Cultivating Open Geo-Data in the Real-World: A Guided Tour of Three Portland-based Projects

The challenge: How do you get the community to be excited about and participate in open datasets?

I’ll explore how I’ve approached this question in three Portland-based projects. Each project has two goals:

1. Free iOS apps for public education and participation
2. The creation of real-time geo-queryable, well-maintained open datasets that can be used for other projects, and preserved for the future, well beyond the current round of apps

The Three Projects:

• Poetry Posts – How do you build an app or a map when there’s no list of locations, and no one can even agree on what these things are called? I’ll talk about co-creating a dataset with a diffuse, elusive and often technology-averse community.
• Heritage Trees – How do you make statistical data exciting and encourage participation and engagement? I’ll explain how I designed and built a system to gather a community-wide collection of photos of Portland’s Heritage Trees.
• Portland Public Art – How do you blend together data in multiple formats from multiple agencies and make sure it all points to the right place? I’ll cover using CouchDB as a canonical datastore, crowd-correcting locations and managing community contributions.

Conclusion – In the context of these projects, I’ll explore these common themes:

• The importance of sustainable, re-usable datasets (i.e. an iOS app is just this year’s packaging)
• Mobile devices as data collectors
• Mobile app users as data submitters, correctors and curators
• Making use and participation easy for non-technical people
• The role of CouchDB in building community projects that have dynamic data and dynamic metadata
• The complexities of intellectual property and local government data
• The use of government data as scaffolding, a framework which the public can improve and adorn

I’ll preserve time at the end for questions and answers.