Talk @ SFU

Sieber gave a talk in he Geography Department at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.

Mashing up Participation: Public Engagement On the Geospatial Web

Everyone’s gone gaga over Google Earth and the rest of the Geospatial Web, or Geoweb. The Geoweb, like its compatriots in Web 2.0, supposedly erases the last vestige of the digital divide, providing ubiquitous data, facile user interfaces, and flexible apps. Indeed, this is the era of ‘You’, according to Time Magazine, in that non-experts become prime generators of content on the Internet. Consequently, ‘you’ set the agenda for further development on the Geoweb and increase your influence in public policy.

Are these claims accurate? That’s what this talk is about. I will discuss advances in Web 2.0 that lead to multiple geospatially-enabled technologies. I then explore this erased digital divide, comparing public participation (sometimes called volunteered geographic information or VGI) afforded by Web 2.0 to traditional public participation geographic information systems. I describe the research that we are conducting in communicating global environmental and climate change via the Geoweb. The talk concludes with implications (e.g., moving from the desktop to server-side architectures) for geographers who wish to transition to the Geoweb and become neogeographers.