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.

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.)

Jim Stogdill and I had a conversation a week ago about the new iPhone 2.2 firmware that includes walking directions as well as similar projects in the space. In my Where2.0 Report I talked about the convergence of mobile devices and the effect on multi-modal routing: your phone changing from auto to walking to metro directions based on your context. However, I didn’t go in-depth on example projects and services.

Jim posted my notes of our discussion on O’Reilly Radar. So check them out there. It’s just an overview, but let me know if I missed an interesting project or story about open-data (or lack of).

It’s been mentioned elsewhere – but wanted to remind you to work on your Where2.0 proposals over the US Thanksgiving Holiday. They are due on Monday.

Each year Where2.0 has demonstrated the migration of location technology from the bleeding edge and locative media art to mainstream businesses and practices. Yet we have just begun to realize the potential. Where2.0 is the conference to hear the newest announcements, learn from experts in the industry, and meet and collaborate on new projects and ventures.

I know people out there are doing amazing work on bringing advanced climate change analysis coupled with user-contributed data to pinpoint carbon emissions or the changing migratory paths of endangered species, repurposing outdated mobile phones for biological sensors, application of geospatial tools to community building, humanitarian and disaster response and citizen media, immersive, augmented reality through wearable and interactive devices – and of course the holy grail, how to realize a viable business plan amongst all this great potential.

Submitting a proposal is easy to do and speaking at Where2.0 is incredibly rewarding. You’ll find it difficult to find such an absorbed and forward thinking crowd to share your work with.

So if you want to ask anything about new and upcoming GeoWeb technologies, communities using geospatial technology, or businesses that are growing in the various spaces of geodata, locative mobile, or even just cool hacks then definitely register!

My apologies to people in timezones that makes this occur on your Friday evening. Since it’s participate at home, you can enjoy it over a nice beverage or meal.

It’s a little difficult to keep up with everything while I’m traveling. Pleasantly I noticed in my inbox that an announcement from O’Reilly went out that included my name.

Brady Forrest and I collaborated on producing a business-oriented analysis of the phenomenal growth around geospatial technology. The report, Where2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web covers various aspects of providers and potential opportunities in a variety of domains that are affected by the emergence of many factors.

Some of these topics include: the impact of open and user-contributed geographic data on traditional data vendors and subsequent tools that rely on the availability, coverage, and quality of this data; highly-connected mobile devices, now often with developer available interfaces for location sharing and high-bandwidth internet connections; models for location-based advertising; and next generation applications such as games, augmented & immersive reality; as well as many more.

It was definitely interesting writing the report from a more practical and business perspective. My background has been in pushing and developing new technologies. I found it eminently useful to think of it from a reverse perspective on evaluating the percolating usefulness across markets and uses. It is valuable for both business development as well as application development to connect.

In addition to the discussion and analysis of the current state of the geospatial web, the report includes a fairly broad directory of companies, applications, and organizations in Where2.0 across the multiple domains. It also includes in-depth profiles of some of the major players.

The report is primarily for businesses that are interested in starting up, or entering, the geo- space and want to get a view of the landscape. It should also be useful for existing organizations that want to understand how the various technologies, acquisitions, and developments may affect their current market.

You can get a discount by using this link.

The report was originally written this Spring and originally announced at Where2.0. We’ve been continuously updating the report with new information such as the completion of the TeleAtlas/TomTom and NAVTEQ/Nokia mergers and the implications as well as the iPhone 3G with built-in GPS and Core Location API. The GeoWeb is a fast-moving space, so it’s definitely difficult to attempt to grasp for a quick snapshot. We hope to update it more in the future as Where2.0 evolves.

There are plenty of summaries around, and each gives insight into the different aspects of the unconference. You have your high-fallutin’ corporate types, developers, and ancillary community advocates that traveled from Portland just for WhereCamp.

Check out the constant stream of twitters of wherecamp.

So many hats

The most important thing I learned at WhereCamp actually had nothing to do with geo.

There has been a lot of discussion leading up to Where2.0 and WhereCamp about the benefits of open data exchange between a number of the geospatial repositories that are coming online to share and aggregate data. Both Sean Gorman of GeoCommons and David Troy spoke in their presentations about the importance and capability of interchange.

