‘cutting-edge’. Therefore, I was excited when initial talk came up around having a BarCamp in Ann Arbor.

However, when the actual details of ArbCamp were announced, things immediately seemed odd. $15 admission fee and a $50 keynote speaker, and only 9-4 schedule. There was immediate discussion within the community about the appropriateness of a keynote speaker and hefty fee for a BarCamp styled/themed/named event. From my perspective this is exactly what I’ve felt is wrong with the South-East Michigan Tech area. It has a lot of potential, interest, and energy, but is very quickly (and sometimes subtly) wrapped in corporate shroud, commercialized, officialized, and repackaged to appeal to suits - and at the expense of the truly innovative tech community.

I’ve been to several BarCamps, all of which have been incredible (if hot, stuffy) and free. I’ve also been to FooCamp, from which BarCamp itself derived its name, but retained the concept. The concept is terrific and given the option between attending a professionally run conference and a BarCamp (assuming both free/low-cost) I would take the BarCamp.

Where am I going with this?

My point - besides a small rant - is that I still think its great a small group of people have taken the initiative effort to put together a community event and tried to garner interest. I am still going to attend and have encouraged others to do so too - and do our best to ensure it truly is an open, interesting, innovative, collaborative, provocative event. And I’m also trying to get people to go out after the ‘official’ event ends at 4PM (and the expensive, book-toting keynote speaker begins) and continue the geekage.

However, I think the entire debacle brings up the question of how to ensure community-driven brands maintain their level of quality and expectation. How does the ‘BarCamp’ community make sure that events that use the BarCamp resources, concepts, and good name follow the general tenants that the community prescribes (and no, that does not mean making everyone happy, the loudest are not the majority). The same holds true of other community standards. What would happen if there was a Microformats+, or GeoRSS 2.0 (ok, there is that, but just a confusion caused by Yahoo documentation).

There isn’t really legal recourse - and I really hope it wouldn’t have to be that. The community probably doesn’t actually hold trademark (though in some cases they do, like OSM I believe). Is it just public ranting? Black-ball by the community? Counter-action?

I’m not sure. I don’t think there have been a large number of challenges to these brands yet - but there probably will be in the future. Forking of communities, and not code.

I really do want the local community to succeed. However I think the suits, and geeks, need to really look at what the underlying problem is and why there is a such a brain/talent drain to the coasts. And no, its not because you’re missing some key ‘Java training course’.