Computer Models for Social Change

Community Development Crowdmapped and Texted

Ana Brandusescu

This was my first time presenting at the State of the Map US, April 12-13. This is the conferecnce of OpenStreetMap users. I loved the whole conference because it's a mix of users, developers, practitioners, nonprofits, and researchers. That amount of diversity meant there was little academese, which was a wonderful break from previous conferences. I presented on Open data and the City. Here's the video from the talk.

Open Data and the City - Renee Sieber from OpenStreetMap US on Vimeo.

Our Geothink grant held two sessions at the Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, April 8-12. in Tampa, Florida. They were on the wicked problem of public participation and whether the Geoweb could do anything to make participation less structural and more manageable. One nice aspect of our sessions was the inclusion of our partners, Neptis and USGS.

Jon Corbett. 2014. Desperately seeking solutions: trying to understand the inherent wickedness of public participation in the context of the geoweb.

Barbara Poore. 2014. Hyperlocal or Hype? How do communities really make decisions?

Claus Rinner, Michael Markieta, Marcy Burchfield, Rian Allen. 2014. Widgets for Wicked Problems: The Neptis Geoweb Tool and Datasets.

Victoria Fast. 2014. Building a Virtual Climate Change Adaptation Community to Promote Urban Agriculture Initiatives

Ana Brandusescu. 2014. Can we use a crisis mapping platform for community development?

Pamela Robinson. 2014. The Wicked Problem of Public Participation: What is the Role of the Geoweb?

Peter A Johnson. 2014. Fear of an 'international' constituency: Jurisdictionality as a constraint on government adoption of the Geoweb for public participation.

Teresa Scassa. 2014. Public Participation and the Geoweb: the Wicked Problem of Intellectual Property Law.

Elizabeth F Judge. 2014. Implied License for Downstream Uses of Copyrighted Information on the Geoweb.

Had a great time at the big geography conference, this year in Tampa, FL.

We revisited the notion of warring GIS tribes that I brought up at the 2012 AAG. This time Michael Gould and I had the idea that representatives of the tribes could duke it out (in a good way, of course). Hence our 2014 panel, Battle of the Tribes: geoweb, GIS, GI Science, cyberGIS, neogeography

Representing were

Matthew Tenney, PhD student in Geography, and Prof. Renee Sieber have recently been awarded a 3-year Mitacs-Accelerate PhD Fellowship to work one of Geothink's industry partners, ESRI Canada. The project “Uncertain Futures: GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information”, will explore the future role and analytical techniques using spatially referenced user-generated content from a variety of Internet and mobile based technologies in light of current limitations to GIS platforms. Approaches for harvesting, integrating and evaluating this fast-paced and high-volume content are of primary focus, aiming at the design and implementation of applications that take advantage of the increasingly important volunteered geographic information (VGI).