The one thing that is atypical of this WhereCamp is that it is not entirely an unconference. The first day there are scheduled sessions and keynotes. Friend of FortiusOne, Todd Huffman is keynoting as well as Eric Frost from San Diego State University Viz Center. I’ll be giving two workshops, the first on using GeoCommons to share data and make custom maps. The second workshop is on how to edit in OpenStreetMap. There are also going to be workshops from SimpleGeo, ESRI and Urban Mapping. While the structured portion of the event is going on during the day Saturday there will also be unconference sessions. Sunday sessions are all ad-hoc and will be proposed the day of the event. I hope to participate in a session on geolocative games, which is one of my favorite topics at most WhereCamps. Some people from Grassroots Mapping will be around, so I hope to help fly some kites and balloons to take aerial photography as well.

Since WhereCamps are usually free to the attendees I was excited that FortiusOne was able to sponsor the event. Without sponsors it would be impossible to keep these events free. The cost of running an ad-hoc event is relatively cheap, but there are still expenses for food and office materials to make the grid for example.

Registration is still open for WhereCampSoCal up until almost the start of the event. So if this sounds fun to you sign-up and I’ll see you there!

One of the points the panel wanted to highlight was the collaboration after the Haiti earthquake between corporations, government institutions and newer participants such as Ushahidi and OpenStreetMap.  As someone who participated early on in the collaboration it was interesting to finally meet people who previous I only knew through phone calls and emails.  One of the questions coming out was is Haiti special or will this happen again?  Was there something about the particular incident or has something fundamentally changed?

I think there are multiple sides to this question.  There is the technology, the people side, the geographic side and the sheer magnitude of the disaster.  I think as far as technology goes things have changed, people can find collaborators in a way that wasn’t possible before.  By finding collaborators individuals were able to make a difference far away from the scene of the actual crisis.  I think the people side is more complex, there was something compelling in the United States with Haiti being so close.  Though now people have formed powerful networks and know that when others need help there is often something they can do.  As far a geography the proximity of Haiti to the United States I believe made the government and its citizens respond in a way they haven’t before.  Then there was the size of the disaster which compelled many people to help.

I think all these factors have changed how people will respond in to a crisis in the future.  Now when an earthquake or flood hits I immediately see the various networks activate, seeing if they can do anything to help.  In some cases such as with the oil spill there is something the technology community can do.  In others there are other factors that either prevent people from helping or the help is unneeded.

Response also will change as groups continue to plan better for the future.  One example of this is the CrisisCamp and the Random Hack of Kindness this weekend.   Another was the Understanding Risk Conference at the World Bank earlier in the week.  I’m still participating in capacity building for OpenStreetMap in Haiti with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.  Data will continue to be available on GeoCommons when other events occur such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  And technology will continue to improve making collaboration easier.

The Understanding Risk Forum is this week in Washington D.C. at the World Bank. The intent of the event is to increase understanding of risk, make it more measurable and work on managing it better. FortiusOne is there in full force with myself and Bill Greer manning a booth in Innovation Fair and Andrew Turner participating in a panel on Open Source Spatial Web and Open Data on Thursday.

GeoCommons can be a valuable tool in understanding and managing risk.  One important aspect of understanding and mitigating risk is having the data to make decisions.  There is a variety of datasets available in GeoCommons that could contribute to risk assessments.  There are population grids for eight countries as well as flood risk information.  Along with providing public datasets Maker! can be used to disseminate risk assessments.  Someone cannot only view your assessment but also create their own map with other data or even download the raw information to be used in another system.  One example of such a risk map is this Flooding Model for White Plains, New York.

The booth as the Understanding Risk Forum was not all serious though.  Bill and I took a break to try out the hurricane wind simulator as well.  To find the simulator you just had to follow the hurricane tracks from outside the World Bank to the bright red “hurricane simulator.”

We took videos of the one minute simulation that created winds of up to 70mph, here is Bill’s reaction and my reaction.  The simulation was that of a category 1 hurricane.

In conjunction with the forum this week at the World Bank there is a Random Hacks of Kindness and CrisisCamp this weekend.  Look for some of the FortiusOne team there.

This week some of the other engineers are off to Google I/O, look for plenty of GeoIQ and Geocommons goodness in the Developer Sandbox there.  FortiusOne is a Google Enterprise Partner and we’ve performed integration with Google applications on both the Geocommons and GeoIQ side.  On Geocommons we’ve integrated with both the Google Earth Plugin and the Google Maps API.  Geocommons and GeoIQ both support KML for upload and download of Finder overlays as well as download of maps as KML.  Specifically On the enterprise side GeoIQ allows you to hook into your organization’s Google Earth Fusion Server.  This enables you to use tiles from the Fusion Server as well as globes with the Google Earth Plugin.

Also in the Sandbox we’ll be demonstrating our REST API and JavaScript API.  Our documentation and some sample code is available on Github. For questions about either API join our API Google Group.   As a company that believes in eating our own dog food Map of the News is built utilizing these APIs.  To see the most current dashboard in action checkout maps of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

If you stop by look for Matt Dew or Andrew Semprebon, tell them “wonderchook” sent you!

The idea of the Challenge was how can bring transparency to aid help make it more effective.  The event began with a keynote from Clay Johnson.  One of the points he made was “open doesn’t mean naked,” the idea being that you can open your data in a positive manner that does not bring ridicule to your organization’s data.  This also lead to discussion later in the day regarding public versus open data.  Sometimes there is much data available but it is in a format so difficult to use that most people avoid the data. Tom Grubisich wrote a post on “‘Open’ Vs. ‘Public’ Data — The Big Difference.”

Datasets such as PLAID which is information on development finance will be available publicly shortly.  You can be sure we’ll be uploading that data, visualizing it and blogging about it as they become available.

