Platial News and Neogeography

Cheap GPS (xkcd)

(Via xkcd - A Webcomic.)

Psychic Location Awareness or ESP GPS

Richard Wiseman, psychologist, magician, and author of The Luck Factor, Quirkology and 59 Seconds, is just wrapping up what must surely be the first ever experiment on psychic power, remote viewing, and location awareness on twitter.

The experiment went as follows. Once a day, Wiseman would go to some undisclosed location. Once he was there, he'd announce this fact, and ask people for their general perceptions about the place. Then, 30 minutes later, he'd post 5 photos of places. Participants were asked to pick which one he was at. An hour later, he's disclose the actual location.

He's undoubtedly going to take some time to crunch the numbers before releasing the findings, but I can't wait to see what came of it.

Within the universe of psychic ability, I wonder if 'location awareness' is already a designated specialty, and if physical proximity (or perhaps social proximity online) might have any impact of success rates? I don't think 'current location' was on Wiseman's demographic survey, but he could surely analyze the social graph after the fact for proximity.

Tactile Sight

There is a story that Oliver Sacks tells on an episode of RadioLab about how he carries these very strong magnetic balls in his pockets, and that these balls are continually re-orienting themselves to the magnetic north, he can simply feel which way is north by the rotation of these objects, essentially a low tech haptic compass. Tactile Sight takes this simple physical protocol to a whole new level.

The Tactile Belt™ is an affordable wearable device that allows you to navigate using only touch.  The device frees you from requiring to use your eyes as there is no display, all information is conveyed via touch.  It is like using Mapquest or Google Maps but not requiring to use your eyes. 

(Via @where20 )

In Conclusion: The Rise of Community Cartography

Stages 0-4 are in concurrent development but the social impact and adoption will almost surely evolve more linearly. As we approach the unanswered questions, neogeographers can become the community organizers of the coming decade resulting in a sharp rise in community cartography with measurable impact. Community cartography is map-making for the benefit of a community by its members.  The ubiquitousness of social media, democratization of map technology, accessibility of data add a level of location-based equity never before achieved. It’s a revolution that unites the power of location, analysis, community tools and access flattening the system a little at a time.

Since the 1980s there has been a growing movement toward participation in the GIS community.  Mapmaking techniques have been used globally for increasing communications, collaborative planning, and conflict resolution. In the Philippines IAPAD has used 3D models as a way to steward conflict resolution with success. The GreenMap project has broadened participation and access even further, around sustainability. The GreenMap methodology involves a common set of icons and framework so that less stewardship is required in facilitating citizen mapping. Community cartography, one topic of neogeography, has the chance to propel movements even further by putting tools for representation, analysis, collaboration, navigation and diplomacy into the hands of millions of people With further decreasing  of stewardship, come new issues to be resolved with care and sensitivity.

Citizens will shape and create new political and cultural contexts which are online, offline and location aware. Borderless connection and real-time location-data enable  independent cross border social structures, trade, migration and  societies cooperating with one another and well outside of governments.

The infrastructure, need and participation is in place and we can get to work on answering the rest of the hard questions. Emergent products, services and regions will not neatly fit into these stages but will overlap, build on one another, integrate and probably conflict but will continue to change the way we live. Pragmatically speaking, we may have to wait another year to have seamless answers to, “Where can I get the best bagel on the Lower East side right this second?” and we’ll first need to be spammed by iPhone based friend-finding services with bugs but its a small investment for ubiquitous knowledge. Happy Mapping.

Resources & References:

Greenmap
IAPAD
FortiusOne
Frappr
Google Maps
Google Mapmaker
Platial
PPGIS, especially the LinkedIn group for the case study fodder Walter Svekla, Geographic Information Scientist and Interdisciplinary Designer, Carmen Tedesco,   Program Officer at AED Center for Environmental Strategies, Brian Cooper,  Associate Lecturer at University of Sydney,  Elke Verbeeten,   Independent Research Professional, Giacomo Rambaldi, Sr. Programme Coordinator, ICT4D Innovation at CTA (Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation)
Institute for the Future
Introduction to Neogeography, Andrew Turner
Open Street Map
Orton Family Foundation
On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges

Stage 4. Diplomacy

How can I apply real-time location-based exchange across borders? How can we create borderless global movements using maps? How can neogeography contribute to international aid and social justice? How can a group of citizens connect and effect cross-nation policy?

