Thursday, December 22, 2011

9/11 Geosymposium at Technology in Government 2011, New York

The NYC GeoSymposium: 2001-2011-2021 held on November 16, 2011 marked the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks by examining the response of the NYC GIS community regarding mobilization of geospatial resources after the event, evolution of procedures, data and technologies since the event, and exploring unmet needs for improved emergency planning and response, as well as future challenges posed by emerging social media and enterprise-wide deployment of software and hardware advances that underpin geospatial application development. I worked with several of my colleagues at GISMO to produce this event, which was co-located with NYC GovTech 2011. We will be launching a GIS design challenge in Spring or Summer 2012. Stay tuned.

Monday, December 12, 2011

World IA Day Announces 14 Locations

World IA Day has just announced 14 locations for February 11, 2012

1 DAY. 14 CITIES.
World IA Day 2012 is about bringing the Information Architecture community together. We’re fostering links within local communities and on a global scale. We’re sharing information, ideas and research. And we’re doing it through unconventional, exciting and engaging IA events this February.

The first ever World IA Day focuses on Designing Structures for Understanding. On February 11, 2012, we’re hosting WIAD events in 14 cities across all corners of the globe. Learn from world-class IA minds, network, showcase new ideas and attend events tailored specifically to your community. We hope you’ll join us at an event near you this February!

Local Connections. Global Impact. World IA Day 2012

WIAD2012 Locations:

Bogota, Colombia
Vancouver, Canada
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Ghent, Belgium
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Italy (Milan, Rome, Sardegna)
Panama City, Panama
Bucharest, Romania
Paris, France
Sydney, Australia
Malmo, Sweden
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tokyo, Japan
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Visit http://worldiaday.org/ for details.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Disaster Planning at Woodstock 1969

This past weekend, while Irene was threatening the East Coast, my husband and I were in the Catskills for visiting day at our daughters' summer camp. We decided to extend our stay through Monday to avoid the surge and inevitable traffic delays following the storm's projected landfall in New York City on Sunday. Rather than avoid trouble, we found ourselves in the middle of it, as the Catskills experienced some of the worst storm-surge damage in the country: downed trees, road blocks, raging forest streams. If fact, a large white pine at the inn where we were staying fell inches from our unit's porch, bringing several smaller trees down with it.

When it was safe to venture out, a trip to the Bethel Woods Museum at Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center, site of the 1969 Woodstock festival, interestingly, provided some perspective on disaster planning in the area.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was held from August 15-18, 1969 at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in the hamlet of White Lake, Town of Bethel, Sullivan County, NY. We passed Yasgur's farm several times while exploring the area's restaurants and outdoor recreation facilities. The area is marked by rolling pastures and clear lakes reflecting big white clouds in deep blue skies. Aside from a very visible lawn signs either declaring "No Fracking!" or "Friends of Natural Gas," it seems little has changed in forty some years.

Artifacts on the planning of the Woodstock festival showcased the local debate regarding the chosen site of the concert. With over 200,000 tickets presold, planning for traffic and security was a huge concern, as was local opinion on exactly what the festival was to be. The festival organizers had mere days to move from Wallkill, NY where local opposition succeeded in preventing it from being held there to White Lake, where the Bethel Town Supervisor approved the plan despite some local protest. Newspaper articles and advertisements documented the debate. Also on view were documents from the local Sherriff's department outlining traffic and security plans and telegrams to other county departments requesting additional coverage. Handwritten notes and official telegrams from Allegheny County and other Sherriff departments indicated a shortage of officers. All stated that they could not spare any men.

Traffic was beginning to be backed up days before the concert started so that it became impossible to get close to the festival site. People were leaving their cars on the highway and walking the rest of the way to the concert. Performers were flown in and out again by helicopter. An estimated 400,000 people were in attendance at the concert's peak.

Then there came the rain. Though not hurricane force, the rains that fell on the Woodstock festival and in the week leading into it created saturated conditions, muddy roads and an already difficult traffic situation. Officials had called in 150 state troopers, and deputies from adjacent counties ultimately did pitch in to direct traffic away from the area. The Evening News of Newburgh, NY reported that by the last day of the festival, mainly due to a lack of food and unsanitary conditions, the crowd had dispersed to only 10,000 and no traffic jams were reported.