While at the challenge I did a short interview about open data, which you can view below.

If you have not attended Where2.0 before, it is the leading edge conference demonstrating the new technologies and applications that are revolutionizing location services, mapping, cartography, and in general changing how we interact with space.

We’re sharing our knowledge by coordinating with two workshops on data and analysis, things we know a lot about. Coincidentally, the tools have now become approachable by non-traditional users and developers through easy to use tools, availability of open data, and collaboration through the web.

In the Geospatial Data Formats workshop we’ll talk about the variety of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured formats that exist, when which formats are appropriate and best used, and how to use tools to convert between them and integrate data into your applications.

For our other workshop on Spatial Analytics, we’ve worked with Peter Skomoroch from LinkedIn is showing how to do large scale spatial and relation analysis using cloud computing and other tools. It is possible to take business data, fused with demographics, realtime feeds, social media, and contextual information to gain better insights on meeting mission goals.

The rest of the Where2.0 conference is full of fascinating applications such as the rise of augmented reality, mobile integration across all aspects of life, and most interestingly the utilization of geospatial technologies to the very edge in developing nations and in citizen-government collaboration. A few of our partners and friends will be presenting throughout the conference on how we’ve worked together to open collaboration and better decision analysis.

Of course, following Where2.0 is the infamous WhereCamp, where for 2-days a large, and close-knit community of neogeographers, hackers, technologists, hobbyists, and others will all gather on Google’s campus to speculate and develop the next generation of Where.

Hope to see you there.

To say FutureRuby is another tech conference would be to sell it short. From it’s edgy theme to it’s widespread evening venues it’s a conference designed to inspire rubyists towards the ideals that have made Ruby the language of choice for thousands of startups.

So I’ve seen the Future of Ruby, now what is it?

The Future of Ruby is Javascript

Javascript, not to be confused by Java, is the language used to enrich the UI of many web applications. It takes what used to be static pages that load one at a time and makes it possible to turn them into fully dynamic desktop-like applications. One of the stars of the conference was Cappuccino, presented by Francisco Tomalsky. Cappuccino is a Javascript framework and development environment that allows programmers to create applications in a way similar to building applications for Apple’s OS X. It is generating excitement among developers who are seeing the fulfillment of a vision of creating truly desktop-quality applications using open web standards.

Why so much Javascript at a Ruby conference? Because the languages complement each other very well. Ruby for the back-end, Javascript for the front-end.

The Future of Ruby is the Mobile Web

JavaScript starred in another role in the PhoneGap presentation by Brian LeRoux, Brock Whitten and Rob Ellis. Say you want to create a iPhone App. All the cool kids are doing it. But you spent your career building web applications and you’re not too bad at it. Until PhoneGap your options were a bit limited. Go learn ObjectiveC and the closed source ideologies of Apple and in the end, you’ll have a beautiful app that runs on one smartphone.

The PhoneGap team has shown another way. Using the open web technologies developers have already mastered, Javascript, CSS and XHTML, PhoneGap makes it possible to build mobile apps that are indistinguishable from native apps. Oh, and that app you just made? It’ll run on a Blackberry, and an Android smart phone too.

Adam Blum of Rhomobile showed us another way. What if you could write a mobile application in Ruby and have that application translated to the native language of an iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian or Android phone? Rhodes aims to make that possible. While not quite as fully developed as PhoneGap, Rhodes is well on the way to providing another option for Rubyists to build mobile apps.

The Future of Ruby is Failure

If you want to succeed, fail faster. So goes the motto of FailCamp which set sail a day prior to FutureRuby at the beautiful Queen City Yacht Club. FailCamp provided a venue to express our failures. Only by understanding and accepting our failures can we find what truly works.

Back on land, Avi Bryant dazzled the attendees by showing in painstaking detail, all of the screenshots that lead to the gorgeous and refined UI in Trendly. We witnessed a downright ugly interface evolving through hundreds of failed experiments into a masterful and thoughtful page design.

Joseph Wilk brought us an entertaining look at an often dull subject, automated testing. Joseph demonstrated a technology called Cucumber which allows programmers and non-techies to come together to write easy-to-read stories about how a web application ought to work. These stories are then executed and initially result in great failure. Line by line, sentence by sentence, developers then write the code that makes the story come alive in a fully realized web application.

The Future of Ruby Will Not Be Stored in a Relational Database

Relational Databases, the venerable database methodology employed in computer systems since the early seventies will always exist. But their dominance for all tasks large and small is increasingly challenged. Ilya Grigorik introduced us to the fascinating world of Tokyo Cabinet, a database that eschews many traditional constraints and provides a wealth minimalist data structures.

It’s worth noting, that much of the power of the GeoCommons platform is derived from a custom object store that in a way similar to Tokyo Cabinet, surpasses the limitations of traditional relational databases.

The Future of Ruby is Eclectic

Not many tech conferences would you find a room full of programmers creating noises together. In a much needed mental recess, Misha Glouberman, a Toronto based performer and artist lead the attendees in a sort of improvisational audio experiment.

The FutureRuby curators included a number of presentations on diverse topics related to the culture of programming. Jon Dahl spoke on Programming and Minimalism drawing parallels between the history of art, music and writing. Brian Marick renewed the call for the kind of unconventional ideas that displace industry giants. Jesse Hirsh focused that call towards ending what he terms the Imperial Californian Ideology. Nathaniel Talbott showed how personal responsibility can save Ruby from loosing it’s vitality to soulless corporations.

The Future of Ruby is Bright

Every programming language depends on an active and vibrant ecosystem to keep it alive and ready for tomorrow’s challenges. FutureRuby provided a bright glimpse into the future of that ecosystem. It is clear that the Ruby community will continue to serve up cutting edge innovations enriching the products built on it for years to come.