Society to society networks become commonplace and global citizens share resources and shape policy, mediation, travel and defense.  This is the stage where long standing national/geographic community issues and territorial disputes can be resolved by societies and where treaties may be forged among citizens.

Neogeography can be the foundation of a new dialogue connecting people across borders, sharing local customs and concepts. Milton C. Cummings Jr. defines cultural diplomacy as “... the exchange of ideas, information, art, lifestyles, values systems, traditions, beliefs and other aspects of cultures....” These ideas, information, lifestyles, values systems become more transparent, easier to analyze to identify points of connection and agreement. Cultures have become collections of subcultures which can be navigated through maps. Within the field of Participatory GIS,  mapmaking is already being used to successfully resolve conflict, border disputes and other social issues. Once these processes are available to everyone and location information is truly open, diplomacy on a  massive scale becomes possible.
The major challenges here lie in ethics and the ability to readily adapt to changing usage as technology becomes even more accessible. PPGIS, the forum for participatory geographic information systems and technologies, shares the guidelines of their strong ethical foundation. Citizens will surely ‘overstep their boundaries’ in foreign affairs and neogeography may be the seat of those new challenges and opportunities.

Stage 3. Ambient Awareness/Viewfinder

How can I get a better understanding of where I am? (Plant species, water levels , historical data etc), How can my location aware device support field-based, perpetual education?

I’m in “Forest park” becomes “Salmon spawning 6 meters north”. How can I navigate near and far using social memory maps? How can we always find the right place at the right time?

Mike Liebhold articulates his tricorder view of the world so well that its easy to forget it doesn’t exist and get annoyed when you go to use it and its not there. But the building blocks are in place for a viewfinder perspective of the world around us.  The much hyped Sekai camera app embodies that world-view and points to better informed human race no matter where we go. Raven will talk more about this at Where 2.0. In stage 3, location is deeply connected to our immediate view and informs us in an ambient way as we passively gather information. The same questions, we answered in Stage 0,  can be better answered with a finer grained, context changing description. “Where am I?”  will provide a hyper local knowledge layer about everything from forgotten histories, toxicity levels and profile-based social commentary which will help us navigate both near and far with the benefit of millions of Geoweb contributors. Traffic, travel, interest, education, crime, politics, economics, language translation, news become a personal location layer. Maps become the ultimate transmitter of knowledge and education happens everywhere you roam.

The scale in some way brings to life On Exactitude in Science, where Jorge-Luis Borges sees “the science of cartography become so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice.” Via Wikipedia.
 

Stage 2. Collaboration

How can we use time-based location data to enable real-time exchange, and interaction? Who wants my extra lettuce right now? How can social mapping help us improve our neighborhood? How can we organize legislative outreach by district using social maps? How can I organize a play-date for my kids while traveling?

Maps of public officials evolve to action networks for advocacy; petitions, letter writing and other policy-shaping actions, maps of fallen fruit and local food become real-time local food & garden marketplaces, maps of dangerous intersections and local problems become solutions for safer streets and neighborhood improvements.

People now collaborate on mapmaking but will soon cooperate on many location-based movements on maps related to local food, urban homesteading and local advocacy. Neogeographers already create maps around these topics but will be able to actually organize, trade and transact in the future, all on a map. There are three considerations for the progress on map-based collaboration; timeliness, trust and benefit.

“Right now”, is a value-gap in the current iteration of the Geoweb and a barrier to location-based exchange. The timeliness of services like Twitter which support location will allow for immediate answers to geographic questions. Even street vendors are using Twitter to create real-time food mobs. In many circles Twitter has replaced CraigsList for the sale of goods, barter of tools and apartment hunting. The second issue of trust is familiar to all forms of social media and span safety and quality of recommendation. Currently, personal location-data exist in silos across Facebook , Google maps, Loopt, Brightkite and dozens of other services. As people have better control over extending location-awareness to their trusted networks, trust-worthy information increases. Improvements to timeliness and trust are well underway, however, benefit is a more complex and interesting problem to solve. Many groups use online maps as a guest book or journal. On Frappr, people use the map as a communications tool within a map-based community.  But maps can also be an organizing tool. The addition of transactional components to social maps will provide measurable results to communities in the form of polls, resource sharing , legislative communication, action alerts and eventually donations and sales-all on a map. With these concerns addressed, we can facilitate real-time location powered marketplaces and exchanges. 