This weekend's storm called for similar measures, but on a much smaller scale. As we left, we noted state troopers and national guardsmen directing traffic near the interchanges of Route 17, I-87 and Route 6. Southbound traffic on I-87 was closed above the Tappan Zee Bridge and it was an hour drive between Route 17 and our usual favorite route, the Palisades Parkway. At the Route 6 traffic circle near Bear Mountain, the Sloatsburg exit was entirely washed away.

Could the traffic situation have been prevented? In 1969, the Sullivan County Sherriff's Department was working with an estimate of 50,000 concertgoers, a figure provided by the promoters that was 150,000 short of presales figures. From what I've seen from this weekend's rains, emergency services would already have been taxed from heavy rains and flooding in the region. Had they known that attendance would approach half a million people, it is likely that the concert would have been called off. That said, I doubt it would have stopped the hundreds of thousands of people from coming.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

This Roadmap Could Use a GPS

I just finished reading Roadmap for the Digital City: Achieving New York City's Digital Future (PDF 2.17MB). A glaring economic concern struck me, which the report acknowledges but does not address adequately, despite devoting several pages to it, and that is the issue of access by underserved populations.

Solutions offered by the plan include noble goals. Free wireless access in parks, training and services in public libraries, senior centers and public housing facilities, a pilot project to bring computing into the homes and schools of 18,000 sixth grade students. These programs directly address the cost of access and a disparity of technology learning in our community. I don't want to discount these efforts, but do wish point out that the issue of access of the disadvantaged goes well beyond free wireless access.
It is disheartening to learn in the NY Times today that "free" Wi-Fi means, "The Wi-Fi in the parks would be free to all users for up to three 10-minute periods per month. Beyond that, users would pay 99 cents for each 24-hour period in which they log on." The Times reports that, "It would be free to all subscribers to the broadband services of Cablevision or Time Warner," which may include public housing where these services are available. In fact, the free Wi-Fi deal was a condition for renewing the cable franchise with the City. I would be interested in learning how many public housing residents are broadband subscribers with these services.

Here is another example: I have been providing computer training to an acquaintance who is a senior citizen and retired bookkeeper. She lives alone, is seeking employment, has worked with computers extensively in the past, but is about 15 years behind on the latest accounting technologies. She has a netbook with internet access but no mobile phone. For her, an iPhone app is useless and Twitter is bewildering (though she does like Facebook). Nothing really works the way she expects it to, including NYC.gov.

A large part of the Digital Roadmap involves community engagement through initiatives like PlaNYC’s Change By Us and the NYC Big Apps contest. Change By Us is a map-based website to collect thoughts from citizens about how to make New York City more livable. The NYC Big Apps Contest, an application development contest, sponsored by BMW, that invites developers to utilize open data collections from the City to address citizen needs, has indeed been a highly successful and exciting initiative raising awareness of engineering talent in NYC among the VC community and the technology industry at large. Keep in mind however, that it required an internet access to submit ideas to Change By Us and the Big Apps contest. So the citizenry making the requests are already connected.

The Digital Roadmap report notes challenges including staffing constraints and complicated legacy systems, and plans to a large degree to let its open government platform allow the developer community to create apps to address citizen needs, which they hope would be more cost effective than creating the services themselves. This crowdsourcing is indeed an effective way to get rapid development of products that the population actually wants and I am a big fan of the NYC Big Apps Contest. But while the Roadmap notes concern that the economically disadvantaged may not have access to the iPhones and Android technology that most of the Big Apps winners develop for, it's the flashier apps that have the most appeal among those that are tuned into the contest.

There are competing needs at stake here. On one hand are the VC funders who want to earn money on apps that serve a deep pocketed consumer market and the developers who want to wow potential funders and employers with their mastery of the latest programs for the coolest toys. On the other are the City's poor, senior citizens and those with developmental needs for which these toys may not be affordable, accessible or easy to use. The city is counting on corporate contract terms and good-hearted hackers to address citizen needs.

