This weekend, Tim Waters (chippy) noticed that the WhiteHouse is using OpenLayers mapping library and OpenStreetMap basemap tiles in their new Delivering on Change page.

Whether you were already serving your country, or are responding to the President’s call, share how you are delivering on change in your community.Whether it is an hour per month helping those struggling in the current economy, tutoring kids in your neighborhood every day, or anything else, we want to highlight what Americans are doing to strengthen our country.

This is very interesting on several levels. Foremost is the use of government provided (TIGER/Line) and crowd-sourced data (OpenStreetMap) in an official US Government Site. This is definitely an indicator that what were cutting edge tools have reached a critical mass to provide broad usability and appeal. Open Source? check

Looking underneath the hood, the data is provided via a KML feed (), so you can pull the data out and upload or map it however you want. Open Data? check

The site itself, Delivering on Change, is asking citizens to contribute stories and media about their personal engagement with change. This is an incredibly exciting step to ask for people to contribute to national storytelling and character. Citizen-sourced data? check

The new US administration is continually doing amazing, and open, initiatives. There is incredible excitement around Recovery.gov as a testbed for the next generation of transparency and embrace of technology and open data feeds.

Small next steps

My thoughts on interesting applications wouldn’t be complete without pointing out a couple of suggestions. While many defend the default OpenLayers controls – I personally think that implementors should take that next step and apply minor customization to better integrate the look and feel of the map controls into their site. I’ve talked before about how easy it is to change some CSS to replace the controls. Perhaps even just a darker blue background to match the White House blue in the logo. Customized?

Another, less highlighted but very important for Government sites is the integration of accessibility controls. OpenLayers supports map navigation using keyboard inputs – which provides for alternative interfaces to navigate the map. It’s not clear if this is official “508 compliant”, but at least demonstrates the potential. Accessible?

How you can help

So do you want to help make Change, especially with mapping data and technology? Come join us at the Washington, DC mapping party – currently planned for June 20 + 21, 2009 somewhere in DC (details coming soon). Or join a mapping party near you.

Through my help with VoteReport.in I have been diving much more into supporting and deploying the Ushahidi platform as part the front-end for user contributed reports. Ushahidi itself started out as a quick mashup a year ago and since then has blossomed into a much fuller platform that is being utilized in dozens of initiatives and projects.

Each of these projects evolves the platform, adding new customization capabilities, more input types, browser support, and more. These modifications may be happening in rapid succession without the main Ushahidi development team even being aware of these changes. And the system may even be running in a remote area with little connectivity.

Traditionally, this has meant that a deployment would download a copy of the current release version, or maybe a development snapshot if there was some emminent new feature that was very useful, and then go off, make modifications – probably on a live server, and maybe email these changes back way after the event in hopes that some of the changes are accepted back into the platform. Updates to the main code base wouldn’t be easily applied to these heavily modified derivatives – so essentially every deploy is a fork of the code.

How Git can save the day

Fortunately, Ushahidi chose Git as the code repository server, although the installation instructions still suggest that you download the code. Git is meant to support just this kind of distributed workflow and collaboration.

If you’re not familiar with Git, I highly recommend checking out Git Internals. But to summarize, it is a versioning control system that is fast, efficient, has local indexes (stored in a local .git directory) and can reference any number of remote indexes to share commits, branches, and files. Where in traditional systems there is an ‘official’ host repository – in Git all repositories are equal and can quickly connect and syncronize.

What this means in a system like Usahidi is that any deployment would first just get a local clone of the official Ushahidi repository to their local system and setup and get running. If they make changes to this code they can just do a commit into their local index. In order to share this code with other developers on this same deployment they could just provide them with the Git link to this repository, or make a branch and add a deployment specific “remote” index that multiple developers could all push into.

Along the way as new code is released in the Ushahidi repository, these deployments could merge in these changes to their local branches without losing their local modifications. And conversely, local modifications could be merged and pushed back into the Ushahidi master index very easily.

