best,
--andrea
This year's Where 2.0 conference occurred at a uniquely optimistic moment in the evolution of locationtech. So many of the products and services that this community has dreamed and demoed about for years are now real. Custom maps, animated maps, interoperable mapping tools and datasets, public and multimedia geoannotation, LBS for consumer-grade mobile devices, collaborative mapping... all of these are available in some form to anyone with Internet access, often for free. Also newly real is the corporate and venture funding available to many of the entrepreneurs building these apps.
At the same time, the sociotechnical problems that have long been expected from these systems—privacy invasion, privacy confusion, LBSpam, data-quality control issues—are not yet real on a large scale, however well-characterized they may be. This is partly because LBS developers have adopted successful design patterns from other "read/write web" contexts, but also because the user base is just not that large or diverse yet. So this is a sunny time, an opportune one for making and courting serious commitments of talent and money to the building of a geospatial web. I believe this is why the typically iconoclastic and creative bunch that assembled for this year's conference displayed surprising levels of geo-groupthink (in Jo's coinage).
The most basic shared assumptions going unquestioned were 1) that search is *the* vector through which the "mass consumer" will discover the magic of the geospatial web and 2) that geospatial search is like any other web search, only with maps and routing in the results. I heard almost nothing about how the physical realities of real-space navigation impact LBS, with the notable exception of Dylan Beaudette's talk. Sure, services like Platial and 43places are for armchair travelers as well as actual ones, but does that mean that there's no difference between browsing their content at neighborhood scale and flying around the globe? On the data collection side, I would have liked to hear from OpenStreetMap how their variety of pedestrian, biking and driving collaborators impacts their coverage in urban and rural areas. What advantages and disadvantages does that variety offer versus the commercial providers and their camera-mounted fleets? Even Oliver Downs from Inrix's talk, which was completely focused on information for drivers, didn't really address how the availability of this information might affect driving behavior.
A corollary of this search orientation was that the value proposition for most of these apps was stated in terms of the individual user. Though I understand the limitations of 15-minute talks, I wished that one of the speakers who invoked "community" and "storytelling" had told us a community story. (Though I did hear a couple in the gaming talks.) As I listened to social software presentations about mapping the memorable events of your life and connecting through places to people who become your friends, I started to wonder what places are, anyway. Are they consensual mental constructs, founts of memories and conversation that need not be tied to Earth, wind, water and infrastructure? Or is the experience of place dependent upon a scarce physical resource that people are obligated to share and manage, namely, space? My answer—and yours too I expect—is both. That's what made it so strange that collaborative and collective aspects of the life on the geoweb got so little attention this year—except when it came to emergency management. There was a weird moment right after Gregory Yetman's talk when Brady or Nate commented, almost apologetically, that they'd wanted to show an example of these technologies employed "for good." But Yetman's datasets, which include information about population, urbanism and poverty, could be useful to anyone with an "on-the-ground" interest in places, whether they're out doing good, at home putting their traveler's journal in another context, or just voting in a local election.
In general the program revealed a divide, not between old-school GIS users and the mashup crowd, but between the big data providers, who offer us increasingly live and high-res information about increasing expanses of the globe, and the big consumer-oriented apps developers, who just want to help us find the great noodle place around the corner and the cool people who'll join us there the minute they get our SMS. As a voracious consumer of both noodles and news, I hope we'll find a way to diversify the business models as the market matures.
As if this long rant needed an "and another thing," here it is: Odd how James Greiner's talk on the second afternoon was the first to include first-hand evidence of the product's actual users. I know that Where is not a design or CHI conference, and that the brand-new companies and apps that were rightfully the center of attention probably don't have much user data they can share yet. But next year, when many of them will hopefully come back, it would be great to have a panel called something like, "What Are People Doing on the Geospatial Web?"
Anyhow, though I've sounded quite cranky here, I really enjoyed the conference and the folks I met there. I was surprised at how welcome I felt as a first-timer and impressed by the quality of the program and the wide choice of channels for discussion. I'd love to see a more diverse roster next year: there are bound to be some interaction designers, social scientists, urban planners or even enterprise apps developers who could speak engagingly to this audience. OTOH, there wasn't anyone this year I would have cut to make room. Hope I get to go back next year!
Rant over, back to geowankerlurkerdom.
Andrea Moed
Masters 2007
UC Berkeley School of Information
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.andreamoed.com
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