This week is National Geography Awareness Week. Hopefully you’re celebrating it your own way by enjoying a map, thanking a cartographer, or even doing some mapping yourself! It’s clear that mapping and geo have entered the mainstream – everyone is engaging with maps through navigation systems, friend location finders, and virtual globes. The next step is to make people aware of the potential for them to personally engage with place and location for personal interests, business uses, and community building.

This Wednesday, I will be giving the GISDay plenary talk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. My talk, “Neogeography: from Tower to Town Hall” will discuss how the movement to broad, public engagement and collaboration, particularly around geographic contexts through web maps, mobile devices, and open data can build stronger communities, improved research, representative government and better livelihoods of people. (link to the UVA Calendar)

Around Washington, DC you can join the OpenStreetMapping party in Bethesda, MD on Saturday, or you can check out the large list other activities at GISVirginia. Whatever you do, spread the word and encourage people to go out and map something.

My presentation at the NCGIS 2009 conference was “Lessons Learned from Neogeography Applied to GIS”. Obviously a very interesting topic, given the continual discussion around the term “neogeography” as well as standards, web tools, and open data. Sean and I spent a good bit of time exchanging viewpoints and ideas so that I could get a better idea of where GIS users are coming from and their common criticisms of the neogeography domain.

What we realized was that these criticisms are reflections that GIS itself is facing:

• lack of metadata,
• amateurs doing analysis, and
• the loss of cartography

However because web maps are more public and involve feedback mechanism such as comments or blog posts, then they are much more visible and loudly critiqued.

Therefore, there is value in considering where this public discourse has more quickly evolved solutions and examples that GIS can incorporate. For example, standard user experience design around forms and input requests as well as feedback and user reward for supplying metadata. Sites like Yelp! make use of quite onerous metadata such as open hours, cuisine type, average cost – that the user is willingly supplying because it provides utility. They can then search, filter, and share this information.

Beyond the common criticisms, I identified three primary areas that neogeography is going beyond traditional GIS focus. Usability, Interoperability, and Participation are all aspects that GIS has struggled with, and in fact any inwardly focused domain has difficulty achieving. By incorporating innovative and external solutions that have emerged, GIS has the ability to take advantage and excel in applying these lessons to achieving their own needs.

I believe the presentation was well received, and definitely touched upon many points raised in other presentations both in recognizing the positive aspects of innovative GIS applications as well as common problems that are faced exposing complex data and capabilities to citizens. I’m definitely interested in any additional feedback or thoughts. I’ll be speaking and discussing in several panels at the American Association of Geographers meeting in Las Vegas next month – a group with similar criticisms and potential points of collaboration.

This Thursday, January 15, I’ll be speaking locally at RefreshDC on “The How of Geo”. Especially covering web and mobile based map design, interaction, tools, examples, and use cases.

As part of the talk I’ll be showcasing the evolution of user-contributed content via mobile devices from VoteReport to the upcoming InaugurationReport and NavigatingWashington sites, and how developers and designers can integrate these ideas, and tools into their web applications.

Of course – as I mentioned the other day there are 2 other geo-meetups that evening, depending on your flavor of mapping you’re looking for:

• Washington Map Society – Buccaneer’s Atlas
• Geosemantic Web Meetup

And on Monday evening, the 19th, we’re having a Disaster Tech/Geo meetup courtesy of @williamv. Probably at Tryst, in Admas Morgan – but stay tuned for more details. Just to add a little craziness to your inauguration week.

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a webcast presentation with O’Reilly: “Trends and Technologies in Where2.0″. It will be a short presentation – approximately 20 minutes – then with about 40 minutes for question and answer discussion.

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.

Last week I was fortunate to speak at the much lauded Future of Web Apps London (FOWA). Ryan Carson and his team put on a well-crafted conference with a great line-up of speakers such as Blaine, Kevin, Matt and more.

I was the only geo related talk, with quite a broad title “Beyond GoogleMaps”. The space is quite broad and is evolving quickly. Especially coming from a series of conferences at Web2.0 Expo New York and FOSS4G in Cape Town, in addition to the work we’re doing on GeoCommons, there was a bevy of new concepts and technologies that we worth highlighting.

As for the title, I actually didn’t pick it (or at least don’t remember choosing it). In fact, I think Google has done tremendous strides in pushing web mapping through their own toolkits and applications. GoogleMaps has some advanced capabilities such as interface styling, alternate tilesets, encoded and simplified geometries, and flash interface. However, a strident claims gain interest and again the purpose was to engage developers to look beyond just slapping a map up on a site and calling it done. They really need to consider the usability, accessibility, and design of their cartographic interface as much as any other component.

My goal with the talk was to inspire developers and designers to play with new tools, and for managers to realize what is possible and appropriate and spur their teams into creating compelling applications with geospatial capabilities. The actual implementation of this desk was 201 slides in less than 40 minutes. One attendee commented afterwards that it was like “watching a del.icio.us stream.” The 178 slides in the uploaded deck have the “Nonline” and AtomPub slides removed. I did not give proper coverage of these major issues and in the end felt they were best left out of this deck.

I concur that overall the presentation is was quite fast. I hope it was inspiring and enjoyable and that people walked away eager to find out more about the possibilities of web mapping. Fortunately you can get the full video and highlights and watch at half or quarter speed. You can also get the slide deck.

I actually have some plans for this presentation to expand out into a better and discoverable walk-through of mapping technologies. Stay tuned. And thanks Carsonified and the FOWA team!