May 22nd, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
Ed McGinnis & Rob Schaefer (and a Map at UNOP 1) by Maitri Venkat-Ramani.
Funny thing happened on the way to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge in San Jose, CA.
Many of you have gotten in touch with me to talk about your own GIS efforts. We’ve seen an incredible coming together of the nonprofit and neighborhoods engaged in collecting, organizing and analyzing recovery data based on it’s physical location.
Thank you for your outpouring of support. I’m no longer going it alone.
Francine Stock from the Tulane School of Architecture, keeper of the Regional Modernism blog, is going to co-present City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery with me at the NetSquared Mashup Challenge conference in San Jose, CA this coming Tuesday, May 27th, 2008. She is the keeper of the Regional Modernism blog. She’s written her ideas for this project in Manifseto for a Mashup.
Thank you for your outpouring of support. Not only will I be joined by Francine Stock and Andrew Turner, who got me involved in NetSquared by insisting that I throw my hat into the ring, but I’ve received the help of many New Orleans organizations that are engaged in the recovery.
I’m going to arrive in San Jose with the weight of our collective GIS experience.
If there’s any city in the United States that is intimate with the lay of it’s land, it’s New Orleans. We’ve all scoured satilite maps, Sanborn maps, flood elevation maps, we’ve conducted neighborhood surveys, we’ve tracked recovery issues online with Google Maps.
GIS is not just software. It is a discipline. We’re now engaging with our local professionals to use GIS to guide our data collection efforts and sharpen our understanding of our recovery.
Francine and I discussed a strategy for the presentation of the fantastic grassroots GIS efforts in New Orleans.
The message for Silicon Valley is that there is a highly-motivated user base here in New Orleans. We are building what we can with the tools that we have, pushing them to the limits of our understanding. Neogeography has become part of our communication. We’re now constantly cobbling together maps and email them to one another, to see clearly what’s going on. We all appreciate the importance of maps to city planning and we’re all, everyone of us, engaged in planning the future of our city.
As always, I welcome your participation in this conversation, but please leave your comments in the GIS forum where the discussion is ongoing.
May 16th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
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.
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May 16th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
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.
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April 21st, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
First there was the comments and stars. Then there was the voting. Now we’re at round 3. The project that I’ve proposed for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge has been made a finalist.
The Accidental Tourist
Now I have to go to San Jose, California and give a presentation at the 2008 NetSquared Conference. Three winners will share in a $100,000 prize to implement their mashup. I’m going to be joined by Andrew Turner of Mapufacture.
Andrew Turner is a friend of a friend. (Well, after this he is most definitely my friend too.) I know Andrew through Edward Vielmetti and the Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop mailing list. It is a mailing list for a standing lunch of a group of Ann Arbor types. After all this time, it’s hard to say what they have in common exactly, except that they all know Edward Vielmetti.
I’ve gotten to know these people better through my blogging, but primarily by following updates using Twitter. As I was leaving updates about my mapping work, some of the people who follow me on Twitter took note. One of those people was Andrew Turner.
Andrew called me and told me about the NetSquared mashup challenge. He told me that I should throw my hat into the ring.
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March 5th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
Through the Broadmoor Project, Think New Orleans has obtained three licenses for ArcGIS that I’ll be installing on the computers at the Trinity Christian Community.
- What: GIS Coworking
- Where: Trinity Christian Community Center at 3908 Joliet St, New Orleans, LA (map)
- When: Please complete this schedule poll to help us choose the right time: GIS Coworking Schedule Poll.
What Is Coworking?
Coworking is a concept that comes out of Silicon Valley. Solo professionals got tired or working out their rec-rooms or else shlepping it all to the Starbucks. They created these offices where you could have a desk, and share a space with other independents and freelancers.
These spaces are called coworking spaces. They are offices for freelancers.
This gives people the benefits of office space. They get to separate work from home, have a place for work, and have office mates that they can tap for assistance on projects.
From these coworking spaces, new collaborations are formed.
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March 4th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
Business Funding 823-248-4474 by Alan Gutierrez.
I’ve applied for a grant to fund the continued development of maps at Think New Orleans. I need your help.
The grant is through a nonprofit that focuses on the Internet. The nonprofit is called NetSquared. They have a submission process where you post your submission online. They award the grant based on votes.
I need you to please vote for my project.
How to Vote for the Project
It is not as easy as it could be, so here’s the run down.
The voting hasn’t started yet, you see. But, I’d like you to get registered and I’d like to you leave comments.
The best thing that you could do now, is to leave a comment. Ask for more features. Tell me what you think of the issue. Give me feedback on the grant.
The more comments the proposal receives the better. Comments show an interest in the project, because it will encourage votes.
Grant Details
The grant is really a prize. You can read about it at N2Y3 Mashup Challenge. Ignore the jargon.
From what I can tell, they’ll give a prize at an awards seminar. I’ll be working on web enabled maps for the recovery regardless. A cash prize only makes life easier.
March 4th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
5 of 5: Storyville superimposed on the Iberville Housing Project by Ben Ledbetter, Architect.
In the above photograph, the area that was “zoned” for prostitution in Storyville is super-imposed on the Iberville housing development.
I plan to post prospectuses for a work I am devising for Iberville, as well as a revision to that interrupted Tulane studio, in these pages soon. Meanwhile, any information, contemporary or historical; factual, anecdotal or otherwise, that anyone has regarding the area outlined in the image above would be most welcomed.
I would also appreciate any of you directing other flickr users to me who you think may have information or interest in these issues.
Please leave comments at the Flickr page for the photograph so Ben Ledbetter can read them.
If you are interested in creating your own maps, you can join the discussion at the Think New Orleans maps forum.
February 27th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
Rebuild by B E M.
Recently, Matt McBride showed his spreadsheet acumen by creating a spreadsheet of the city’s targeted demolition list. He cross-referenced the demolition list against the city’s permit database, to find which of these structures already had demolitions permits. He did so by punching in addresses at city’s online permits database.
For those of you who don’t know, I was once a computer programmer.
It would make Matt’s life easier, I figured, if Matt didn’t have to pick through the city website to obtain the demolition permits. It would be easier if he had them all in a spreadsheet, because he seems to like spreadsheets.
So, I went and gathered up all the permits issued in Orleans Parish since January 2005 and put them into spreadsheets. They are available for download at Think New Orleans.
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February 25th, 2008 Alan Gutierrez
This is a forum to discuss the Geographic Information Systems efforts at Think New Orleans.
This is a blog post where the comments section is used to maintain an ongoing discussion with a search engine friendly archive. I prefer this to a listserv because it is more likely to attract the attention of other folks interested in GIS, though the magic of search.
How to Participate
There are two ways to follow the discussion.
- You can choose notify me by email when you leave a comment. You will get an email notification. You can manage that notification the way you manage your listserv traffic.
- You can subscribe to the comments feed. You can manage that feed the way you manager your RSS traffic. (If you don’t know what RSS is, then leave a comment.)
- Bookmark and come back frequently.
Say Anything..
Join the discussion by leaving a comment. That way you can get the update email messages.
I’m going to corral the GIS related discussions back into this forum. When I write about GIS at Think New Orleans, I’ll link to this forum as the pace to discuss GIS.
This way, our discussion can attract more interest and more participation. It also frees me from the task of coordinating all the email.
