I just finished my presentation at FOSS4G in Cape Town, Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS. It was part of the Disaster Response session and was a nice way to conclude the group of presentations that talked about disaster preparedness, response, reporting, and the importance of maintaining data across situations. The work in New Orleans is a model of the citizens actively involved in the data collection, analysis, and discussion that affects rebuilding their city.

I think overall it went very well - and lots of interest in the processes and successes and how it can be applied elsewhere.

Many thanks to those involved in making the work a reality. Especially to Francine Stock, Alan Gutierrez, and Karen Gadbois who provided much of the material in the presentation.

This morning, Mikel and I gave our presentation at Web2.0 Expo New York on Trends and Technologies in Where2.0. It was interesting to devise a way to cover the Geo-space in the breadth of business to hacking. To do this, we split the 45 minutes into two obvious halves: Trends, and Technology. The Trends cover cutting edge uses of location and geospatial technology in businesses and organizations. By contrast, the Technologies cover the bleeding edge of geohacking done at Burning Man this year.

Looking at the current landscape of the Where2.0 space, you can see that it is essentially the broad acceptance of the concepts of the locative media crowd from 8-10 years ago. Therefore it’s easy to imagine that the current experiments and creations of geohackers are the leading edge.

Update: Mikel and my slides are spotlighted on the SlideShare front page and the Web20Expo section.

Monday afternoon I was graciously invited by Andreas Weigend to be a guest lecturer to his graduate course on Data Mining and Recommendation systems. In general, the course evaluates the use of online personas and information to provide better user experiences and marketing.

It is readily apparent the increased penetration of mobile devices on everyone’s lives. In the United States the iPhone has revolutionized how people daily interact with online information - using Wikipedia to investigate local history and marine reports to understand the freshness of fish at the market. In Asia they’ve long had the capability to find nearby friends or potential mates, point at buildings to query reality, and instantly send live media to one another. In Africa mobile devices serve as the primary infrastructure for communications, payment systems, and even voting.

With people continually carrying both a personal sensor and data device it’s possible to glean powerful insights into behavior, desire, and action. Users are actively seeking to better engage with their surroundings and community.

The question is, how can we access this latent information in order to understand the individuals and offer them appropriate, and appropriately delivered, information depending on context. It is important to know if a user is currently traveling in a car to not interrupt them but provide information that is localized based on their mode of transit and trajectory.

A restaurant search is more valuable when it shows relevant suggestions 2 or 3 miles ahead then perhaps any restaurant that is 0.5 miles behind the car. Similarly, a pedestrian has no use for a search result that is over a mile away, but is willing to patronize within several blocks - but also depending on perceived safety and familiarity with the various regions.

The lecture was a survey of both the abstract concepts of mobile geolocation, proximity, trajectory and data mining, as well as examples of emergent technological and anthropological solutions. Flickr serves as a very coherent example of providing a hoard of information on user behaviors (time, content), lifestyle (pictures of children, parties, travel, business), and obviously location.

Services could identify young fathers of children that travel often and afford expensive cameras to offer child-care services, luxury family sedans, or maybe even high-end strollers (I’m looking at you Bugaboo).

And the techniques don’t apply to purely marketing needs. It would also be possible to use contextual relevance and behavior to understand the flow of a city for better planning. Of course, I could imagine more nefarious purposes as well as governments seek to track and prevent dissident movements.

The utilization and integration of mobile devices, or more generally ubiquitous computing, has yet to mature - but the platforms for experimentation and demonstration are now common and the general public is becoming more comfortable with at least the understanding of location-contextual relevance.

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.

Last (last) month - I did an interview on IMI Tech-Talk radio discussing my O’Reilly Shortcut “Introduction to Neogeography”. It was a great 30-minute coverage of my interests in geography and the geospatial web and a quick overview of some of the useful tools that have shown up and how users are using them.

The interviewer was in New York City, I am in Michigan, and the broadcast area is Phoenix, Arizona. So if you weren’t in the area you probably missed it. Fortunately, they finally put up the archive just a week or so ago, so you can listen for free.

Download the show here.

I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself. It’s that typical “my voice sounds weird” that makes it difficult to just sit back and enjoy. But I hope you do. Please let me know what you think.