Stage 1. Analysis & Information

How do people choose where to live? What are the pros and cons of one neighborhood over the next? What are the crime trends for this area and how can we use that to quickly respond? How can geographic data help us make market predictions?

With these answers, crime mash-ups and real estate mash-ups evolve to map based analysis tools for decision making,  and local economic, social and political trends can be identified.

Aggregation has left us with an unfiltered abundance of wasted and fragmented data. This is the problem which draws the most criticism of user-generated content. Much of the geodata we are seeing is highly contextually dependent, yet aggregation usually isn’t tuned to pay much attention to the context of the data. Imagine if iTunes wasn’t aware of the notion of compilation albums, or even of albums at all? It would be a huge mess if songs were only treated as atomic units, totally independent of context.  A geotagged snapshot of a taxi isn’t meaningful if you can’t see that it’s part of a map of “celebrity spotting”, or “all the places I’ve been mugged”. User-generated content and citizen created mash-ups are in early stages of their value contribution. To increase value, citizens require more robust tools for analyzing data and technology for visualizing large data-sets for a diverse amount of use cases from crisis management to wedding planning.  We estimate that only 10% of content contributed to Platial & Frappr is of value to users outside of the mapmaker’s community. Obviously 100% is valuable to the mapmaker and a universe of people around that person even  "Places I've Lived”. With richer analysis and clearer context, even seemingly irrelevant data can provide an interesting layer on top of maps for a specific region or use case. i.e.: NE Portland has a high density of  dive bars, hiking, bikes, vegan food, graffiti and chai. This simple level of analysis increases the value of user-generated content in the context of understanding unique aspects of a city or neighborhood especially in comparison to other cities or neighborhoods.

New tools for analysis are available at the enterprise level and further emphasize visual intelligence for use in complex geographic projects. FortiusOne, for example,  offers significant amounts of economic, political, environmental and geographic data to aid decision makers within government, NGOs and small business.  Using these tools, Vancouver Sun analyzed data on more than 1.6 million parking tickets to create a dynamic map  that readily pinpointed for readers exactly where they were at the highest risk for getting a ticket. That is one small example of the pervasive, decision-making information coming our way.

How Neogeography Will Change the Way We Live (even though we can’t find organic tacos, nearby, on-demand)

“How are mash-ups and pushpins going to actually benefit society?"

For quite some time neogeographers around the globe have been collectively harboring a radical vision: a map of the world as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. This map would be a bottom-up,  social layer of data, a richer, more democratic, less commercial, more cooperative view of the world.

Over the past several years, many of us have been mixing liberal doses of enthusiasm with the burgeoning new toolsets in an attempt to approach this vision. Despite numerous flaws, issues, concerns, and challenges,  we can look back and see that collectively, we have all  achieved a great milestone together - the beginning of a more diverse representation of the world around us.  

Thousands of people, organizations and companies have directly contributed to the underlying fabric of the Geoweb and some of that  fervor  is well captured in this Open Street Maps video which shows the growing contributions to OSM in 2008.

This is only the Stage 0 Geoweb marked by Widespread Representation. We can assume that next steps will transform representation into measurable impact and meaningful action. I’ve categorized what I see to be the upcoming multiple stages of the thriving Geoweb by the types of questions which are currently unanswered- a more refined set of questions which will be addressed by future products, services and communities, many already in progress.

Stage 0: Widespread Representation*
Stage 1: Analysis & Information
Stage 2: Collaboration
Stage 3: Ambient Awareness/Viewfinder
Stage 4: Diplomacy
* This does not imply that progress will not be made continuing along the “Widespread Representation” path but that “How do we solve that problem?” has been answered.

Lost Robot Asks for Directions

New Scientist has an article about a robot that had to find its way through a city without a map.

The robot, called ACE for Autonomous City Explorer, lacks an inbuilt map of Munich or a GPS system. Like a lost human in a similar situation, all it could do was ask for directions.

The beauty of this approach is its ability to deal with changing environments, construction, hazards, etc. It trades the temporal instability of hard coded maps for the risk that it will get wrong directions in the field. I imagine a system that could dynamically weigh the viability of data from various sources could bring a lot of value to the navigation industry.

(Via GLOWLAB.)