Tag: C4FCM

Center for Future Civic Media

Maps!

On July 9, 2009

Nadya asked for map updates, so here we go. I made these two while doing the spatial exercise with the kids, and to test out my GPS-photo geocoding workflow. KML files are attached, for your viewing pleasure.

Jerusalem Shufat

I’ve also been working on the GroundTruth test platform, and fixed several outstanding bugs related to the routing. Of course, now I think I will abandon Mapfish and go back to Django, but it was a good learning experience. Mapfish is just too finicky, and while it’s clearly powerful underneath, I can do everything I need with Django, and get a nice interface for free. Now I just need to convince local NGOs to buy in and share their data, so this tool is actually useful. More on that later.

In Ramallah

By Josh

On July 6, 2009

In Mapping Palestine

Got to Ramallah after 20 hours and 7 modes of transportation. It’s a busy town, but not quite as chaotic as I had expected. The traffic lights are respected, there is trash pickup, and there are internationals seemingly everywhere.

The lodging is great, sharing with a bunch of very friendly and helpful folks. We had excellent Indian food for the first night, and for several days of leftovers since. Spent the first day recovering from jetlag and walking around the neighborhood, and the last two volunteering with Nitin’s project, Voices Beyond Walls. It’s a two week camp where kids from Jerusalem and Shufat camp learn to make short films. We did a small mapping exercise to start, asking the kids to show us their neighborhoods and the places that make them unique. They had a surprisingly good spatial sense, and made pretty good maps.

Setting up meetings for later in the week with NGOs. I finished the upload of the west bank to OpenStreetMap, and now it’s merged it with the Israeli one. If only integration in the real world were so easy…

Heading Off

By Josh

On July 2, 2009

In Mapping Palestine

I managed to convince my advisor that my traveling to Israel and Palestine was essential to my research, and so I’m off for five weeks. I’ll be conducting interviews with human rights groups, activists and ordinary citizens about what kinds of digital tools they might find useful under the Occupation.

What exactly I should build is still an open question. I’m designing a platform that combines data on the checkpoints, the wall, the road networks, and other arbitrary instruments of control imposed on the population. I want to enable citizens to contribute their local knowledge to the map to keep it dynamically updated. A text message interface for this would probably be the most widely useful. I have a very rough start to this called Ground Truth that uses road data from OpenStreetMap.

Weighed down with electronic gear, I hope I don’t get too harshly interrogated in Tel Aviv. I’ll be updating this site with some regularity as events unfold, although certainly not every day. If you’re terribly interested in my daily status, check my Twitter feed, which I’ll update from a cell phone so everyone knows I’m still alive.

CrisisCamp DC

By Josh

On June 14, 2009

In Travel

Spent the weekend at a the CrisisCamp “unconference” at GWU in DC, a meeting of technologists, public policy experts, and a few grungy students around the area of mapping, disaster preparedness and response. Met some people I had previously only known via email, and made new connections for future projects. The first day was mostly to define the problem, discuss how technology fails in crisis situations, and what better tools might look like. There was a serious push on the second day to come up with the broad outlines of a platform that could combine data from different NGOs all working in the same geographic area, which is remarkably topical given my current research area. The call went out for a CrisisCommons, to be developed during an upcoming “Hackistan” session.

I was once again shocked at how much good data is out there that remains trapped in PDF maps. Maybe a combined georectifier/vectorizer is in order. I talked with a guy from GeoCommons briefly about the idea, and he thought it was a bigger challenge than I had initially expected. But I still love the idea of freeing data from the confines of its format, letting it out to wander in the open wilds of the infosphere.

Stopped by the White House on my way out of town; amazing how different it feels to go there now that the occupant has changed. Unlike previous visits, I didn’t feel like yelling obscenities and throwing myself against the iron fence. Welcome change, that. Still, there’s a good representation of the wacko contingent there on any given day. This guy’s sign has the trifecta of racial slurs, conspiracy theory references, and a grizzled beard. Shine on, you crazy diamond, shine on.

VirtualGaza

By Josh

On February 1, 2009

In Unmapped

I’m back dating this post a bit, but this is the site I worked on all through IAP. And no, Grandpa, I’m not working for Al-Jazeera. I think my implementation is better than theirs.

Now I’m working on cleaning up the code for open release, and finding a host organization to sponsor me on a trip there this summer.

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Virtual Gaza is an independent, civic media initiative established by a collective of scholars, media activists and Palestinian residents of Gaza in response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009.

For years, Israel has been gradually tightening its strangehold on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, sealing its borders and cutting off adequate food, fuel, and medical supplies, bringing the economy and infrastructure to the point of collapse.

Israel has also sought to control how Gaza’s story is told to the outside — from its sophisticated ‘public relations’ campaigns to blocking the entry of foreign journalists.

Virtual Gaza is a space where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction of the Gaza strip can be documented by those experiencing it directly. The diary entries, photographs, and video material gathered here have been contributed by residents of Gaza. For safety reasons, authors are located in neighborhoods but their precise location is not shown.

Virtual Gaza invites you to help break the information blockade.

virtualgaza.media.mit.edu