WhereCamp5280 Day One Highlights

I attended a previous WhereCamp this year in Palo Alto, that said I wasn’t sure what to expect from WhereCamp5280. For those unfamiliar with BarCamps they are unconferences which means the topics and schedule are determined by the participants the morning of the event. Also if the event is two days the schedule for the second day is not determined until the first day. Usually you kick off the day stating your name, your affilitation and three words/tags about yourself. I was somewhat concerned when multiple people said “no tags.” I think some of the problem was that many people had never been to this type of event before. The idea of the tags is to help everyone determine what everyone else is interested in and also to loosen everyone up a little. My tags where “open data, open source and OpenStreetMap.” After this initial bump with the intros everything was very good from the individual conversations I had with people to the sessions and the very un-unconference plenary sessions.

The first two plenary sessions started things off with Peter Batty’s talk on “NeoGeoSchmeo.” Essentially his thesis was that as neogeography has moved from simple Google Map mashups to advanced analytics and cartographic renderings there is no difference between old and new geo.

via Jim McAndrews

Peter’s talk was followed by James Fee’s talk about “Problems in Data Sharing.” Which included a run down of government data portals that were difficult to use and returned questionable search results.

After these opening talks things moved into traditional barcamp style sessions. I attended a discussion on “GeoGames” with Andrei Taraschuk from Umapper. Games he mentioned with a geo component, whether it be utilizing geodata or actually using the player’s location were The Last Guy, H.A.W.X., PlanetInAction.com’s GoogleEarth games and VirtualPunk. VirtualPunk was one of the first times I had “non-iphone envy,” it is a mobile java based game which looks pretty interesting. My interest in games is primarily that I love geo and I like to have fun, right now I play FourSquare pretty regularly. I would like to see some way to utilize games to increase OpenStreetMap involvement, but I’m not sure what the best way to do that would be. The major question that came out of the games session however was, how do you make monantize it?

After the breakout session we had lightening talks. Those were kind of a blur for me, but the one I most enjoyed was Chris Helm’s about CouchDB. It was interesting to see someone else wanting to attempt to use it for geo. A great partical demo was an AR talk that one of the local police department is using and was a great crowd pleaser. As well as a demo of SilverLight 3 and utilizing it to display lidar data mixed and mashed for a bunch of different view points.

After lunch there were more plenary talks. PlanetEarth gave a demo and their interface for adding POI data looked very smart.

The afternoon breakout sessions I attended where about OpenStreetMap
and “Open Data Standards.” The OSM discussion lead to how to get more people to participate. I didn’t realize that the US-Talk OSM mailing list was low enough volume that we should post regarding MappingDC events there. Day two of WhereCamp5280 will likely have a session on how to use Potlatch to contribute to OSM. Discussing “Open Data Standards” was an okay discussion, but I sometimes feel tha the barriers to sharing data are so much lower than they were a decade ago that standards is not the most pressing issue. I think my opinions on that might be a whole other blog post in itself.

Following the sessions there was a great social event at Peter Batty’s place. It included interesting geonerd discussions which quotes such as “if anyone tells you that Map/Reduce sucks you should punch them in the face.” I love passionate nerd talk like that. Later into the night things turned to “Karoke Revolution,” which everyone participating. Hopefully the video from that is never released.

All and all day one of WhereCamp5280 was both fun and educational. It is always great to see what other people are doing and think as well as get to talk to them about it.