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.

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

There are already two twitter-map mashups: TwitterMap, and GeoTwitter. GeoTwitter is a simple “red-dot” map, which parses a twitterer’s home location and plots that using Googlemaps XML.

TwitterMap is much more full featured. It actually polls the current public profile feed looking for “lat: lng:” specification of your current position, and then puts that on a full-frame map, with different colors depending on how long since you’ve updated. The problem is that Twitter has gotten very popular, and updates happen frequently. TwitterMap only polls the public list every so often, so there’s a 1 in 20 chance your post will actually be grabbed.

The developer, Patrick Kollitsch is hard at work on an updated version that should fix this issue and have more features to boot.

I definitely like the idea of showing a fading history of when the person last updated, or to see a trail of their travels. Also, seeing the user’s community of friends with lines linking them – especially if mixed into the history, so see as they come together and apart, would be very cool.

More to come on possible geocoding & picoformat ideas around Twitter, and like services (dodgeball, plazes, et al.)

Update (3/28/07): another TwitterMap has shown up that offers a very simple and effective interface. It also offers TwitterVision, which is a semi-realtime updating of twits as the show up and their location.

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
  # MD:5
  # MD:4

resp = Sunlight.getRepresentativeNameFromCityState({:city => 'Detroit', :state => "MI"})
puts resp.inspect
  # Kilpatrick, Carolyn C.
  # Conyers, John  Jr.
  # Levin, Sander M.
  # McCotter, Thaddeus G.
  # Dingell, John D.

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

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!

They mentioned having a public GeoParser API available for developers to play around with. So I passed in one of the output feeds from FoFRedux (a feed aggregator that supports GeoRSS) through the Metacarta GeoParser to produce a map of locations that show up in my feeds.

FoFRedux -> Metacarta Example: SlashDot article locations

So now you can use a feed aggregator to display, say locations of articles and posts for your friends feeds. Or locations of Flickr photos, or even UPS/Fedex package tracking. The example just shows the image output, but the GeoParser can output GML or GeoMarkup XML, and JSON for better intergration into other applications.