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’.

For FOSS4G 2007 I got roped in to doing a lightning talk. It was a fun experience and I’m glad I did get to go up on stage (and early in the conference so my talk wasn’t subject to the effects of the many pubs/parties).

The slides are available on SlideShare, but it’s mostly just pictures of the various projects. It’s better to go directly to the bookmark list: http://del.icio.us/tags/BeyondGPS.

I got to attend the GNOME conference, GUADEC, this summer as part of my UK travels and conferencing following State of the Map. I’m a long-time linux user and advocate, since second-year of college in 1998. However, after about 3 years of running it as my desktop, I moved to Mac OS X since it gave me the power and configurability I wanted, but without the constant administrative overhead and ‘recompiling my kernel’ to play some new video or check email. Since then I have used Linux servers, but not for my actual desktop.

However, the Free Desktop has come a long way to improving the user experience and configuration. GNOME and KDE have been developed to be more stable and the Ubuntu distribution has really done a lot to make a simple to install and use Linux desktop, especially on Laptop devices - known for their difficulty to setup with specific hardware pieces.

The GUADEC conference brings together the ’superstars’ and names of GNOME and Linux in general. Doc Searls, Robert Love, Jono Bacon, Havoc Pennington, and the entire GNOME Foundation gave keynotes or talks. Other talks are focused around the various toolkits and applications that have released new versions or are just new and want to introduce themselves to the community.

Being the Free Desktop, applications are definitely offline focused, with some online connectivity. Many apps are media-centric, photos, videos, music, chatting. Personally, my desktop has moved primarily to a window or cache for my online tools and I now do mostly web-development.

Design

There were many discussions around design and usability - and generally the lack of both in open-source development. There is definitely a disconnect between the programming and design communities. And it is difficult for one to engage the other - as they tend to speak different ‘languages’ (figuratively).

So in playing around with some of the newer or updated open-source tools, such as OpenOffice Impress, you definitely notice that for lack of a designer, programmers just copied existing applications (such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint). Jono Bacon, in his keynote, verbalized my thoughts exactly. “rethink your applications instead of just copying them” These developers have the possibility to reinvent and discover new interfaces for users - and also make their development easier (powerpoint has a lot of odd functionality)

Now, to be fair, open-source developers are also faced with trying to convince users to switch to their application, and offering a foreign interface could discourage usage. However, by not offering anything innovative they give reduced impetus for someone to try your application and actually find it more useful than the alternative. Within a large corporation applications are essentially ‘free-of-cost’ anyways, so the ‘free’ is less compelling than if it makes you more productive and is fun to use (see why Apple’s Keynote is so popular).

Online/Offline

The GNOME organization is apparently worried about possible stagnation of the project and lack of focus forward. So it was intriguing when Havoc Pennington and Bryan Clark gave their keynote that offered a possible re-invigoration and focus for the project.

Their vision is to enable better integration between the GNOME desktop and online applications. They demoed “Big Board”, which is a sidebar that users login to and it connects to their online persona to pull in their friends, calendar, mail, etc. He also advocated tying into and using web applications like GoogleDocs, Flickr, etc.

In addition, since your persona is stored on a remote server, it’s easy to then log into your account and pull down your information locally to any computer you use - whether it’s a public computer, another machine in your organization, a friend’s computer, your mobile, or even just a new installation of your computer. When editing your documents, they are stored and backed-up on the server.

However, I think he didn’t make his case very well. Their concept is excellent, however in that crowd he made too much focused of integrating with Google (which he mentioned more than 10 times, including using the GData protocol exclusively), or Flickr, and saying “privacy doesn’t really matter”.

He could have made a better argument, and this was picked up and mentioned by Jeff of Planet, that the concept would be better received if he encouraged development of a GNOME server that offered these services, and perhaps using something like the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP).

Imagine taking .Mac syncing, Google Office, MugShot (social networking integration), and offering it as a single, integrated system. Opening your word processor you see in your “recent documents” both online and offline docs. Editing these or creating them would keep a local copy for when you’re offline - but also store online for backup, access via the web/other computers, and collaboration.

Using this system, you never have to worry about ‘leaving’ a file on another computer - or making backups and having to move them offsite (if you keep your backup disks in the same building as your primary computer you’re not doing a good job) - or having to ’send’ a file to someone and worry about synchronization.

The concept is great - not just for GNOME, but for desktops in general. It’s not a new idea either, but one that is possible now that bandwidth is high, online applications rival desktop applications, and open protocols exist that everyone can commonly use for intercommunication.

Linux Mobile

One of the biggest themes around the conference was Linux Mobile. Hildon, Hiker, OpenMoko, Maemo, G(PE)2 /GreenPhone, OLPC all gave talks, demos, and many T-Shirts. The N800 is a great demo platform for showing what a mobile Linux device is capable of.

And obviously, our talk on GeoClue and its ability to easy enable location-based applications by giving a D-Bus service to location-provider agnostic location, is squarely targeted at this emerging market and use-case.

Big C

Some things that were surprising. The first was how corporate Linux has become. I imagine 1/3 or more attendees worked for Nokia, Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Sun, or some other large company that uses open-source and employs developers that are open-source centric. However, what this means is that the overall feel of the conference and development changes to a somewhat more cautious and large organization assumption.

There is then a disconnect between these developers and the ‘hackers’ that work at home, in their spare time, or freelance. The corporate discussion is around how to develop better UI spec documents for working between designers and programmers - whereas most developers can’t even find a designer to help them out, let alone make better documentation.

Overall the conference was very enlightening. Some really good ideas came out and I hope the GNOME community embraces them and uses them as a focus point moving forward. This is quite a long post, so I’ll end it here. But I’ll continue on with some of the themes in more depth in the future.

I had a great time at the State of the Map Conference in Manchester,UK. As usual, it’s great to finally put faces (and voices) to names/typing.

Henri Bergius and I gave a talk about GeoClue - the slides are here. In particular, we tried to make the case for the application of open geospatial data for location-based systems and a common framework that we are developing currently on the Maemo Platform, but applicable to any mobile or desktop system.

What is the State?

As Mikel pointed out, OSM sometimes seems like it’s on the edge of disaster, and other times, like this weekend, that it’s definitely going to succeed.

Overall, I got a reinvigorated surge of excitement about the project, and also some face-time to discuss details on bits and pieces to work on and add what help I can. Specifically, Schuyler and I talked about better spatial storage and access to the Ways with possible future benefit of moving to PostGIS and queries.

Henri and I pitched our concepts on MaemoSurveyor - an online/realtime OSM collection and editing utility. We also talked with other devs working on similar ideas.

The biggest ‘take-away’ was that OpenStreetMap is beginning to consider it’s future as it moves from primarily collecting to instead correcting data. Therefore, mobile devices can be particularly useful when you are viewing the current map and can make corrections - or at least annotations - as you walk around an area.

Also - I was surprised to hear very little about Asia and nothing about Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and South America. The project is definitely Euro-centric, with mention of the US (not even all of North America). That’s definitely a reflection of the current user/developer base and effort. But I think OSM is getting to a point that it would very much behoove them, and the world, if they start trying to reach out to the broader world and including them in the general discussion and consideration of OSM.

I’m looking forward to the quick spurt of activity that will happen from all the discussion at SotM as well as the long-term continued, exponential? growth of the project.