I understand that the City is forced to look to outside developers to serve these needs because tax revenue is so low. The strategy to open data and let developers come up with apps is a great way to provide services on a large scale, but not the best way to serve the needs of the underserved. And cutting inadequate deals with providers is more a way to say "We did it," than to say "We did it right." There needs to be an incentive for building apps for economically disadvantaged groups.

This all sounds very dreary. I should note that I am excited to see the level of engagement and openness in city government. After participating for 20 years in grass roots efforts to create an open discussion and sharing of public data, via my involvement with GISMO and the Municipal Arts Society's Community Information Technology Initiative, it's a step in the right direction.

But we can do more. And I’m working on an idea for involving my own develper community (IA, UX, GIS, etc) in coming up with a plan. If you are interested, please let me know.

IA Institute Newsletter #6.05 Released

I am almost finished with the NYC Digital Roadmap and will have a blog post coming soon. In the meantime, there is a lot of new publications on Information Architecture. Put this on your nightstand, bring it to the beach or carry it on the metro, cause we've got reading to do:

IA Institute just released Newsletter #6.05 with Part Two of Finding IA at the Enterprise Search Summit by Shari Thurow, a follow up to my article from the previous newsletter.

http://iainstitute.org/news/001263.php

The Journal of Information Architecture released Issue 1, Volume 3 with a focus on the unique way of seeing what Jorge Arango terms "Environments for Understanding" and how they persist across channels and media.

http://journalofia.org

Also the long awaited IA issue of the ASIS%T Bulletin is out:

http://www.asis.org/bulletin.html

And if that's not enough, here's an inspiring blog post on "Information Architecture," building bridges and making maps from Peter Morville:

http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000647.php

I've got a lot of reading to do....

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Open Government Forum at Internet Week NYC

Over the next couple of days I am going to post summaries of Internet Week sessions that I attended last month. Here is the first, a panel on open government in NYC:

In June, I attended a panel on Open Goverment in NYC, hosted by Time Warner as part of Internet Week NYC. I joined my friend, Queens Community Board 3 member, Tom Lowenhaupt, who has been advocating for a .NYC top level domain for over ten years. Given some of the road blocks he has faced in his campaign, I knew attending an Open Government forum with him would be interesting.

Presented in a panel format, the event focused on Setting the Digital Standard for open government. NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith introduced Jesse Hempel, a senior writer for Fortune Magazine, who moderated a panel of experts in government information technology including:

  • Adam Sharp, CEO, Twitter
  • Carol Post, Commissioner, NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT)
  • Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer, NYC
  • Seth Pinsky, President, NYC Economic Development Corporation

Commissioner Post opened with a brief description of the city's plans for a digital roadmap, including a range of web 2.0 tools that allows the City to to communicate and join with citizens to make a better city, break through hardened boundaries between people, neighborhoods, agencies, etc. "The fundamental responsibility of government being to allow access to information," she said.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Conversations with Richard Saul Wurman

I was having a nice conservation on Monday with my friend, journalist Amanda Robb, about topics that floated in interesting ways from pitching social awareness campaigns to women's magazines to the role of Twitter and other social media in reporting. The conversation got me thinking about the two different angles that we approach our respective careers in media: she with the words and stories and publications of a journalist and me with the technology platforms, codes and administration of new media operations that bring those words to the world.

So what a treat to find out about Richard Saul Wurman's newest venture, the WWW.WWW Conference, which will celebrate improvised conversation.

Simply pairings of amazingly interesting individuals prompted by a question, generating a conversation. For 10 minutes to 50 minutes. And so it will go – conversations interlaced with threads of improvised music. An astrophysicist & a microbiologist. An actor & a playwright. A jazz musician & a classical one. An energetic exploration of the lost art of conversing.

WWW.Wow. Where else could you find TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, Yo Yo Ma, Herbie Hancock and ESRI's Jack Dangermond all in one place? It's the WWW.WWW Conference, currently planned for September 18/20, 2012.

