Published in
Geo, Mashup, Project
Last week, Alan Gutierrez gave an excellent presentation at the Burton Catalyst Group titled “How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software” or “Innovating Your Way Out of Total System Failure” . Get the slide deck (powerpoint, 32MB)) and digg the story here.
It’s a compelling tale of emergent behavior by a community to leverage the tools it has at hand to enact powerful change. Too often large tools are built to be the end-all-be-all solution to perceived problems and pain points. However, the actual tried and true method of cobbling together solutions from a variety of tools, each as appropriate, leads to agile toolsets and better communication.
On a very similar note, my talk for FOSS4G 2008 in Cape Town has been accepted. Rebuilding a City through Community Participation, Neogeography and GIS will present the technical details of utilizing open-data, open-source and closed-source GIS tools, loosely coupled systems, workshops and open discussion to build cartographic visualizations. As a developer I enjoy tech-talk, I find the application based presentations much more interesting.
The presentation will use the New Orleans mapping as the case study, and while I can’t convey the “in-the-field” experiences Alan, Francine, Karen, and the others living in the city can tell, I hope I can share the experiences to inspire other communities to employ similar tactics to engage their neighbors and government.
The project is still very much a work in progress, but it’s exciting for exactly the reasons Alan gave in his talk – people are already doing the effort and passion – just help them pull the pieces together to have a great impact.
Published in
Conference, Mashup, mapufacture
Two months ago I talked about working with Alan from Think NOLA to provide tools and technologies for bringing together the quickly growing user-generated datasets, collaborative mapping, and historic information towards advocacy, awareness, and planning in rebuilding the neighborhoods of New Orleans.
What has been most amazing about the project is that there were emergent, self-induced projects that were actively addressing many areas of capturing information. They are using Flickr for geotagged photos of historic buildings, spreadsheets of demolition permits exported as KML, and key historic maps that outline the original city planning.
The project was selected as a finalist in the NetSquared challenge, which means they were given the opportunity to come out to San Jose to meet with the other 20 projects and discuss their ideas, goals, progress, and cooperations. While the conference itself will award three top-voted projects with funding, the point of the conference and discussion isn’t solely this monetary support.
In planning for the conference, the entire discussion occurred publicly on Alan’s Blog at http://thinknola.com/post/gis. Through open discussion, numerous other projects and individuals contacted Alan to share support, data sets, ideas and future collaborations. NetSquared served as a catalyst for focusing a specific set of projects, but the longer effect is that it has brought together people that will carry the project forward and make sure everyone succeeds.
As a prototype, I used Mapufacture to combine together Francine’s Flickr photos, planning documents of school rebuilding, and the 1924 Taylor’s planning map of New Orleans. It is just a simple demonstration of what is possible using a combination of Neogeography, GIS, and community participation. The next step will be to build better tools for basic analysis and discussion. In addition, the data is open and available for other people to download for their own visualizations, analysis and collaborations.
Prototype: http://mapsomething.com/demo/neworleans
Published in
Mashup, Programming, Ruby, Web
Sunlight Labs has released a public API, their Sunlight Datakit. It’s a straight-forward, simple API for getting access to their Civic data, like Congressional Representatives, zipcodes, timezones, and some geographic information.
There is some basic information about elected representatives that makes politico mashups easier: the ability to tie a name to a state, the district and zip codes that they represent, their office telephone number, and so on. We have put together a simple labs “datakit” that does this for us, drawing from several publicaly available data sources. We are making this fully available and have provided a fully documented API for the methods we have developed for those sources. Find out about the datakit here.
Of course, any API needs a nice little client to tie it into your applications. Here is my Ruby client. It’s very simple, because is uses the fallback method_missing to handle any function passed to the class. This also allows the class to be extended by implementing specific methods if more processing of the response is needed.
require 'open-uri'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'cgi'
SUNLIGHT_HOST = 'http://sunlightlabs.com/datakit/'
class Sunlight
def self.method_missing(service_method, *args)
params = args[0].collect {|k,v| CGI.escape(k.to_s) + '=' + CGI.escape(v.to_s)}.join('&')
url = SUNLIGHT_HOST + service_method.to_s + "?" + params
open(url).read.split("|")
end
end
resp = Sunlight.getDistrictFromZip5({:zip => 20740})
puts resp.inspect
resp = Sunlight.getRepresentativeNameFromCityState({:city => 'Detroit', :state => "MI"})
puts resp.inspect
The Sunlight Datakit currently offers the following functions. Check out the documentation for information on the parameters and returned values.
- getDistrictFromZip5
- getStateFromZip5
- getDistrictFromZip9
- getStateFromZip9.php
- getRepresentativeNameFromDistrict
- getRepresentativePhoneNumberFromDistrict
- getRepresentativeRoomNumberFromDistrict
- getCityFromZip5
- getCityStateFromZip5
- getLatitudeFromCityState
- getLongitudeFromCityState
- getZipCodesFromCityState
- getTimezoneFromCityState
- getRepresentativeNameFromCityState
- getRepresentativeNameFromState
- getStateAbbreviationFromStateName
- getStateNameFromStateAbbreviation
Published in
Mashup, Programming, Technology, Web
AOL has decided to make a try for the Web2.0 phenomenon by fulfilling a rule of Web2.0, releasing a public API.
AOL Developer introduces a set of API’s meant to tie into existing AOL services like instant messaging (AIM), AOL Music, WinAMP player, homepages, and MapQuest’s OpenAPI.
AOL is also releasing Boxely (coming August 2006), which is a toolset of UI elements similar to Yahoo!’s UI library (how does one include both a bang and an apostrophe in a possesive noun with punctuation like Yahoo!?)
It’s not clear yet what AOL really has to leverage in terms of bringing in mashup developers. Really someone that wants to get hired/bought. Though being able to better integrate AIM status and location into a site/tool seems really useful. So go to developer.aol.com and see if anything sparks your imagination. And try not to smirk at AOL’s line:
…this is where you’ll find the special sauce to build great Web applications. We want you to hack our stuff. So mash it up!
Last week, Alan Gutierrez gave an excellent presentation at the Burton Catalyst Group titled “How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software” or “Innovating Your Way Out of Total System Failure” . Get the slide deck (powerpoint, 32MB)) and digg the story here.
The geowanking community has taken notice of the 
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