NSGIC Past-President in a "Hallway Conversation"

Past-president Learon Dalby is the guest on a Directions Magazine Podcast with Adena Schutzberg. The interview -- a "Hallway Conversation" -- was recorded in late October. Ms. Schutzberg has noted in the past that some of the most important conversations that happen at professional conferences are the ones that take place on the side, or out in the hallway. She's started trying to model that aspect of conferences in her podcasts.

This hallway conversation is a review of issues discussed at the 2009 NSGIC Annual Conference. Among the subjects covered are the growing use of social media, crowd-sourcing of data, broadband mapping, parcels on Google Maps, governance of the NSDI, and the NSGIC Advocacy Agenda.

Another Social Media Tool for GIS Coordination

Actually, this is not about a new social media tool. Rather, this is about a new aspect of twitter, which has seen a sharp increase in use among GIS coordinators and others who (let's be honest) like to stay obsessively in the loop.

This week, twitter opened up all users to the creation of lists, a tool that was introduced slowly over the previous weeks to a smaller subset of users. Lists allow users to create and curate collections of "like" twitter accounts. It is an expansion, and focusing, I think of the "following" behavior that makes twitter such an active spreader of information.

And this new way of using twitter is going to shake things up for a time, as users find ways to use it. As a start, we're seeing several professional organizations start to curate self-focused lists. Here at NSGIC, for example, we have started a list of State GIS Coordination tweeters.

Here are a few other lists we've found in the first hours of the list-creation period:

• NationalGroups (@Governing)
• geo-prof-orgs (@tinacary)
• geo-biz (@entchev)
• geotweets (@StevenFeldman)
• gis (@mapmaker)
  

This will be an interesting period. Even as I write this post, and poke around twitter for lists to list, things are changing. I expect that the "list of GIS lists" will change, continuously, over the next few days. So treat the list above as just a teaser.

We'll have to wait and see what the final collection of lists of lists will turn out to look like.

GeoTools to Enable Big Ideas

Google has opened voting for its Project 10¹⁰⁰ which launched a year ago as a search for ideas to "change the world by helping as many people as possible." There were some 150,000 suggestions, from which 16 "big ideas" have been developed.

As we reviewed these submissions, we started noticing lots of similar ideas related to certain broad topics, and decided that combining the best aspects of these individual proposals would produce the most innovative approaches to solving some very pressing problems.

What struck me, in reading through the 16 big ideas, is how many include some aspect of geospatial data, either as a major focus or in a supporting role among the suggestions that led to these ideas. For example:

• Create real-time natural crisis tracking system includes both the collection of data via geospatial remote-sensing tools and the use of on-line mapping as a user-interface.
• Make government more transparent includes calls for map-based issues reporting and legislative updates.
• Collect and organize the world's urban data is in and of itself a geospatially-based initiative.
• Create genocide monitoring and alert system includes the use of map-based reporting and monitoring "to track, predict, and prevent genocides."
• Promote health monitoring and data analysis includes suggestions to use a geospatial component to health data to "spot community trends."
• Create real-world issue reporting system is another suggestion that calls for a largely map-based interface and monitoring system.
• Build real-time, user-reported news service includes suggestions for location-based reporting and news services.
  

And several of the other nine ideas are ones that may include a geospatial component.

My purpose in reporting these ideas is not to promote voting for any of them. Rather, I was struck by the extent to which geospatial data and tools are fundamental to nearly all of the big ideas now being discussed, whether as part of social-media driven initiatives such as Google's or among government leaders at all levels.

It suggests to me that geospatial data is not the end in itself -- not the "big project." But it is essential to almost all other big projects and must be reliable, widespread, and accurate.

Another Media Map in (and on) The News

Governing.com's 13th Floor blog features a simple geospatial mash-up from the Wichita Eagle this week.

The Eagle's Wichita Crime Maps is similar to other media mash-ups that we've seen. It presents basic crime data from the local police on a "standard" Google Maps map. There's nothing too earth-shattering here.

But the 13th Floor bloggers do use this to make a point about data-sharing from their point of view as folks who cover local government issues:

Lots of police departments are mapping crime data and lots are putting the maps online. Usually, though, they end up buried deep within government Web sites. I'd guess that most are rarely visited. So, if governments really want the public to see their data (and, in some cases, that might be a pretty big "if"), working with the media on projects like this one makes a lot of sense.

IndianaMap Featured in Television Report

Indiana's Jill Saligoe-Simmel reports on her Professional Geographer blog that the Indiana Geographic Information Council's IndianaMap is featured on the series "Across Indiana" on Indianapolis' WFYI Public Television station.

Dr. Jill reports that the segments are the result of several months of work by members of the Council and feature information on the uses and benefits of Indiana's 2005 very high resolution orthophotography project.

The blog entry includes a few highlights.

GIS Coordination as Social Networking?

David Sacks, founder of the genealogy website Geni and a former leader at PayPal, has written a guest-post at TechCrunch in which he argues that the future of the web portal will shift from the current "search" model (Google) to the "social-web" model (FaceBook).

I think that this shift holds lessons and perhaps opportunities for GIS Coordination and creating the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

In his post (The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter), Sacks notes that the earliest web portal model was "browsing," as embodied by Yahoo. He traces Yahoo's decline in market-share against Google to the changing number of web sites. Early on, a limited pool of sites could be accessed through Yahoo's browse-able catalog.

But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.

Sacks suggests that the paradigm is shifting again. Now, networks of like-minded web citizens are starting to guide each other to content through a variety of tagging and aggregation systems.

The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends.

It is his thesis that FaceBook is developing the portal platform that best embodies this new model.

That may or may not be the case, but this idea does make me think of some of the ways we try to create and maintain strong state-level GIS Communities to enable the NSDI.

Increasingly, we are bending the tools of the social web to our needs, publishing RSS feeds, starting blogs related to GIS, and using tagging sites such as del.icio.us to note and aggregate useful content.

I think we can do more. The key to the social web is wide participation. The strength of NSGIC is the breadth and depth of its membership. Our challenge now is to increase the links among that membership on this new and growing social web.