Neighborhood Coworking: A GIS Guided Block by Block Survey of Mid-City
Home Is Where the Heart Is by Bart Everson.
I’ve set out to introduce the concept of coworking as a means of organizing the grassroots information projects that drive this recovery. The initial focus was to capitalize on the donation of three ESRI ArcGIS 9 licenses to the effort, from the Broadmoor Project. I invited everyone to participate in an initial GIS Coworking session at Trinity Christian Community.
Since then, an initial project has begun to take shame. Jennifer Farwell of the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization is conducting a block by block survey of Mid-City. I told her that to brace herself, because I was going to make her project a centerpiece for this GIS Coworking Center. At the same time I was speaking to two other local people about GIS and they’ve agreed to help on this project.
GIS Guided Neighborhood Surveys
Kathrine Cargo is GIS/Mapping Coordinator for the Orleans Parish Communications District. She works on keeping the 911 maps accurate. Kathrine got in touch with me to be on a panel at a convention of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association in October. Kathrine has offered to help me get the GIS Coworking Center going.
Kathrine had already made an effort to introduce GIS to the Beacon of Hope, but the learning curve for GIS was too steep. Beacon of Hope already has an established method for conducting neighborhood surveys, with a rich set of spreadsheet templates. We’re now looking at the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization survey as a model. Jennifer Farwell is technically adept and eager to introduce GIS to the Mid-City housing project. A refined survey, property documented, can serve as the basis for future Beacon of Hope surveys.
Tom Nehrbass followed his wife to New Orleans. She got a job as a journalist at the Times-Picayune. Tom is proficient in ESRI ArcGIS 9. He got in touch when he came to town and saw my initial GIS coworking post. Now he’s volunteered to create the technical architecture of the survey.
Apparently, we have everything we need to execute a GIS guided block by block survey of Mid-City and produce maps quite unlike any produced by similar surveys.
Open Licensing
There have been similar efforts to perform GIS guided surveys, but they’ve not been guided by locals and the availability of the data collected has been constricted. We’re going to ensure that the end information products created by these surveys is available using open licensing.
Open licensing is not, public domain, rather it makes the information openly available on the condition that if anyone improves the information, they will be compelled to make their improvments available under the same terms under which they obtained the original data. For those of you who’ve volunteered for collection efforts, only to see your efforts squirreled away, we’re building openness into the project at the outset.
This way, the data collected does not become the property of whoever happened to gather it up on their hard drive. We need more openness, not more little data fiefdoms.
Replication
We will document the process and make it available through the New Orleans Wiki. The process itself will be open licensed, so you don’t have to ask permission to use any of the materials to conduct your own GIS guided neighborhood survey in New Orleans, or anywhere else.
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Hey Alan,
I was going to ask how yer hammer’s hangin but looks like it be hangin’jus fine. Thank you so much for all of this work.
Bruce
I keep meaning to say that conversation on this topic should take place in the GIS forum. Please submit your comments there where the developers of this project are collaborating.
[...] Neighborhood Coworking: A GIS Guided Block by Block Survey of Mid-City 2 Alan Gutierrez, New Orleans News Ladder [...]