However, while the concept is easy – lets share data – there is a lot of difficulty in the specifics. 45 minutes in an ad-hoc session could very easily diverge into many channels of non-resulting vectors.

Instead, Steve Coast introduced us to a brilliant technique for investigating, analyzing, and brain-storming on difficult and potentially controversial issues. A technique that is perfectly adaptable to solving problems in short-time periods with a large group of people.

Six de Bono Hats is a process walking through various perceptions of problem solving. You preset a time limit on each, everyone in the group “wears” this hat and offers insight with this perception. After the fixed time, you move on to the next hat.

• White hat (Blank sheet): Information & reports, facts and figures (objective)
• Red hat (Fire): Intuition, opinion & emotion, feelings (subjective)
• Yellow hat (Sun): Praise, positive aspects, why it will work (objective)
• Black hat (Judge’s robe): Criticism, judgment, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)
• Green hat (Plant): Creativeness, Alternatives, new approaches & ‘everything goes’, idea generation & provocations (speculative/creative)
• Blue hat (Sky): “Big Picture,” “Conductor hat,” “Meta hat,” “thinking about thinking”, overall process (overview)

By using this technique, we were able to lay out a good path towards interoperability and interchange. We acknowledged previous and current efforts in geospatial and non-geo domains and also the difficulties that will be faced. You can read the resulting notes here.

The technique was so successful I applied it at the GeoPrivacy session. It came in half-way through after I saw that the conversation for the first 30 minutes was turning into a ping-pong game of point-counterpoint with no real guidance or outcome. So we performed a much fore-shortened de Bono hats and came out with an adequate list of privacy concerns, and suggestions of future actions.

A week passes

With WhereCamp and Where2.0 2008 over, I completely collapsed on Monday morning. Having the two conferences back to back means that is an incredible concentration of experts and enthusiasts. There is also the follow-on of the well-packaged Where2.0 with the unwrapping to dig inside of WhereCamp that brings us back to innovating and collaborating.

It was a grueling but completely inspiring week. I’m not sure how the future will turn out, but I know I’m very excited about it.

Where-3D

One of the biggest of these emergent trends from the first day of Where2.0 were Augmented & Immersive Realities. Companies like EveryScapeEveryScape (homepage) doing immersive video and annotation – the next generation of QTVR. EarthMine (homepage) is capturing a huge amount of data to create high-resolution 3D models of the world that can then be utilized for annotation and analysis of the real world.

Ancillary to fully digitizing reality, aerial imaging is becoming as ubiquitous as GPS for capturing road information. Pict’Earth (homepage) are building the autonomous systems and tools for capturing and using imagery in systems like OpenAerialMap. What is the next generation of open-data collection?

Where-Design

Another common theme that has emerged was proper visual design of these new mapping technologies. Adrian’s opening keynote has clearly shown what straight-forward steps can be taken to use open-source tools and simple concepts to provide compelling, visually attractive interfaces.

Chris Spurgeon even asked the cartographers in the room to raise their hands, outing about a half-dozen. As map interfacespenetrate into most of our tools and websites, I hope there is continued growth in future dialog of technologists and cartographers.

Where-is-the-Money

While this has been present at previous conferences, Where2008 definitely included a large current of discussion around monetization strategies and opportunities. Greg Sterling’s panel was fairly narrow in breadth of members, consisting primarily of the sole geospatial advertiser(s) and mobile companies. Steve Coast of CloudMade and Ian White of Urban Mapping are both data provider companies, yet debate focused on “mobile coupons”. I would have liked to have a broader view of the monetization landscape – how in fact has Urban Mapping moved from data provider to ad-supporter. Skyhook Wireless is dabbling in a number of spaces: geolocation technology, social network, advertisements, and who knows what else. Even CloudMade had three separate businesses before getting funding. The common trend of that panel’s composition was that they are involved in a lot of markets.

On the second day Dev Khare of Venrock gave a much broader survey of the monetization landscape, looking at devices, users, opportunities and strategies.

Why Where?

One of my favorite components of Where2.0 are the closing series of talks that approach answering the question “Why are we building this technology?” It’s important, as innovators, engineers, developers, and businesses to understand the implications of our work. We cannot claim that we are not free from responsibility for the resultant uses of our applications.

