In the last few years the increased access to streaming data, user-generated content and mobile media capturing devices has opened up new capabilities in responding to emerging, dynamic situations. I’ve been fortunate to be invovled in a number of projects dealing with immediate crisis such as hurricane evacuation or wildfires, to slow rebuilding of cities through community participation, and even more general technology development through work with Ushahidi and now Swift. I’m still new to the domain and have a lot to learn about on-the-ground action and effectiveness, and integration with first responders and officials.

It’s for just this reason – the mix of expert crisis responders, with technologists, sociologists, policy makers, and many others that there has been a desire for a venue to bring them together to share experiences, thoughts, and collaborate on innovating together. Mikel and Jesse have talked about Disaster Tech and their lessons learned – but there still needed to be a broader discussion of international, local, regional, fast, slow, prediction, analysis, response, and rebuilding around crisis. So it was very exciting that at Government 2.0 Camp, a meeting of interested people metup and we finally pulled together to make this conference a reality.

CrisisCamp will be a 2-day unconference – June 13 + 14, 2009, held this year jointly in Washington, DC and London, UK – to bring together this wide array of people, organizations, and ideas to connect and build solutions together. In DC, the event will be hosted at the George Washington University School of Policy and the Internet – a wonderfully open and well-situated venue that also hosted TransparencyCamp. Equally as exciting is that there will be a Friday night Ignite session on Crisis experience and tools hosted at the World Bank Headquarters auditorium.

Help make it happen

Besides coming to the camp as an active participant, we’re also looking for sponsors. The costs are quite low, thanks to the generosity of GWU, but there are still fixed costs to cover security, A/V equipment, rentals, and potentially food for attendees in order to keep them fueled and together to collaborate. Please contact us via email (crisiscommons (at) gmail.com) or through the sponsorship page directly. We truly appreciate your support and will make sure everyone knows about it – they will appreciate it as well.

In addition – we’re looking for Ignite speakers. While the unconference itself will be open with no preset agenda, the Ignite talks are fixed, 5-minute lightning talks meant to highlight particular stories and lessons that you would like to share with the attendees. Again, email us – crisiscommons (at) gmail.com – to let us know that you would like talk.

I realize this may come as a late notice – things have been very hectic with Where2.0 and other conferences, but we truly hope you can come to this amazing unconference to share your thoughts, tools, experiences, and help build the next generation of crisis techniques.

Signup here for CrisisCamp

Where2.0 registration early-bird pricing ends today (with an extra 10% off via whr09twt1 code now with 25% off goodness with whr09cm25 – or even higher discounts if you qualify under one of the other groups (students, academic, government)).

For me – the most compelling thing about Where2.0 this year is seeing the round-trip evolution of GeoHackers 3 years ago, to viable, growing businesses. It’s been widely recognized that the Where2.0 follow-on, WhereCamp, is where innovators and thinkers spend the weekend considering what the future of location technology is – but now it’s even becoming mainstream.

Steve Coast went from a crazy idea, to a global community, to a funded-global business and is talking about Ubiquitous GeoContext. Dennis Crowley has done it before and doing it again and discussing the social-locative ghosts of past and future. DC is being represented by Eric Gunderson, Tim “Chippy” Waters’ open-source map rectifier is being used in major libraries – and Chris Spurgeon, well, his talks are awesome and the perfect way to end the conference with Maps in Space. And there are even more that I believe will be announced soon.

Besides the evolution of Where2.0 – there is a cadre of immersive, submersive, subversive, pervasive, innovative, locative, mobile, design-principled, compelling.

And there may even be some cool locative games to join in on.

(disclosure: I am a member of the Where2.0 conference selection committee and as such obviously think everyone speaking is awesome and should be heard by as many people as possible.)

Our panel at SXSW Interactive seemed to be a success. While I feel very comfortable preparing and delivering a solo or duo presentation – this was my first panel, either as moderator or panelist.

Preparation

I worked on synthesizing good and bad points from other panels I had experienced. They are often primarily mini-presentations rather than discussions. Our panel met up twice at SXSW before the actual session and each time was very relaxed with interesting discussion. So much so that I had to cut them off to save the “ah-ha” and “oh really?” moments for the actual panel itself.