WWW.WWW will be a gathering of the greatest, most interesting & curious minds in the world engaged in immersive & improvised conversation. It will celebrate the 21st century while drawing attention to the new patterns & convergences effecting our health & that of our planet.

A unique un-conference that pairs up incredible minds for brief chats in a single venue. No presentations. No schedule. Just 100 interesting people and 50 conversations.

Richard Saul Wurman, who also founded TEDMED and the eg conferences, and coined the term "information architect" in 1976, is himself a M.Arch graduate who has been exploring the themes of design and place and livable urban environments since the sixties, so it is fitting that ESRI president and fellow mapping pioneer, Jack Dangermond should host the conference. You will recognize other great names associated with the event incuding glass artist Dale Chihuly, who will create an installation for the event and SEED Media Goup's Adam Bly as Science Curator. SEED was an original creator of what was to become my all-time favorite MOMA show, Design and the Elastic Mind.

The event will be streamed live to multiple locations and the talks will also be available via a yet-to-be-released, multi-platform tablet application.

Watch http://www.thewwwconference.com for details.

I won't want to miss the conversation, so I've already added it to my calendar.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Blog migration in progress

I am in the process of consolidating some of my writings into this new Blogger format. As much as I love the integration, flexibility and ownership of a self-hosted WordPress blog, I have been finding it to be increasingly a chore to update my installations. So much so that I've lost track of my words, which I promised myself I would never do, choosing instead to leave them as guest postings and collaborations on other people's blogs, websites and the ultimate sinkhole of discussion lists, Facebook and Twitter.

So here it is, the simplest, no-brained solution I could find, with no upgrade headaches, and a fun theme (that I might just tweak a bit here and there - I can't help myself).

While I'm gathering my musings and reports from the various ends of the internet (seems I was quite prolific in 2004 when I took a course on blogging), please visit some of those aforementioned websites:

http://gismonyc.blogspot.com
My blog for GISMO, a New York City meetup group for geographic information system professionals in the Tri-State area. I've been involved with this wonderful group of people for nearly 20 years in what used to be called Virtual GISMO. Many GISMO members are the unsung mapping heroes of Pier 92 during the aftermath of 9/11. We're developing a retrospective panel for an upcoming technology conference, which will probably mean more writing in my future.

http://iainstitute.org
I write the news, calendar items, Annual Reports and Salary Surveys for the IA Institute, an international community of people involved in the design and structure of information spaces, where I also serve as Operations Manager on a consulting basis and Mentoring Coordinator for the pure joy of it.

http://realestatevaluation.wordpress.com/
I occasionally collaborate on articles, research reports, GIS, and data visualizations with real estate valuation expert, Jim MacCrate of MacCrate Associates. I've worked as an editor and WordPress admin for the weblog, Real Estate Appraisal and Valuation Issues, and have served as editor and co-contributor for Straight from MacCrate, which appeared as a column on Miller Samuel's Soapbox blog.

http://www.west104garden.org
I'm the website committee chair for the West 104th Street Community Garden and write or edit most of the news, event and research pieces.

Now to go hunting for those words.

I Joined Google+ Today

I appear to be a late joiner to Google+, if the list of people in my contact's circles are any indication. It appears to have pulled my info from LinkedIn and has features of Facebook and a very interesting what if discussion among designers going on. I expect it will be a similar experience to LinkedIn and Facebook, perhaps with less of the silliness of Facebook but with similar features, such as Circles which lets you categorize people into groups. 

Just like Facebook, only better.

I've always liked that Facebook lets you group people. It's so natural. I tend to get frustrated by LinkedIn's degrees of separation - you are either in someone's network or you have someone or a chain of people between you and the other person. In a way this is nice because you are still able to contact people in your second network while preserving how you know that person (so and so's friend). Without a grouping feature, once you accept a person to your network on LinkedIn, you lose information about how you are connected to your new contact, unless you go to their page to see shared contacts.

