[Geowanking] Where 2.0, an open critique

[Andrea Moed]

It was a privilege to meet so many geowankers f2f for the first time at
Where 2.0 a couple of weeks ago! Here's my take on the conference, for those
interested. (Also posted at
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-lKnxhicwdqmCF1ByK9Mn1QNr?p=10)

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
amoeda at sims.berkeley.edu
http://www.andreamoed.com
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