Mapping the Inauguration: a.k.a. Putting Your Opinion on the Map

We are happy to announce that our collaboration with PointAbout to map the Obama inauguration has officially launched. The application is called “Navigating Washington” and can be downloaded for the iPhone or BlackBerry. The site serves two major functions 1) aggregating useful geographic data for the inauguration like security zones, closed bridges, events, public restrooms etc. and 2) a geo-enabled polling application called “Speak Your Mind“. On the data aggregation side we only have inauguration events and travel restrictions, but we’ll be adding more layers as the event draws closer. Any layer in GeoCommons is a candidate to show up in the application, so if you have some data that you think would be timely and relevant definitely let us know.

While we always love aggregating data we are particularly excited about the “Speak Your Mind” application. We’ve always been fascinated by mapping out public opinion and visualizing its diffusion (remember PollMapr . The inauguration gave us a great opportunity to dynamically map out the public’s opinion on the inauguration and the policies of the new administration. You often here the quip, “how will it play in Peoria” well we wanted to see how the inauguration would play around the country/world to a far more personal but anonymous level. Since the voting mechanism from “Speak Your Mind” is located on a mobile device your opinion can be mapped to a meaningful location. So when it comes to opinion about the inauguration we can see how it is playing in Peoria IL, San Francisco CA, Cedar Rapids IA, Valdosta GA, Grand Rapids MI, Chester MI, West Lake OH, West Palm Beach FL etc. etc. PointAbout did this short preview on Vimeo:

2009 Obama Inauguration – “Speak Your Mind!” Application from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Also here is a screen shot of the web destination with preliminary polling results on the question, “Can Obama get us out of recession?”

Many of these ideas evolved out of Andrew Turner’s work with TwitterVoteReport, and I think there is a great generic application of the concept to mapping opinion. Andrew is going to follow up with a more technical posting of how we built “Navigating Washington”, but as a sneak peek it was done with the GeoCommons API that is supported by an Amazon EC2 instance of the GeoCommons platform. Lots of great possibilities with the combination and there will be more from Andrew soon. Also keep an eye out for NPR’s InagurationReport09 where we’ll be lending related technology support.

p.s. – if you have ideas for polling question you think would work well please feel free to add them to the comments sections.