Lisa Parks, a media studies expert, makes us realize the impact remote imagery has on the potential conceptual understanding and involvement of citizens. Even by the fact that someone of her expertise is looking at a complex technology as satellite sensing from the viewpoint of “media” should demonstrate the deep influence tools like Google Earth and WorldWind are having on users around the world.

Erik Hersman (blog) and InSTEDD both do incredible work to flex tools to serve the emergent and demanding needs of people in disasters and crises. Simple, yet compelling repurposing of mobile phones as observer data collectors and Twitter for in-the-field tracking and response are just a few examples of the good ancillary applications of geospatial technology. We should all be cognizant of how our tools may be modified ad-hoc to assist these unanticipated needs.

Then last night I gave an Ignite talk on the work we’re doing at Mapufacture to provide customized GeoWeb services. It was less of a “production pitch” than other presentations – something that I’ll talk about in another post about the changing face of the Where2.0 conference. The video

This morning Adrian talked about what EveryBlock is doing to explore the next generation of Where2.0 apps that are bringing better cartography and localized news to the web.

I’ll try and cover more news and talks that are interesting as they happen.

Where2.0 starts in one week, with the free and avant-garde WhereCamp the weekend after. I think the team pulled together a great program that captures many of the new companies and concepts of the morphing Geographic space.

Unfortunately not everyone that deserves the opportunity to speak got a slot. There are also very few returning speakers – we want to hear from new innovators. The conference is single track – which means we’re all part of the same conversation, and talks are already limited to 5-15 minutes so it’s a whirlwind of energy and ideas. That’s why WhereCamp is the perfect venue to really engage and still share your ideas with a broader community.

Mikel, Steve, and I are giving a workshop essentially talking about Neogeography and integrating geo-data and services into your web applications.

Monday night I’m giving a 20-by-20 (20 slides, 20-seconds per slide) lightning talk at Ignite titled “Building Customized Slices of the GeoWeb”. I’ll be sure to share the slides (once I’ve actually made them)

And I also have a couple of other things in the works that will be released as well that I’ll be able to talk about soon. Overall it’s going to be a really exciting, and crazy week. I’m thrilled looking forward to the inspirations and conversations that will happen at the conferences.

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.

Google’s Dev Day was in fact the cattle drive I was worried it might be. However, it was still an incredibly fun event because of the hallway track and getting to meet a large number of the Google ‘geo’ team, as well as various others from other companies.

Apparently I was part of a “geo digerati” party, check out the reciprocal ValleyWag post. Congrats to Ian and the Urban Mapping team.

One of the more mind-boggling things at WhereCamp was Mikel building a mashup into someone else’s site. You can now automatically see Google Pano’s of Upcoming event locations within Upcoming. I do truly hope that the WebKit party was a blast – looked like it was going to be one based on their pano’s.

For the in-depth info, check out all the social sites with the tag wherecamp. For extra geekiness, tags I made use a machine-tag for the specific session. e.g. wherecamp:session=lightningtalks

a couple of highlights off the top of my head:

• Great conversations on the “Gist of an Area” with Travis of Neighboroo, Tim with ThinkWhere/Geocodr
• Being amazed by the skill and wit of Poly9. They type too fast for their own good.
• Lightning talks from GeoTude
• dancing to Viscious Groove

Many thanks again to Ryan Sarver and Anselm Hook for being awesome coordinators & hosts, and to all the sponsors: Yahoo, O’Reilly, meadan, Google, uLocate/Where.

Tags: where20, where2007, wherecamp, gdd07, urbanmapping, ianwhite, valleywag, googlestreetview, yahoo, oreilly, meadan, anselmhook, ryansarver,

Thoughts

I really enjoyed giving this talk. I hope the people who heard it, or check out the slides find it compelling to do their part to integrate into the GeoStack by working with common data standards and tools where possible. I think it was received very well overall – based on the amount of people that talked to me about it afterwards. I even got cited by Jack Dangermond of ESRI in his panel discussion.

Upcoming

I’ll be giving similar talks this summer at State of the Map and GUADEC in the UK with Henri Bergius and Tuomas Kuosmanen.

Bring out your geeks. Bring out your geeks…

I was actually surprised there weren’t more useful hacks for the conference itself. There was no SketchUp and GoogleEarth model of the hotel and various locations that users could walk through an annotate. There wasn’t a demonstration of Imity’s technology or another bluetooth/social software that users could install on their Symbian/Mobile phones for sharing contact information and localized information. There was no central GeoRSS feed of speakers, where they’re from, local events and sites in the San Jose area.

