Real-Time Awareness will focus on how to use the vast amount of data generated by social media and other internet technologies to deliver real-time awareness. Specifically, we will be examining the range of challenges that exist when trying to create real-time awareness, especially in the context of breaking news or events, crisis response and citizen engagement. We’ll discuss questions like: Which data feeds are the most reliable? What is the best way to filter the data? How should the data be analyzed? What’s the best way to convey the information to the user? What do citizens expect when they use social media to communicate with governments?

In our panel, we’ll be discussing the various issues and possibilities to visualize and utilize real-time information. Social media feeds, traffic cameras, mobile devices, satellite sensor feeds, crowd-sourced data, and more are quickly becoming valuable sources of information but the capability to quickly and effectively harness them are an open question.

My fellow panelist are Nancy Choi from Development Gateway, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin from The Stream Al Jazeera, Chris Damsen from NetVibes, and Paul Shinkman from WTOP. It should be a fascinating conversation!

The Archivists were a new community to me – people that are passionate about the capturing and storing of data – often until the end of time! But they also vary in their core missions – often diverging on the utility of the captured data and information. Very few seem to be really thinking about archives as a useful resource today and only focusing on the long-time storage and eventual access of the data by some unknown entity. As one member of GeoMAPP said: “All of the Archives are storing this superseded GIS data in dark archives and aren’t really providing access to the datasets and don’t have web mapping interfaces”

Clearly, we think a bit differently about archiving – choosing to focus foremost on access to data which will result in improved archiving of data, distribution, and analysis on utility and benefit. My presentation Maps as Narratives: Making Spatial Archives Accessible

focused on the concept that maps have been, and are increasingly a vital resource for people in their daily lives and work. By providing users tools to access and use historic and realtime data, we can then capture this data and provide it to other users and data repositories.

Particular to internet feeds, and social media we can’t easily predict what data will be useful. Neogeographers create visualizations of twitter streams, photos, foursquare checkin’s, friend locations. How do we know which of these are the modern correspondances of tomorrow’s US President or Global business leader? Through easy mechanisms for sharing data and maintaining links we can begin tracking this information in it’s varied forms, providing better insight and archiving of data for later reuse, whether it is tomorrow or in 100 years.

Tomorrow I’m giving a longer workshop demonstrating our analysis components and letting everyone try out and experiment with learning more about how to quickly build compelling visualizations and relevant decision making as it applies to their field – whether it is climate science, crisis response, or city planning.

If you’re in Boston, tomorrow’s workshop is open, so come by and learn more about GeoIQ.

With this growth has been a lot of convergence on “hot” topics such as check-ins, POI’s, and data marketplaces. Personally I think these are interesting because they’re easily understandable, and will yield short-term gains but are affected by many players that are still building their own unique silos. Likely at Where2.0 we’ll hear about who will emerge as the topmost winner in each of these niche spaces. Mobile more generally is interesting and will likely be part of almost every talk – from simple locative services, to more augmented or alternate reality, social sharing and friend-finding, and future uses as mobile payment systems.

I’m speaking on Wednesday on what I consider to be the really cutting edge and exciting future of finally enabling real collaboration through location, open data, and everyone being able to ask questions of their space and communities. I’m going to demonstrate some our new features and capabilities in GeoIQ for collaborative analysis and highlight our partners that are using GeoIQ to build a smarter world and better engaged customers. The GeoCommons community is growing up and we’re pushing it along by sharing unique capabilities with users and some surprising new opportunities for people to more easily and quickly gain access to our advanced features.

Finally, at WhereCamp on Friday and Saturday at Stanford we’ll really talk about the future of mapping – what new tools should we be looking at for faster and more interactive and dynamic visualization, standards and API’s, psychogeography, and new ways to engage global communities. As always – I’m ecstatic about Where2.0 and looking forward to seeing the usual friends and many new members of our community.

What was interesting was the day before Foursquare made an announcement that fit directly into this premise. They began partnering with other organizations to link information between checkins and other services. You can see this in action on the the Thrillist section of Foursquare. If you notice there is a “More Info” link next to each of the displayed venues. The permise of this is you can then go read the Thrillist review of the venue and easily add it to your Foursquare to-do list. I think the idea of “pre-exploring” an area is interesting, meaning when I normally use Foursquare I tend to only use it when I am out and about. Sometimes I look to see where my friends are, other times I look for popular places to go. Combining the Foursquare information with other things allows me to explore from my desktop and plan to do things later. Other partners for this launch were The New York Times, New York Magazine and MenuPages. For the full Foursquare blog post look here.

So Foursquare has starting doing these integrations how can everyone do it? Services are emerging to crawl and collecting this data such as Factual and others are attempting to solve the problem on their own. The most idealist suggestion was to create a foundation to hold specific location information everyone would link to. This was suggested as a possibility within our SxSW panel, but I think everyone agrees it would likely be impractical. I’m excited to see how GeoIQ analysis modules can further aggregate data from a variety of sources to help others create these links and potentially serve as an outside link as well. This can either happen through our APIs or straight downloads as well. I’m excited because I think it means more cross data analysis similar to Sean’s recent analysis into San Francisco start-ups and his other analysis on DC Restaurant Inspections and Yelp Reviews.