Circles makes Google+ more personal and organized than LinkedIn. It is also more spare, sort of like the defunct Facebook Lite, but I'm witholding judgement for now. Facebook ended up dropping its Lite feature, and I suspect Google will eventually add in Facebook-like distractions and ads, since advertising is their ballywick.

If you are interested in learning more, let me know and I'll invite you to my Circle.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Finding IA at the Enterprise Search Summit

(this article originally appeared at iainstitute.org on June 20, 2011)

Last month in May, I had the pleasure of attending the Enterprise Search Summit East in New York City with IA Institute board member, Shari Thurow. Shari and I were on a quest to discover the role of information architecture in Enterprise Search. We didn't have to look too far, as both days were keynoted by IA Institute veterans: former IA Institute president and CEO of FatDux, Eric Reiss, on Day 1 and IA Institute founder and Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., Thomas Vander Wal, on Day 2 . Institute founder Bev Corwin was also in attendance and I quite was pleased to make a personal connection with a former coworker from PricewaterhouseCoopers, whom I hadn't seen in ten years.

In Reiss's keynote, "The Dumbing Down of Intelligent Search," he challenged search professionals to have the user, not the application, serve as the frame of reference for search. Using Google as an example, Eric showed how the algorithm may not provide the correct context. Those who build the algorithm need to ensure that contextual metadata is available in the CMS. Eric also challenged implementers to understand the business and educate the content providers of those needs. "Matching patterns is not the same as matching needs," he explained. And lest the users themselves forget their own power, Eric encourages all users to be critical and experiment, learn basic strategies and not to take for granted that the search solution is intelligent.

Thomas Vander Wal's keynote on Day 2, "The Search for Social," was a fitting bookend, showing how to deal with all the input once your Enterprise Search team has embraced the user. VanderWal described tools that go beyond searching for artifacts such as documents, emails and image/video content to searching for human resources, knowledge and expertise within the enterprise. Many presenters demonstrated social search tools for finding user profiles, activity streams and Yahoo! Answers-style knowledgebases.

Monday, April 25, 2011

IA Institute - A New Framework

At the IA Institute Annual Members' Meeting held in Denver on April 2, the Board of Directors presented a new framework for characterizing the relationships that the Institute will mediate going forward.  The framework came out of a board strategy meeting that I attended in Iceland back in February.



Read more in the April newsletter and see some very cool (OK, cold) Iceland pictures in my Facebook album:

IA Institute Newsletter #6.04
Reykjavic Photos

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

NY Times: Japan Interactive Earthquake Map

The New York Times' Interactive Map of the Damage from the Earthquake in Japan:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/newsgraphics/2011/0311-japan-earthquake-map/index.html?hp


I was able to locate the town where my friend Pia's brother is teaching English (center of quake zone but far from the nuclear plants, very little structural damage, no casualties) and where my daughter's camp friend's family lives (quite a bit south of Tokyo, out of quake zone).

Coincidentally enough, Brett and I were attending a New York Red Cross breakfast the morning the tsunami was announced, and while the content of the morning's presentation was focused on what the Red Cross does for New Yorkers, it certainly added some urgency to the obligatory donation appeal at the end of the breakfast. (Brett is a volunteer photographer for the Red Cross and my friend Sonia's husband, Nick Malik, sits on the NYC board).

On a cheerier note, a friend pointed me to this T-shirt on Treadless.com combining Eisenlohr's projection with an image of a radio broadcast signal. This is an entry for Oceanic Preservation Society T-shirt Challenge. Theme: Singing Planet. Really neat design.


http://atrium.threadless.com/singingplanet/submission/1009/

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The IA Institute released its 2010 IA Institute Salary and Benefits Survey.

Highlights of the 2010 Salary Survey include:

Median Salary:

The highest salary range was a tie between the USD$80,000-90,000 and USD$90,000-100,000 ranges, each representing 12.8% of the total responses.

The average salary was estimated to be USD$95,252, up $5,252 from 2009.
 
Freelance Rates:

Excluding outliers, the average freelance rate was USD$88.65, up USD$3.65 over 2009. The median rate was USD$85.00 and the modal rate was USD$100.00, with eight people indicating that rate.