Seven Questions and Seven Brief Answers about the City of New Orleans and the NetSquared Mashup Challenge
The organizers of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge are printing up the program. To describe City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery I was given a set of seven questions to answer in 200 characters or less. My co-presenter Francine Stock from the Tulane School of Architecture and keeper of the Regional Modernism blog helped me with these brief answers.
What problem are you trying to address?
Citizens feel besieged by an opaque city government making capricious decisions about recovery. A run away City Hall is demolishing homes out from under recovering families. We need further transparency.
How does your Mashup provide a solution to the problem?
By humbly serving the fantastic efforts of New Orleanians to photo document their recovery and mashing this photo record with new data sets generated by grassroots GIS efforts of local nonprofits.
What changes in the world because of your Mashup?
People come home to New Orleans and rebuild with confidence. They feed their experience into, and base their personal and political decisions upon, a spatially organized library of civic intelligence.
What information/data will people interact with?
Repopulation data derived from US postal data. Building and demolition permits. Road Home Program grant data. Flood elevation maps. Plus, upload of geocoded photos and neighborhood authored reports.
What have you done in the past to give supporters the idea that you can pull this off?
Photo mashups of threatened architecture. Geocoding and mapping demolition patterns and building permits. Social media workshops. We’re partnered with GIS savvy nonprofits throughout New Orleans.
How will you distribute your Mashup?
Aside from the thinknola.com hosted Mashup: We contribute to other social media and GIS efforts. Our data is licensed though Creative Commons. Our Mashup will export data sets as KML for re-Mashing.
How will you encourage use of your Mashup application?
Partnerships with GNOCDC, Beacon of Hope, and City Works will integrate and contribute to existing GIS efforts. We’ve established a pilot GIS project center to help neighborhoods generate new GIS data.
The Internet Rewards Brevity
As always, I’m eager to hear your thoughts. Are we getting closer to a project that you’ll find useful? Leave comments in the GIS forum, where Andrew Turner, Francine Stock and myself are working on defining the presentation and the mashup itself.
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I do want to hear from you, but please leave your comment in the GIS forum.