As combining data continues to become easier I can wait to see what other insight is possible!

Just this morning the opening sessions have had good insight into what the industry is thinking and doing. We’re on the edge of a new paradigm of production and understanding – akin to the Scientific Discoveries that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. We gained the ability to rapidly buil and produce at astonishing rates, the Web, and produced better understanding and capabilities in improving these new technologies. Data is less ephemeral but is something more tangible that is obtainiable, shareable, and manipulatable.

Mark Madsen pointed out the recent evolution of data:

• 1950-60′s: Data as product
• 1970-80′s: Data as byproduct
• 1990-00′s: Data as asset
• 2010+: Data as substrate

Data has become more widespread, available, pervasive, and ultimately more useful.

Within this new paradigm of Data as Substrate, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com discussed how data moves through our systems: collect | store | organize | analyze | share. This is exactly what we realized several years ago in aiming to provide visual analytics that you need to provide smooth flow through that entire chain. It’s something we’ve baked through out GeoCommons to allow users to easily explore data and share their insights.

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, specifically mentioned the power of geospatial data analysis. Investigating geotagged messages and sentiment analysis combined with local demographics and business information can reveal deep insights into markets and communities. It is becoming increasingly important to deliver combinations of information and there is a need for better exploration and analysis tools. We have enough platforms, we need new interfaces.

Matt Biddulph, founder of Dopplr and now at Nokia, discussed prototyping with data and his examples consider mining how mobile phone users give indications of preferred routes and areas of intent by tracking route requests and map tile views. But even in Nokia, with the very powerful Navteq, they have difficulty sharing data. They are using HDFS (Hadoop File store) as essentially an organizational file sharing system – passing around URI paths to data that can be quickly loaded and analyzed.

So far, it’s clear that there is incredible excitement in handling and analyzing data. There is quite a bit of superfluity on the terms “big” and “massive” with regards to Data, but regardless we’re now able to handle volumes of information that were severely limited or even impossible just a few years ago. The tools are commodity and off the shelf – so the interesting questions can be quickly asked and explored without worrying as much about the underlying components or technology. We’ve shared how we’re actually providing new interfaces to users to do their own analytics and explorations – powered by many of the tools discussed and popular but also some new ones we’ve built and will be sharing with the community. Particularly in dealing with geospatial data that provides for some truly interesting context in analysis.

Ignite talks are five minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Each slide lasts 15 seconds and they keep going. They are a great way to get an overview of different projects, because of the brevity of the format one is forced to be straight and to the point. The keynote is by Kurt Jean-Charlies from Solutions, Solutions built Noula which as the platform that Ushahidi Haiti handed off to a couple months ago. It is built for Haitians by Haitians and meant to be used long-term in Haiti as an SMS alerting and reporting platform. FortiusOne is participating in the Tech Fair. We’ll be demonstrating the work we’ve done with crisis events in the past year as well as some of the information sharing technology we’ve developed to help with collaboration in on going crisis events. With our simplified APIs released this week it is going to be even easier to continue collaborating with others quickly when the need occurs.

Saturday and Sunday is the annual meeting of CrisisMappers. Most of the year CrisisMappers is mainly a Google Group where people coordinate information sharing and techniques. The annual meeting serves to bring those that collaborate remotely all year together to discuss issues and advances in crisis response. There are roundtable discussions schedules as well as self organized sessions these days. I hope to discuss improving information sharing further. So often sharing continues to be sneakernet of information on the ground. I’m interested in techniques to improve this so that sharing is seamless and not a burden to responders.

If you are interested in talking about creating systems around collaboration both online and offline find me and we’ll chat.

The one thing that is atypical of this WhereCamp is that it is not entirely an unconference. The first day there are scheduled sessions and keynotes. Friend of FortiusOne, Todd Huffman is keynoting as well as Eric Frost from San Diego State University Viz Center. I’ll be giving two workshops, the first on using GeoCommons to share data and make custom maps. The second workshop is on how to edit in OpenStreetMap. There are also going to be workshops from SimpleGeo, ESRI and Urban Mapping. While the structured portion of the event is going on during the day Saturday there will also be unconference sessions. Sunday sessions are all ad-hoc and will be proposed the day of the event. I hope to participate in a session on geolocative games, which is one of my favorite topics at most WhereCamps. Some people from Grassroots Mapping will be around, so I hope to help fly some kites and balloons to take aerial photography as well.

Since WhereCamps are usually free to the attendees I was excited that FortiusOne was able to sponsor the event. Without sponsors it would be impossible to keep these events free. The cost of running an ad-hoc event is relatively cheap, but there are still expenses for food and office materials to make the grid for example.

Registration is still open for WhereCampSoCal up until almost the start of the event. So if this sounds fun to you sign-up and I’ll see you there!