Tom and Schuyler are wrapping up their first deploy with the World Bank to Haiti. They’ve been doing amazing work in connecting the various participants on the ground in sharing data and providing them with lightweight tools and data from the broader web, CrisisMappers, and CrisisCommons community.

Schuyler has been writing up his experiences but due to connectivity and the large amount of work, they’ve been utilizing Twitter: @schulyer and @buckley_tom, continuing to keep the world up to date on their progress, safety, and insights. They have even managed to get out video discussing the use of OpenStreetMap by UN OCHA and other reconstruction efforts.

The USB Drives and USB Sticks that we sent down have seemed to be incredibly useful. The ability to utilize dynamic information and map interfaces in an offline, or semi-disconnected environment is empowering, while also allowing people to still print their maps with the data. We’re now working on deploying these same tools to Afghanistan and other areas that there has been a large amount of data gathered but not broadly distributed.

Tom and Schuyler head back to the U.S. tomorrow, but the job is far from done. Mikel’s Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T.) is looking to deploy at the end of March to provide continue logistics support and begin training Haitians on building and utilizing the maps – much like the MapKibera project. Haiti has perhaps an excellent opportunity to leap-frog the use of open data and technology by empowering the government and people with tools they can use in reconstruction.

The platforms continue to evolve, incorporating lessons learned from user needs, to new data sources, and working in varied environments. We’ll continue to provide data and maps through GeoCommons that are usable by everyone, and distribute tools to anyone who needs them.

On Saturday, CrisisCamp Haiti was a revolutionary step that was indubitably a success. Within 3 days of an idea a small group of people helped coordinate and run a series of CrisisCamp Haiti code-a-thons across 5+ cities, over 400 participants, and at least 20 continuous hours of work. At least 6 projects were started, and many more existing projects added people to their community, taught new skills, and built out new features.

In general, the last week has involved a whirlwind of grassroots organization and development of numerous projects. This change of realtime engagement and response by volunteers and non-traditional organizations through internet has no doubt raised the hackles, or at least the concern, of traditional responders, agencies, and government. There are often voiced considerations of causing confusion, providing technology that will have no use, and lack of organization and hierarchy.

Even within these grassroots participants there are calls for centralization, and building chains of responsibility that are somewhat antithesis to the very mechanism by which the project started and how it acts. Many of these projects formulated from simple ideas, growth through passion, an aligned community, and freedom to explore ideas and vet these within the organization. Over time the best ideas crystalize and become part of the long term project and others spin out to new projects.

It’s about the Mindshare and Multiplied Resources

In the beginning of a Crisis response there is an intense desire for people to engage and provide some type of resource: money, time, guidance, knowledge, contacts. At the same time, there is the alternate side of organizations seeking these vast, and limited, resources. Aid agencies put out SMS shortcodes for donations, PayPal links, matching funds. First responders need time, physical labor, and fortitude. Technology projects seek knowledge, translation, testing, documentation, data, integration.

Perhaps uniquely, technology has the possibility of multiplying any individuals efforts. By providing code, or data, and aggregating that data out, my contribution can feed into numerous other projects – whereas time or money is nominally a single use resource. It can buy water, or work for an hour moving rubble, and that’s all that resource can do for that time.

So a perceived problem is in bifurcation and redundancy of efforts and confusion. This can largely be mitigated by open collaboration, and easily sharing data through interchanges. Projects like the People Finder is slowly converging on this type of solution through the use of PFIF exchange and common aggregation points with API’s.

We’re working on improving the CrisisCommons.org site and wiki in order to track active projects, aggregate similar efforts and point volunteers to project homes to join their individual communities.

As always, each new year brings a refreshed feeling of excitement. Perhaps its the long holidays and copious amounts of food, family and fun, or seeing a magic new number on the calendar that makes it feel like “The Future!”, or just a desire to take advantage of an allowed re-emergence of self and goal setting. Of course, time isn’t discontinous, so 2010 isn’t disconnected from the current continuum of development and trends – but it’s still worthwhile to take the time to step back and consider where we are and where we’re going.