In preparation, I had each of the panelists send me a bio, their thoughts on a couple of questions, and to gather links of example sites or tools that we could show off during the session. In addition, I prepared a series of talking points that I wanted to cover, various bullets on sub-points to cover, and an overall goal.

Outside of the panelists, other people submitted questions via Google Moderator and emails that helped provide different viewpoints.

Lessons Learned

All of these preparations served very well, though I learned a few important points for future panelists: Prepare a clear, definitative first question. In spite of my well layed out series of bullet points, a short overview and introduction to the topic, the moment I turned to the panel to ask the first question it slipped out of my head.

Another lesson was that while having a good set of links prepared to show, it distracts from the conversation itself and turns into a small demo-fest. It would have been better to leave the links for people to discover on their own and focus on the discussion.

Other thoughts on how to run a good panel were logistics imposed by the conference itself. During our preparatory meetings, we would sit around a table, face one another, and it would be a very natural flow. Body language and eye contact has a tremendous impact on connecting with a speaker and allowing for a multiple-person discourse.

By contrast, panelists sit at a flat table, facing the audience, and have difficulty seeing one another. They either have to turn their body awkwardly to face other panelists, or look to the audience and not notice the panel.

For a better panel, like interviews, it seems better if there were chairs in a semi-circle and could easily see one another and naturally discuss. Wearing head or lapel mics would also create a more natural feel and better discusion.

During the panel, I monitored Twitter for “neocarto” and “neocartography”. Most relevant messages were about attendees having difficulty finding the venue (it was located in the Hilton instead of the Convention Center) as well as waking up late (10AM on Sunday).

Another request that several panelists made was to encourage the audience to ask questions at any time during the panel. The first question didn’t come until about 35 minutes, but once that bubble was broke – there were several others. It worked out fine, but retrospect, I would have planted a question with a friend to make sure and ask after about 20 minutes if no one else stepped up.

Outcomes

The 60 minutes went really quickly. We definitely didn’t get to each of the topics I was hoping to, though we did address the primary issues and questions raised other good points. I’ll follow up in another post about the specific points of the neocartography discussion.

I’m also at the American Association of Geographers next week on two panels – so it will be interesting to compare how those panels operate.

A couple of months ago I post-deadline submitted a panel suggestion called “Neocartography: Mapping Design and Usability Evolved” to SXSWi and asked for people to help by voting for it. I was notified very late that room was made and the panel got the green light. We had to tweak the panelists and topic somewhat from the original proposal, and thank you to those that helped promote the idea and make it happen.

The goal of the panel is to explain and explore the next generation of mapping tools combined with traditional cartographic techniques to encompass modern capabilities and user expectations. The official description is:

Designers are dropping maps into their applications with little concern for usability or design and users are underwhelmed by just another map mashup. We need to move beyond the simple pin-dropping and consider appropriate mapping interfaces. This panel will look at the current and emerging tools to provide compelling geographic interaction and visualization.

The Panel

The goal was to find panel members that represented different aspects of leading thought behind web map design and usability. A cutting edge artist and designer building industry leading interfaces, a usability expert and lead of the industry changing and most broadly used web mapping platform, and a researcher and formal cartographer bringing traditional techniques to the future. This was quite a daunting task, and am fortunate that just a such a representation was possible to bring to SXSWi:

• Mike Migurski, technology lead at Stamen Design
• Elizabeth Windram, User Experience Designer for Maps at Google
• David Heyman, Web Cartographer at AxisMaps and lecturer at University of Wisconsin

Each panelist is an expert in their own right and offers incredible insight, experience and advice. Brought together they can compare ideals, methods, techniques and tools. But with only 60 minutes, what topics to focus on? This is where you can help.

The Participation

While I have my own ideas of topics to discuss, I would like input from the world on what topics around mapping, cartographic design, and usability are on your minds. Please check out the Google Moderator topic I created. Create new questions or suggestions, vote pertinent ones up and boring ones down. I’ll be using this list to formulate the questions or topics the panel will be discussing.

The Anticipation

SXSWi is in just under two weeks – so there isn’t much time. Get your suggestions in now. In addition to the Google Moderator I’ll be using Twitter during the panel to accept additional suggestions or topics. And we’ll make sure to record the whole thing to share with everyone afterwards.

