President Obama has made it clear that he intends to get right to work. One of the issues he will have to deal with in the next few weeks is the Israeli Palestinian conflict. After a “22-day offensive against Hamas militants”, a cease fire has held for the past few days and Israel has completed its pull out from Gaza Strip.

Now, the UN must assess the damage done and deliver as much aid as possible to the residents of Gaza. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 1,314 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,000 people were injured. Of those, more than 400 children were killed and 2,000 were injured. The United Nations is reporting that as many as 35,000 displaced persons are seeking shelter. Many businesses, schools and other buildings, including 50 UN facilities have been damaged or destroyed.

This will put additional pressure on the already difficult living conditions in Gaza’s refugee camps. Nearly one million Palestinian refugees live in camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Another three million plus live in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Many of these camps lack proper sanitation and infrastructure. Unemployment is high and restrictions placed by the Israeli authorities have worsened the socio-economic conditions. Finder! has datasets for these camps which contain information on the populations over time as well as conditions of the camps.
The map below shows the camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by population in 2008.

Perhaps the most devastating incident during the recent fighting was the shelling of a UN School that was being used as a shelter, killing as many as 40 civilians. This took place in the Jabalya refugee camp, one of the 8 refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. This camp is shown on the map above.

You can look at this map in Maker! or make your own, to learn more about the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian refugee camps.

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With so many visitors coming to Washington, DC for the Inauguration we thought it would be handy to post up Inauguration friendly restaurants and deals in downtown DC. Check out the map here and enjoy the festivities.

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A proposal recently came online recommending that the new Obama administration should invest over a billion US dollars to build a “National GIS”. The proposal claims “This system can be built quickly, immediately creating high tech jobs, and will serve as a public resource for project planners to support transportation infrastructure, water resource management, alternative energy research, and project siting.”

While I am a big fan of investment in geospatial technologies I believe we need to ask the question if this is the best use of resources and the right technology implementation. The claimed benefits are job creation, quick deployment, and utility as a public resource. So, we have a big price tag, over a billion dollars, so it can be assumed that whoever wins this contract with have to hire people to build and deploy the “National GIS”. The economic multiplier here is about one since you are building a specific system to deliver a National GIS to a single customer – the US government.

The second factor is “quick deployment”, and while I’m a bit skeptical on this point, I’m assuming this means there are GIS components that can be sold to the US government to build a “National GIS” quickly. The report goes on to say the “National GIS” would use “existing modern GIS server technology”, so I think it is safe to assume that ArcGIS server technology or other GIS server (is there another one – MapInfo maybe?) would fill this need. So, we have a proprietary technology driving a monolithic centralized system that delivers a large contract to a small number of vendors. After spending a billion dollars plus we have the hope it will deliver a public resource.

While this would be great if it did turn out, I can’t think of any current GIS projects that are a heavily used public resource. I don’t mean a resource for GIS users, but a resource for the public – the citizenry. Google Earth, Ushahidi, MapQuest, Local Live, Yahoo! Local etc. are all things the general public uses, but rarely GIS. So, who are we building a pubic resource for with our billion plus dollar?

I’d advocate a slightly different plan. Invest the money in making government data open and freely available to the public, when the data is appropriate, in popular open formats. Then let the community innovate around the data and create great applications with it. Let’s face it the government is just not a great builder of user facing Web technologies. When was the last time a government built a piece of Web technology that caught on like Twitter wildfire, ARPAnet? This is not meant as a slight just a question of allocating resources where you get the best return on investment.

Vivek Kundra’s “Apps for Democracy” is a great example of this principle in action. He made Washington DC data (including geospatial) openly available in standard formats then had a contest to develop applications around it. The program was a great success and received many accolades and Vivek has become one of the front runners for the new Federal CTO position.

A similar approach could work for building out critical components for the geospatial capabilities the nation needs. Provide grants as incentives to direct entrepreneurial companies to build prototypes to solve the outstanding problems. Then take the most successful pilots and deploy them to production with the funding and support to make them realities. Why put all your money in one massive project with a few vendors and hope it works out a billion dollars later. Just trust the lobbyists were right?

Most importantly, though, are the benefits of this type of approach – true economic stimulus and job creation. The majority of job creation comes from small and medium sized businesses. In this approach you are specifically incentivizing those companies to innovate to solve pressing problems resulting in multiple winners and dual use innovations. It is what America does best – hard driving entrepreneurial efforts to innovate and solve tough problems. If we want to get out of recession and stimulate the economy it is going to be by creating incentives to innovate and spark competition. I firmly believe it won’t be by lobbyist driven billion dollar projects to a small cadres of vendors/integrators. Pretty sure that is what got us into this mess.

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We are happy to announce that our collaboration with PointAbout to map the Obama inauguration has officially launched. The application is called “Navigating Washington” and can be downloaded for the iPhone or BlackBerry. The site serves two major functions 1) aggregating useful geographic data for the inauguration like security zones, closed bridges, events, public restrooms etc. and 2) a geo-enabled polling application called “Speak Your Mind“. On the data aggregation side we only have inauguration events and travel restrictions, but we’ll be adding more layers as the event draws closer. Any layer in GeoCommons is a candidate to show up in the application, so if you have some data that you think would be timely and relevant definitely let us know.

While we always love aggregating data we are particularly excited about the “Speak Your Mind” application. We’ve always been fascinated by mapping out public opinion and visualizing its diffusion (remember PollMapr . The inauguration gave us a great opportunity to dynamically map out the public’s opinion on the inauguration and the policies of the new administration. You often here the quip, “how will it play in Peoria” well we wanted to see how the inauguration would play around the country/world to a far more personal but anonymous level. Since the voting mechanism from “Speak Your Mind” is located on a mobile device your opinion can be mapped to a meaningful location. So when it comes to opinion about the inauguration we can see how it is playing in Peoria IL, San Francisco CA, Cedar Rapids IA, Valdosta GA, Grand Rapids MI, Chester MI, West Lake OH, West Palm Beach FL etc. etc. PointAbout did this short preview on Vimeo:

2009 Obama Inauguration – “Speak Your Mind!” Application from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Also here is a screen shot of the web destination with preliminary polling results on the question, “Can Obama get us out of recession?”

Many of these ideas evolved out of Andrew Turner’s work with TwitterVoteReport, and I think there is a great generic application of the concept to mapping opinion. Andrew is going to follow up with a more technical posting of how we built “Navigating Washington”, but as a sneak peek it was done with the GeoCommons API that is supported by an Amazon EC2 instance of the GeoCommons platform. Lots of great possibilities with the combination and there will be more from Andrew soon. Also keep an eye out for NPR’s InagurationReport09 where we’ll be lending related technology support.

p.s. – if you have ideas for polling question you think would work well please feel free to add them to the comments sections.

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