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

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.

If Where2.0 is the cutting edge of geospatial technology - at least in the consumer space, then WhereCamp is the alpha brainstorm and prototyping of Where2.0 2010.

There are plenty of summaries around, and each gives insight into the different aspects of the unconference. You have your high-fallutin’ corporate types, developers, and ancillary community advocates that traveled from Portland just for WhereCamp.

Check out the constant stream of twitters of wherecamp.

So many hats

The most important thing I learned at WhereCamp actually had nothing to do with geo.

There has been a lot of discussion leading up to Where2.0 and WhereCamp about the benefits of open data exchange between a number of the geospatial repositories that are coming online to share and aggregate data. Both Sean Gorman of GeoCommons and David Troy spoke in their presentations about the importance and capability of interchange.

However, while the concept is easy - lets share data - there is a lot of difficulty in the specifics. 45 minutes in an ad-hoc session could very easily diverge into many channels of non-resulting vectors.

Instead, Steve Coast introduced us to a brilliant technique for investigating, analyzing, and brain-storming on difficult and potentially controversial issues. A technique that is perfectly adaptable to solving problems in short-time periods with a large group of people.

Six de Bono Hats is a process walking through various perceptions of problem solving. You preset a time limit on each, everyone in the group “wears” this hat and offers insight with this perception. After the fixed time, you move on to the next hat.

• White hat (Blank sheet): Information & reports, facts and figures (objective)
• Red hat (Fire): Intuition, opinion & emotion, feelings (subjective)
• Yellow hat (Sun): Praise, positive aspects, why it will work (objective)
• Black hat (Judge’s robe): Criticism, judgment, negative aspects, modus tollens (objective)
• Green hat (Plant): Creativeness, Alternatives, new approaches & ‘everything goes’, idea generation & provocations (speculative/creative)
• Blue hat (Sky): “Big Picture,” “Conductor hat,” “Meta hat,” “thinking about thinking”, overall process (overview)

By using this technique, we were able to lay out a good path towards interoperability and interchange. We acknowledged previous and current efforts in geospatial and non-geo domains and also the difficulties that will be faced. You can read the resulting notes here.

The technique was so successful I applied it at the GeoPrivacy session. It came in half-way through after I saw that the conversation for the first 30 minutes was turning into a ping-pong game of point-counterpoint with no real guidance or outcome. So we performed a much fore-shortened de Bono hats and came out with an adequate list of privacy concerns, and suggestions of future actions.

A week passes

With WhereCamp and Where2.0 2008 over, I completely collapsed on Monday morning. Having the two conferences back to back means that is an incredible concentration of experts and enthusiasts. There is also the follow-on of the well-packaged Where2.0 with the unwrapping to dig inside of WhereCamp that brings us back to innovating and collaborating.

It was a grueling but completely inspiring week. I’m not sure how the future will turn out, but I know I’m very excited about it.

Where2.0 is amazing in watching the trends over time. The ideas that are postulated and alluded to years ago are now emerging in products, tools, and companies.

Where-3D

One of the biggest of these emergent trends from the first day of Where2.0 were Augmented & Immersive Realities. Companies like EveryScapeEveryScape (homepage) doing immersive video and annotation - the next generation of QTVR. EarthMine (homepage) is capturing a huge amount of data to create high-resolution 3D models of the world that can then be utilized for annotation and analysis of the real world.

Ancillary to fully digitizing reality, aerial imaging is becoming as ubiquitous as GPS for capturing road information. Pict’Earth (homepage) are building the autonomous systems and tools for capturing and using imagery in systems like OpenAerialMap. What is the next generation of open-data collection?

Where-Design

Another common theme that has emerged was proper visual design of these new mapping technologies. Adrian’s opening keynote has clearly shown what straight-forward steps can be taken to use open-source tools and simple concepts to provide compelling, visually attractive interfaces.

Chris Spurgeon even asked the cartographers in the room to raise their hands, outing about a half-dozen. As map interfacespenetrate into most of our tools and websites, I hope there is continued growth in future dialog of technologists and cartographers.

Where-is-the-Money

While this has been present at previous conferences, Where2008 definitely included a large current of discussion around monetization strategies and opportunities. Greg Sterling’s panel was fairly narrow in breadth of members, consisting primarily of the sole geospatial advertiser(s) and mobile companies. Steve Coast of CloudMade and Ian White of Urban Mapping are both data provider companies, yet debate focused on “mobile coupons”. I would have liked to have a broader view of the monetization landscape - how in fact has Urban Mapping moved from data provider to ad-supporter. Skyhook Wireless is dabbling in a number of spaces: geolocation technology, social network, advertisements, and who knows what else. Even CloudMade had three separate businesses before getting funding. The common trend of that panel’s composition was that they are involved in a lot of markets.

On the second day Dev Khare of Venrock gave a much broader survey of the monetization landscape, looking at devices, users, opportunities and strategies.

Why Where?

One of my favorite components of Where2.0 are the closing series of talks that approach answering the question “Why are we building this technology?” It’s important, as innovators, engineers, developers, and businesses to understand the implications of our work. We cannot claim that we are not free from responsibility for the resultant uses of our applications.

Lisa Parks, a media studies expert, makes us realize the impact remote imagery has on the potential conceptual understanding and involvement of citizens. Even by the fact that someone of her expertise is looking at a complex technology as satellite sensing from the viewpoint of “media” should demonstrate the deep influence tools like Google Earth and WorldWind are having on users around the world.

Erik Hersman (blog) and InSTEDD both do incredible work to flex tools to serve the emergent and demanding needs of people in disasters and crises. Simple, yet compelling repurposing of mobile phones as observer data collectors and Twitter for in-the-field tracking and response are just a few examples of the good ancillary applications of geospatial technology. We should all be cognizant of how our tools may be modified ad-hoc to assist these unanticipated needs.

Mikel, Steve Coast, and I gave our 3-hour workshop yesterday talking through our work and thoughts on hacking geo sites and open data. I think it went well overall - and welcome feedback from anyone that attended.

Then last night I gave an Ignite talk on the work we’re doing at Mapufacture to provide customized GeoWeb services. It was less of a “production pitch” than other presentations - something that I’ll talk about in another post about the changing face of the Where2.0 conference. The video

This morning Adrian talked about what EveryBlock is doing to explore the next generation of Where2.0 apps that are bringing better cartography and localized news to the web.

I’ll try and cover more news and talks that are interesting as they happen.