I would think with a very specific, and technical, group of people that such hacks and demonstrations would be emminently useful and cool to see. I am as responsible of this lack as anyone else. My time was restricted getting SpeedLimit up and going, and then being over in Europe for several weeks before hand. If I get to attend the next Where2.0, or if I can attend Web2.0 or another conference, I promise to bring my alpha-geekhood and demo the kind of tech they’re talking about at the conference.

Shazzam!

There were several sets of “Lightning Talks”, where 3 presenters each had 5 minutes to present some topic. I thought these were very well done. They forced the presenter to get directly to the point of their topic, allowed more people to present, and also broke up the longer 15 minute presentations. Each set of Lightning Talks was centered around a topic such as: mobile games, social mapping sites, or open-source GIS applications.

The Next Big Thing

Obviously, the end of the conference wrapped up with the question of: “What is the next big thing?” What will we be talking about and presenting at next year’s Where2.0?

So far it seems like better incorporation of large-scale, commercial grade tools into the Open-Source and consumer-level community as supported by groups like the OSGeo, and popularized by Google Earth and NASA WorldWind.

Mobile presence and location-aware applications had a shimmering here from people like Socialight, Mo’Blast, and Imity. The next breakthrough will be when major mobile providers (Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, et al.) open up the location information that already exists on mobile phones to developers and users.

Overall, Where2.0 was a terrific experience. A lot was crammed into 2 days (plus a day at Google) and I hope I can get to another one in the future!

Coordinates:

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

The first was an SVG Map Viewer, which is a really cool utility for viewing maps in a browser. By using SVG, it can quickly reorganize the actual data such as changing map projection on the fly. You can also reorient, add/remove layers and other cool stuff.

The second was National Geographic’s map machine where you can investigate various layers of science and climatological data.

The next presentation was by a company Inrix, which showed off some of the new technologies and techniques in traffic monitoring, traffic history, and traffic prediction. So their system would show you the current congestions, as well as the predicted future conditions based on historical conditions and also planned events (sports, concerts, etc.)

They’re using the “Inrix Dust Network”, which consists of sensored delivery trucks, service vehicles, and toll pass devices. Therefore they’re constantly, almostly for free, gathering large sets of data.

Of course, not all these sensors and such are good. By use of toll sensors, they will know where you are. Now is the time to start putting in place and defining geo-privacy standards.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

1. Complexity
2. Revenue
Communication is the revenue generation. SMS inter-team communication
3. Dirtbags
Dangerous because people can be tracked. How to cloak and hide identity or location while still playing the game?
4. Seams
Boundaries of Wifi cloud are part of the game. But how in general to deal loss of connection and location?
5. Adaptable Field
6. Accuracy
How to deal with the constaints of the location technology?

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2006, where2con

“Today in Royal Oak a new business…”

where Metacarta can then pull out Royal Oak and try and continue searching the documentation for more location pertinent information that Royal Oak may be in Michigan, or Florida, or Australia, or wherever.

The examples use the OpenLayers, mapping agnostic, webmap tool.

For a great example of all these technologies, check out Gutenkarte, which maps the locations for any book found in the Project Gutenberg library. I wonder how it deals with imaginary places, and mixtures of real and imaginary places (like Nowhereville, NY)

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con

The idea is that naming a location by Lat/Lon is not really human readable, easily indexable, or understandable. Instead, locations should have a good URL friendly schema for accessing sites, posting to blogs, people easily getting to data on a site, etc.

So, for example, to find information for Michigan I would do:

/us/mi/wayne/northville/-highearthorbit+office

or for the Whitehouse perhaps:

/us/dc/Pennsylvania+Ave/1600/-White+House/-Oval+Office

As brought up in the discussion at Where2.0, there were some concerns regarding splits across municipalities (Lake Superior is in both the US and Canada), and countries like Japan which doesn’t use street addresses.

I like the push to human-readable, but semantically useful, data references and metadata.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con

• Platial – here is a new GeoRSS feed of San Jose, CA
• 43Places
• Wayfaring

Lightning talks are great.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con

I’ll try and post various thoughts on speakers and talks as I get a chance. Better than putting them all in a single post.

Technorati Tags: where2.0, where2con