Mashable and James, amongst many others, have excellent predictions that will and won’t happen in 2010. Generally they are good insight into trends in the geo and mobile space, although I will take up counterpoint to some of his suppositions on File Formats, Interfaces, OpenStreetMap and Augmented Reality.

File Formats and Interfaces

Geo is definitely becoming mainstream – everyone in my family has a PND, uses Google Maps, and are asking about various location sharing applications. In the next year we’ll see geo become part of the assumed infrastructure, like the timestamp on a post or article, the location will be embedded.

I don’t think TAG (Twitter, Apple Google), as James puts it, will be the only location sharing services. They, along with even more used Facebook, will definitely be the general public interface to location query and sharing – but just because of this reason alone they will have to be very generic, leaving room for specialized location based services to still thrive in niches. FourSquare offers ‘gaming’ or Flickr visual media, and others for music, drinking, sight-seeing, and house finding. They will leverage TAG, or at least TG.

Apple is like the Nintendo of consumer technology – more interested in providing an integrated, compelling experience, and privacy, before full open-ness and engaging with the developer or geek. They’ll still have API’s, but not something like OpenSocial, GeoRSS, or FireEagle integration.

The iPhone, and to lesser extent Android, have been revolutionizing mobile devices. They are truly providing windows into the rest of the web of data combined with the real world. It’s natural for geopatial tools to move into these interfaces, but like any good user experience it won’t be the same capabilities you find on a desktop or browser application. The utilities will be specialized for the small screens, finger inputs, and out-and-about tasks.

For file formats, the Shapefile, unfortunately, isn’t near EOL. Too many tools only speak shapefile, and there is numerous legacy data that is still only available in Shapefile. Sites like GeoCommons offer alternate formats for all the data, but that still won’t remove this basic format. Only when there is a truly open, license free, API to File GeoDatabases (FGDB), and every off the shelf tool can talk that API or Spatialite, will Shapefiles begin disappearing out.

GeoRSS and/or KML, on the other hand, will be in every service that does anything Geo. Looking at any iPhone App review that includes KML (or doesn’t) brings up this point. Near enough everyone has Google Earth on their desktop, and Google is making big pushes in the utilization of Google Earth Plugin for in-browser virtual globes.

Visualization Technologies

To date, we’ve been stuck with either Flash or JavaScript DOM magic (and yes, Silverlight is out there too) in order to do data and geospatial visualization in the browser. As I mentioned, Google has been pushing Google Earth Browser, but also more generally they released O3D, a modern incarnation of X3D, providing for more general capabilities for creating 3D browser experiences. VRML lives!

More recently, there has been a resurgence in vector graphics that don’t rely on proprietary technologies or additional plugins. SVG and Canvas support is pretty widely supported except in the infamous Internet Explorer (which I hear is still being used even today). Examples such as ProtoVis, Cartagen and Tom Carden’s experiments definitely demonstrate that SVG is just on the cusp of being able to do a majority of compelling visualizations capabilities.

Another driver for alternative visualization platforms is the drive to mobile device integration. I don’t see Apple allowing Adobe onto the iPhone anytime soon, and even Android doesn’t have support. What types of visualization make sense is still a very open question – but whatever they are will be done with something like SVG.

Geo Data Skirmishes

James suggests that OpenStreetMap “won’t dominate”. While it won’t dominate, I disagree that it won’t continue to be extremely successful.

Google has recently moved to gathering their own data. They still have a long way to go, with many, many errors in roads, areas, addresses, and businesses and they’re using the crowd to help clean it up. Google is in fact proving the crowd-sourced model. It will be successful. Google is doing it with Google’s data, so there is no positive external benefit to that work – so to the industry it just looks like another data provider. However, with this proven model OpenStreetMap will succeed since any effort built into OSM has a positive benefit to anyone else.

However, there is a major difference in the trajectory OpenStreetMap is taking in the United States compared with Europe and other regions. In most other countries, the governments had very draconian licensing and as such OpenStreetMap was creating data from blank areas – starting from scratch, and building a community of volunteers along the way.

By contrast, in the US a vast majority of the data is free, and becoming more available everyday under the new administration. Therefore the US has a broad coverage of decent data without having first built the user community. So the difficulty here is both in building out community, as well as engaging companies that can do the same thing on their own while retaining proprietary rights to the data.