Moving sideways

Now lets think about some really powerful uses of the Git architecture. Since the entire index is stored locally in a .git folder – it is easy to put an Ushahidi deploy on a USB stick or archived folder, send it around, make modifications in the field and continue to commit these changes to a local repository even while offline. Then when connectivity is restored, or the USB stick can be brought back to a networked computer, the modifications that had been made, and tracked, could be pushed back to a deployment or Ushahidi instance.

And with arbitrary remote indexes – individual deployments could share code and modifications between themselves without having to go through an Ushahidi instance. Local networks around an incident, culture, language, or feature set could easily collaborate and iterate the code. Imagine if in Gaza, the Al Jazeera instance could have shared code to other local organizations running similar systems.

I think there are even more potential applications of Git to distributed architectures that would be useful for document and database sharing that occur in fast paced situations. However, Git itself will have to work on some of the usability and interface design issues that make it a difficult tool for novice users.

Like any over-committed technologist who participates in multiple organizations, projects, hobbies, and just life in general – it’s easy to obsess on finding the best task tracking tool. I used to be a dedicated user of iGTD, but somewhere in the upcoming iGTD2 release the developer ceased releases and progress disappeared. Since then, I’ve considered Things, OmniFocus, and even simpler mechanisms like TaskPaper or hosting my own with Tracks.

None of these options really clicked with the way I wanted to organize my projects and tasks. In addition, their ability to syncronize between computers, or mobile access was limited. At best it required MobileMe account, very expensive iPhone clients and still syncronized to a single machine instance.

When Remember the Milk released their free iPhone client (requires Pro version) I went back and checked the progress of this project. I was very impressed with how far it had come from merely a simple web task to a very simple, and incredibly flexible, web-based task manager. The most powerful capability here is that my task list is decentralized and can by accessed, queried, synced, and viewed transparently and independent of interface.

RtM has embraced and followed through on the paradigm of bringing the tool closer to the user, rather than forcing the user to come to the tool. Look over the very long list of official services, GMail gadget, mobile clients for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, & plain mobile browser. I can input new items via Twitter (which means via SMS or any Twitter client is now a task manager), Email, or even Quicksilver. Putting tasks into Remember the Milk is as easy as the thought that created the todo and I can easily flow it out of my head and into a safe tracking system. I even made a Fluid app of RememberTheMilk.com which gives me a Desktop-like app.

Sorting and fulfilling tasks follows the common GTD methodology. In addition, you can setup locations and attach tasks to these locations. Like other mobile task managers, with the iPhone app you can then lookup nearby tasks or at a specific location.

Remember the Milk even has an API, although you need to sign up for it and verify you’re using it only for non-commercial use or explain what your commercial use is. I’m thinking I need to do some integration of tasks with my home automation system as well as task completion trending.

I think that Tracks is still a good option. It’s open-source and written in Rails – so it’s easy to extend and modify. Building on Twitter or Mobile interfaces would be straight-forward and mean that I could have complete control and privacy of my items. Maybe I should put that on my “todo” list: d rtm Extend Tracks with RTM functionality

Note: Kumbuku Maziwa means “Remember the Milk” in Swahili. This was the first phrase I learned as a way to move beyond “hello” while we were hiking for several hours in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. The locals thought I was super-silly for asking how to say Kumbuku Maziwa, but now I’ll never forget the phrase.

Now that the day is wrapping up, offering a very small selection of some amazing reports of good and bad incidents on US Election day:

my designated voting location was closed for repairs with no signs…

Buffalo, NY (link)

police were waiting to ticket me and challenge my ability to vote due to incorrect license plates

Kings Beach, CA (link)

I was sworn at by a poll worker to stop “bitchin’ and complainin’”

Tulsa, OK (link)

…everyone was in a good spirit, and the electoral officials did a wonderful job handling such a large crowd. My hats off to them…

New York City, NY (link)

Very organized and quick. Fie on computer voting machines – paper works great!

South Lyon, MI (link)

My First day voting, and went very smoothly … I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life…

Irvington, NJ (link)

Thank you Team!

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.