Last week I attended and presented at the North Carolina GIS Conference in Raleigh, NC. It was a different conference from the ones I typically attend. It is a much more regional and GIS-focused conference than Where2.0, State of the Map, or Location Intelligence. The attendees are primarily county, regional, or state GIS coordinators, users, managers and some federal GIS experts from Fish & Wildlife or USGS.

Last week I attended and presented at the North Carolina GIS Conference in Raleigh, NC. It was a different conference from the ones I typically attend. It is a much more regional and GIS-focused conference than Where2.0, State of the Map, or Location Intelligence. The attendees are primarily county, regional, or state GIS coordinators, users, managers and some federal GIS experts from Fish & Wildlife or USGS.

What’s interesting for me was the perspective of very local government users that are working on the street and block level. They are working under constrained budgets and with varying levels of mandates coming down from above. The DC GIS department is a great model to follow but doesn’t have the same levels of management above it that a county-GIS department would in western North Carolina. It’s this hierarchy that is both onerous as well as potentially empowering.

Individual GIS departments are seeing an increase in repeated data requests, often for the same data from the same receiving organizations. One way to address this is to easily offer the data through web site or services – however this often goes against the grain of politics and feelings of ownership in an organization that choose to require manual approval of data requests.

In fact, this was notable during presentations and discussions that GIS departments referred to their users as “data producers” and “data requestors”. The concept of a simple “data consumer” was not understood or welcomed, despite the fact that the data is public and free of license.

One solution is the development several state level initiatives that are seeking to provide central repositories of data, tools, or collaboration. Through these state portals, regional offices are encouraged (or mandated) to upload their information on a regular basis. Then, subsequent data requests go through this clearinghouse. One example is NC Street Map. However, you’ll quickly realize (after following that link) that these portals are not nearly as encouraging as the name would imply, despite sounding like the increasingly beloved OpenStreetMap.

In order to get an account, you still must still fill out a ‘request’, and then request data. This may make it easier for government agents to more easily identify data sources, but not necessarily, or easily, get it or use it.

Open Initiatives

Attending the conference were 4 authors of what is known as “NSDI Proposal #2“, or as they jokingly call it opeNSDI. The objective being to open up these, and other, data clearinghouses. Focus on sharing data and interoperability instead of merely vendor specific solutions or tools.

There are varying viewpoints on how federal money, say via a Stimulus package, should be requested and parceled out across the state. County GIS employees are limited, or non-existant, in many departments. Therefore, there are no resources to provide building out a local infrastructure to share and manipulate data. The first request is to pledge to fund a new employee in each county.

The response to this is that this new employee would quickly be repurposed and pulled off of something as inconsequential as data sharing. In addition, hoping for long-term funding rarely works out, and if this job was created would probably be removed in the first round of cutbacks. Instead the idea is to receive a one-time funding to each county to implement a data sharing system that serves local needs as well as can be aggregated up to the state and federal levels.

Either way, it’s not an easy solution, but fortunately there are some really innovate and ingenious pioneers that are forging the path and providing best practices. Counties such as Mecklenburg have built an entirely open-stack portal (read about it on Tobin’s Fuzzy Tolerance blog). This effort was definitely the outcome of very hard work and foresight, but fortunately it’s being recognized as such (including winning the award at the conference for best GIS website in the state) and hopefully encourages others to follow along.

River roots

One of the most exciting applications of modern tools and local efforts was from Wansoo Im, famous for his public toilets mashup with and GIS4Kids.

He’s been working with RiverKeepers, a non-profit organization that monitors for river pollution, in collaborative mapping. IMRivers . Beyond simple placemarking sites, each of these individual instances is then aggregated to the national River Network. Unfortunately, none of the sites syndicate their data via a feed or API. So the information is effectively locked into these portals.

Other interesting talks included Michael Waltuch, an ESRI veteran, on Books as an Paradigm for User Interface Design and Rob Trickel from the Division of Forest Resources on Digital Aerial Sketchmapping. There are still plenty of issues facing the application and utility of geospatial tools. Especially for small organizations and how to face increasing consumption of public data, decreasing budgets, and incredibly advancing technology. Overall, the conference was a well put together and provided valuable insights into local and regional GIS issues and future paths.