Forum | Harnessing the Spatial Data Explosion

We live in a world where vast troves of new information are being captured every day: smartphones double as data collection devices; social media applications aggregate geographically encoded mood swings; collectively tagged photos lead to new spatial data; global volunteers charting unmapped cities in the face of disasters or create new historical climate models from old ship logs; and cheap hardware is hacked to monitor trees, air quality or collect new aerial photography sets. This information is increasingly being put to the test in disaster relief, scientific analysis, historical research, government and private sector planning and operations support as well as environmental and social advocacy.

But can we conceive a situation where all of this data is vetted and validated for accuracy, flows freely and transparently among volunteers, expert users, government agency staff, and private sector servers? What would that take? Is it even possible or desirable? This conversation features speakers representing four different corners of the crowdsourcing geo data world including crisis responders, social media data crunchers, hardware hackers and sensor data collectors and citizen science enablers. They will talk about some of their experiences with collecting data, extolling lessons learned, warnings, upshots, pitfalls in their processes and how their data can be better operationalized by more and more users in both known and unanticipated ways.

Program Speakers:
*Colin Reilly, Director of GIS/Mapping for NYC's Department of Information and Telecommunications Technology, will talk about NYC's new relationship with Openstreetmap.
*Joe Saavedra, of Parsons School of Design, will talk about citizen science hardware hacks and environmental sensor data collection.
*Aaron Straup Cope, web designer and internet typist at Cooper Hewitt Museum (formerly of Flickr & Stamen Design) will talk about generating geodata (alphashapes) from Flickr tags.
*Georgia Bullen, Field Technologist at the Open Technology Institute (OTI) of the New America Foundation, will talk about civic hacking and citizen science in Red Hook.