where2.0 - Wed 14th May (3.30pm - 5pm)

The last session of the 2008 where2.0 conference, introduced by Tim O'Reilly.

InSTEDD: Humanitarian Collaboration Tales
Robert Kirkpatrick (InSTEDD), Eduardo Jezierski (InSTEDD)

"InSTEDD functions as an 'innovation lab' for developing novel approaches to challenges in the field."

Their approach is to partner with as many other services and technologies as appropriate.

"We learn by failing fast and failing often."

A virtual instance of Sahana (a disaster management system) has been put into action as part of the response to Cyclone Nargis.

Interesting use of existing apps such as Twitter, incorporating lat/long positioning data, to communicate with people in the field on mobile phones.

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Lifemapper 2.0: Using and Creating Geospatial Data and Open Source Tools for the Biological Community
Aimee Stewart (University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute)

Lifemapper: Two main purposes of the project
- to create an archive of ecological niche models
- a bunch of web services to expose the data in the archive and allow analysis on the data

Yet another projection of data being shown on Google Earth - Google must be happy.

Lots of data being collected from around 200 institutions, totaling about 6,000 collections of data. Some techie stuff about how the data is gathered, stored etc ("using as many existing standards as possible"), and then accessible via the Lifemapper website.

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Google Maps for Mobile with My Location - Behind the Scenes
Adel Youssef (Google Inc.)

"My Location opens the road atlas on the right page".

Launched in beta in Nov 2007 and launched on iPhone in Jan 2008.

My Location is based around using Cellid as complementary to GPS as a means of determining your current location.

No personal/user information is collected - just information about the location of the cell tower.

Some of the challenges:
- 100's of different platforms
- Areas of interest vs actual location (for example, the cell tower is not necessarily where you are... nor is it necessarily the location you are interested in)
- Noisy data

"A balance between respecting user privacy and providing good useful functionality to the user... the user has full control over the service".

What next?
- improving accuracy and coverage
- continue to improve security
- enabling location for 3rd parties (android, gears)

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A Data Source to Make Mashups Correct, Complete, Relevant and Revisited
Jonathan Lowe (Giswebsite LLP)

Freebase - an open, shared database of the world's knowledge - holds spatial data but is not exclusively spatial.

Freebase has semantically structured data. Semantics is about meaning, providing structured relationships between different objects.

So... semantics is good, structured data is good, Freebase does both of these and is also open... which is good, yay!

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Enemies Around Every Corner: Mapping in an Activist World
Erik Hersman (Ushahidi)

First up, Erik is excited about some of the stuff he's seen at the conference.
These include Geotate, AfricaMap, Buglabs, DIY Drones.

Then onto his coverage of the unrest in Kenya around the recent elections.
One influential local blog was Kenyan Pundit.

"Our Goals:
- create a way for everyday Kenyans to report incidents of violence they saw
- create an archive of news and reports around the same event
- show where majority of violence is happening"

ushahidi.com was created in a couple of days.

Lessons Learned:
- the importance of mapping accuracy
- data poisoning - what happens when an antagonist starts using it?
- verification is difficult
- clarify why it was created and make that obvious
- include a feedback route from the end user, not just pushing data out

Whether you are an activist or an antagonist depends on which side of the issue you are on.

Some examples of activists websites, including I Love Mountains.

Mapping for human rights is different to mapping for activism.


... and that's a wrap.