Recently the United Nations Statistics Division released UNdata a catalog of a variety of UN data. In the about page it is described as “This database service is part of a project launched by UNSD in 2005, called “Statistics as a Public Good”, whose objectives are to provide free access to global statistics, to educate users about the importance of statistics for evidence-based policy and decision-making and to assist National Statistical Offices of Member Countries to strengthen their data dissemination capabilities.” Clearly meeting “An Open Data Litmus Test” there is a download button. As soon as I discovered UNdata I began searching for data and using it within GeoCommons.

First I selected a dataset I was interested in. In this example I picked “Years of Life Lost to Communicable Diseases (%).” I downloaded the data as a CSV and then uploaded it using Finder. Since the data did not have geographic boundaries I utilized GeoJoin.  First I selected World Boundaries and used the name column to join the UNdata to the boundary dataset.

Next I selected the columns I wanted to join by selecting “country or area” in my dataset and “Name” in the country boundaries.

Only 163 of 191 features matched, but I decided it was okay to continue on and make a map.  I first added metadata and then clicked the “Make a Map” link. Below is my final result. If you decide to upload data yourself or make a map please tag is “UNdata” so we can aggregate them together.

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I have found the recent story about the “Barefoot Bandit” to be quite fascinating. It is incredible how someone could elude authorities for so long in this day and age.

I came across an interesting graphic about the story created by Matthew Bambach of the Seattle Times. It is a map of criminal incidents that have been tied together to Colton Harris-Moore aka The Barefoot Bandit. I decided to make a similar map of the incidents, but decided to incorporate the temporal animation feature that GeoCommons provides. Below is the map I created in Maker!:

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By clicking the green clock in the layers box in the upper right hand side of the page you can open up a temporal timeline. This timeline allows you to see a temporal animation of the crimes as they took place across the country. You are also able to see the periods when criminal activity was slow or very active. Overall, the temporal animation is able to give you a better understanding of the Barefoot Bandit’s activity compared to a map with static points.

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Today I’m off to State of the Map in Girona, Spain. State of the Map or SotM is the annual OpenStreetMap conference. SotM is a mix of the businesses surrounding OpenStreetMap as well as the community. The three day conference encompasses three days, one business day and two community days.

I’ll be there speaking about some of the work we’ve been doing related to open data as well as specifically OpenStreetMap. Friday is the business day at SotM this year, I’ll be speaking in the “OSM: We’re in Business” track about our work in on open data with different levels of government. The title of the talk is “From Arkansas to Afghanistan – Open data sharing and collaboration for better engagement.” Sunday there is a humanitarian track, which includes a talk from Nicolas Chavent of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team on our work in Haiti. Afterwards I’m speaking about running OpenStreetMap with GeoCommons offline for humanitarian response. Even now six months after the earthquake Internet access varies by location in Haiti. There is a need for low and no bandwidth solutions for effective data creation and sharing.

In addition to talks I’m excited to meet people from the OSM community I’ve only previous known online. A diverse group spread out all over the world, State of the Map is the main opportunity to get many people together in person. There are a variety of “Birds of a Feather” sessions including one for OpenAerialMap and the first in person meeting of the OpenStreetMap Strategy Working Group. I’ll be participating in these somewhat “serious” events, but I’m also looking forward to more silly ones. On Saturday night there is a Concert Contest. Since I haven’t packed my bassoon I’m going to bow out of playing “Ode to a Duplicate Node” and cheer on the contestants. I’m sure it will be as good as “Map of the World as We Know It. (And I See Signs.)”

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For the past couple weeks I was in Haiti with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Our project was sponsored by the World Bank and the goal was to continue to build mapping capacity within Haiti. For those unaware OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free map of the entire world, in a method similar to Wikipedia anyone can edit it to add information or correct mistakes. Almost immediately after the January 12th earthquake volunteers from the OpenStreetMap community began digitizing roads from old satellite imagery. Soon after that imagery providers donated new imagery and volunteers continued to improve the map as well as create data products that could be downloaded onto GPS, printed and utilized in GIS systems. Data team members from GeoCommons gathered data from OSM and created overlays in Finder! as well as a dashboard in Map of the News.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team aims to apply the principles of open data and open source to humanitarian response and economic development. So far the team has had three missions to Haiti to facilitate these principles of open data. This has been primarily in the form of training. Following up on two previous missions Nicolas Chavent, Trevor Ellermann, Todd Huffman and I were in Haiti from June 19th – June 29th holding training with a variety of actors all over Haiti. The first week was spent in Port-au-Prince, but then we quickly moved on to Jacmel, Léogâne, Gonaïves and Carrefour.

What struck me most about the trip was how quickly Haitians understood OpenStreetMap and open geo-data. One afternoon Nicolas was explaining OpenStreetMap to a team of community mobilizers from the International Office on Migration (IOM). The community mobilizers are an interface between IOM and those living in the spontaneous settlement sites managed by the Office. I don’t speak any French, but the entire trip I enjoyed watching people’s reactions when learning about OSM. Initially when Nicolas started explaining OSM to them they listened politely, but soon they were listening intently. Everyone leaned in closer and closer and hung on every word. Then it was decided amongst their group that everyone needed to come in on Saturday to be trained in OpenStreetMap, there was no choice. The importance of being able to map where resources are in a rapidly changing environment and for Haitians to do this themselves was clear to the group. I can’t imagine seeing the same intensity for open data in the United States, but I suppose we haven’t had the need to develop the same hunger for it. One of the main questions in Haiti is what happens when International organizations start leaving, who maintains things then? Hopefully through the work of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and our Haitian partners the answer can be the Haitian people.

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