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.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Have you ever traveled out of the state you live in and found yourself saying, “Wow, people in this state are terrible at driving.” Now you can see if your claim was appropriate after looking at the GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test.

GMAC Insurance has been conducting an annual survey where respondents take a driving test that contains questions from DMV tests across the country. Below is a map of the average scores from 2010 along with their inverse ranking among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

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From the map you can see that states in the darker orange color range had the highest scores and states with the lighter orange colors scored lower on the test. On the 100 point scoring scale the highest state score was Kansas with 82.3 as their average. The lowest scoring state was New York with a score of 70.0.

There was also a second part to the survey. This part surveyed drivers on the types of distracting behavior that they took part in while driving. These distracting actions include applying makeup, changing clothes, eating, talking on a cell phone, and texting on a cell phone while driving. Below is a map of the percentage of respondents per state that responded to participating in these distracting behaviors.

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The above data is all very interesting and I wondered to myself what might cause the bad driving statistics? I decided to then correlate the average scores from the GMAC Test with three types of data: 1. Max State Speed Limits by State (to see if fast driving correlated to bad driving) 2. % of Deficient Bridges by State (see if poor road conditions correlate to bad driving) 3. Population Density by State (to see if congestion correlates to bad driving). These are not perfect indicators, but I thought it might be fun to see of any of these numbers might correlate strongy. Below are the maps:

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The correlations are interesting:

We see that the max speed limit vs. the average scores had a low correlation of .39. So it is probably safe to say that slow max speed limits or high max speed limits do not deter people from being bad or good drivers. Bridge conditions had a slightly stronger correlation at -.49. This is a bit stronger and may hold some weight for arguments sake. Then the last correlation of population density we see as the strongest at -.56. Also not extremely strong but may be something to consider when deciding why people are bad drivers in certain states.

I found the data from GMAC Insurance to be rather interesting and had fun looking at my state and other states that I have traveled through. See what you think of the results and see if you can see why drivers from Kansas score better than drivers from New Jersey.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Today I’ll be attending ThinkSocial and PepsiCo’s The #Promise conference which is an initiative focusing on the use of social media and technology to engage companies in working with people to address global challenges.

Social responsibility and public good  are ingrained throughout FortiusOne’s entire company and solutions. We are passionate about open data, information sharing, and collaboration. We spend our days, nights and weekends working with non-profits, government, communities, and citizens to utilize and create information to improve their lives and communities. Participating and supporting these organizations and efforts aligns with our business, but also with our responsibility to our communities.

In particular, mapping is a compelling tool to use in engaging in discussion, and happens to be our commonly preferred lens and platform. But in the end the goal is to actually act in ways that improve health, guarantee safety, educate people, and generally increase happiness. Our work in Afghanistan, Kenya, New Orleans, Haiti, and locally around DC have primarily been lead by our hearts and promoting ideals while also leveraging our corporate and personal expertise.

I’ll be interested to hear from other companies on how they’re actively engaging with citizens and consumers in affecting positive impact on issues. Is it more than mere marketing and are they working both in the spotlight but also where it matters and may not get all the media attention but have a real impact?

Popularity: 10% [?]

It has been great to see a dialog emerge on open data surrounding ESRI’s merging of Geodata.gov and Data.gov. I think Marten’s post title sums up my general consensus – “confusion”.

Every person I’ve talked to and every post on the topic has a different version of the story. Further, the story changes as the community asks hard questions. It is all a bit murky, but I thought this was a good opportunity to take a step back and encapsulate what the community is looking for with open data. In this case I’m going to lump together the geo-community and the broader data community because the two are converging at a rapid pace.

I’d posit there are some very simple litmus tests any government agency can put against their projects to determine if they are truly opening data:

1) Is there a download button?

In order for any data to be open you need to be able to download the data so that you can remix, reuse and share the data. Data and the government agency that supplies it are not transparent if you can’t download the raw data. PDF’s and web services don’t count. They can be useful additions to the raw data, but they are not a replacements.

2) Data should always be linked to the derivative works created with it.

Take Geoplatform.gov – a nice mash up of data from Data.gov but I have no way to get back to the data to re-purpose it in a useful way other than a few links to PDF’s – the scourge of open data.

You’ve highlighted great open data, now let the community get to it easily. It is like running a great advertisement and then giving your consumer no easy way to buy the product. All government mashups – map and otherwise should have mandatory link back to the raw data for download.

3) Downloading should never be more than two clicks away (ideally one).

Whether it is Geodata.gov or any other government site you should always be able to quickly and clearly get to raw data download easily. It does not matter whether you are a GIS user or Joe Six-pack finding the content you want should be a simple process. In the recent open data discussions folks have been holding up the features of Geodata.gov as the standard, but I think we can do better:

Five clicks (after you find the advanced search) and navigating a lot of text is a tough task even for a GIS professional.

4) When you get to the data it should be available in multiple formats and be easy to use (i.e. data dictionaries).

Users come in a lot flavors whether they are geo or non-geo. They should have a selection of data formats to work with. There are lots of great file format transformation tools out there both open source and licensed. While easy to use is subjective. Let’s start with demonstrating how our current options are not easy:

Following the last example I did a search for demographics on Geodata.gov and got a result for “200 county demographics”. I received an option to download a PDF or a zip file. PDF is where data goes to die, so obviously I went for the zip file. I unzipped the file and found a .csv. Cool but not really geodata. All the same I opened it up to find lots of data but no attributes for the columns. Annoying, but no big deal I’ll shoot back to the metadata – the essence of Geodata.gov. There is a list of attributes and definitions but no way at all to map those back to the spreadsheet. Rendering both the spreadsheet and the metadata useless.

5) The data should be searchable and portable.

It was great to get the clarification that ESRI will be implementing the OGC CSW standard. A standard is always better than a proprietary format or approach. Folks may disagree but I’ll go a step further and say a Web aligned standard is most often better than a GIS standard. The CSW spec took us 14 days to implement and Opensearch took a little over a day. The CSW spec is over 200 pages and the OpenSearch spec is a couple of pages. Good news being the OGC is considering adopting OpenSearch (only 24 pages . In our experience Opensearch has allowed the community to create a large number of simple interfaces into Geocommons – including ArcMap, Google Earth, Jive, Windows 7, Chrome, IE8 and Firefox.

There are a lot of other great things that can be added on top of these open data basics, but they are not substitutes. Web services and API’s are all great things, but in my mind they come after the basic data access. Creating sophisticated mash-ups and dashboards with data are also very useful, but if the data is not also directly available (a download button) fail the litmus test.

There is a ton of potential in opening up government data for better transparency, greater innovation and sustained economic growth. In order to capture that potential though we must truly open data, and not let the idea be subverted or hijacked by special interests.

Lastly, after revisiting Geodata.gov today and trying to actually work with it I can only come to one conclusion. If we truly care about opening up government geo-data – rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. I’m sure it was great in 2004, but the Web and GIS has moved on.

Popularity: 13% [?]