What’s fascinating, and what signals the ultimate long term success of OpenStreetMap, is that US state, local, and federal government agencies themselves are engaging with OpenStreetMap. They are investigating how to put their data directly into OSM, and possibly even re-incorporate updates and modifications back to their own infrastructures. Some are even considering using OSM toolset as their infrastructure. OpenStreetMap is going through some growing pains with respect to licensing, maintenance, and community – but all necessary steps in moving from a small cadre of hackers to a global, public project.

As we see an increase in open government, specifically driven by the US Administration’s directives, as well as other initiatives such as INSPIRE, this embrace and utilization of open platforms, and repositories, for sharing, federation, and syncronization of data will increase.

And as for augmented reality, it won’t be as big as you think… yet.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday around the not-new, but recently renewed interest in, Placebase’s – and more specifically Jaron Waldman’s – joining Apple in their “Geo Team”.  

Putting aside the question about whether Apple purchased Placebase, it’s more interesting and worthwhile to consider why Apple is interested in pulling in and working with technologists like Jaron that obviously demonstrate the ability to pull together components and build a compelling, unique mapping stack.

Apple technology has increasingly added location capabilities. Address Book, Mail, and iCal all detect addresses and provide links to maps. iPhoto and Aperture understand coordinate tags and can provide maps as well. CoreLocation on the iPhone, and now in Snow Leopard, allow any developer to get the location of the device via a cascading order of geolocation: GPS, Wifi, IP, etc. Apple themselves developed the “Google Maps” iPhone application – just utilizing the Google API for tiles, location and routing.

More recently, Apple has provided for “lost iPhone” tracking via MobileMe. Enterprising uses and developers have used this for friend and family tracking services.

Looking forward, it’s clear that Apple sees the important potential of location to support and augment almost all of their applications and platforms. Like any good business, the less dependent a company can be on third-party’s for core functionality, the better. Therefore, it makes sense that Apple would investigate ways to own and control this key component.

And beyond pure business and strategy, there is a lot to gain by Apple controlling it’s own location and mapping stack. Apple obviously focuses on providing exquisitely crafted experiences. This should permeate through their maps as well. Look at the maps to your local Apple store for an example of how the cartography can fit into the look and feel of the Apple.com store interface. This same customization can exist throughout their product line. Maps applications and API can provide customized interfaces and styling.

And consider that Apple can also build out a MobileMe friend finding and family tracking service. There is now an inherent trust in Apple tools: easy to use, virus free, great for kids. These translate over to trust in sharing my location through my phone to my private family sharing portal.

So in the end, what this signals is a major shift to provide broad, consumer facing compelling geospatial technologies in a well executed interface. Apple is already responsible for enabling location-based services to cross the chasm, and is inducing the broad emergence of augmented reality. It makes perfect sense for them to ensure they control and can craft the entire experience. I’m personally glad they have someone as expert as Jaron on the team.

Voting is now open for next spring’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference, and I was kindly asked by Josh Babetski to be on his panel SXSW Panel: Time + Social + Location.

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

The panel is quite a great group – from the inceptive MapQuest that led the way in internet mapping, to the more modern social location networks of Brightkite and the recent Twitter announced location support.

We’re now carrying the equivalent of super-computers in our pockets that have near ubiquitous connectivity, location, media capturing, and sensors. We can easily lookup businesses, cabs, and directions. But what else is next? Is it really just people checking for the closest coffee shop or hotest hookup?

Or do people want to ask “The Big Here” questions: to inquire about their location and context – the history, environment, perception, and culture that surrounds them or guides them through place. Will we have tricorders, or will mobile devices be relegated to toy devices and glorified media viewers?

This panel includes the foremost implementers and leaders in the field that are building real tools that are used by thousands and millions of people around the world. What have we learned, and where are the next steps leading us?

SXSW panels work by people voting. So please vote up the panel. Last year I moderated one of the only location-based panels, but fortunately this year there is a much wider aspect of geospatial discussions and presentations. So while you’re at it, check out the other good panels.