GWF 2013 - Plenary - III : Christopher Tucker

Thank you to Geospatial World Forum and all the delegates for coming today and giving me the opportunity to speak. I kind of twisted my title a little bit because I'm a non-profit, or the MapStory Foundation is a non-profit, and convergence and collaboration really have a natural pairing with governance and engagement. You're trying to take a lot of different technologies and a bunch of different business models and bring them together for purpose, and those purposes often are tied very much to the specific information communities you're talking about. I'll talk about that through the course of my presentation, and I have a lot of build slides, so please bear with me.

So we've talked a lot about geospatial. Everybody has used the word geospatial in the presentation. Why we are at the Geospatial World Forum, that's something we're very comfortable with. And I'm going to get us a little bit out of our comfort zone. Some of the other presentations you've also heard the term open government, and a lot of the open government initiatives around the world that have been spurred often by geospatial information. All of our public services, all of our government information relates to our territory, and that information is tied to space and time. So with those open government movements, we've seen the liberation of a lot of that information and an explosion in the utility you can have from geospatial technologies. Something I really haven't heard at this conference as of yet is about the Makers Revolution. Anybody out there ever heard of the Makers Revolution? Raise your hand. All right, so it's starting to leak out. If you've heard of Wired Magazine, anybody heard Wired Magazine? Okay, so Chris Anderson, the recently departed editor of Wired Magazine, just authored a book called The Makers Revolution, and it really focuses on a shift in how industry works. It's no longer just factories that produce things and you go buy them at the store, but many of the pieces and parts of the things that you would like to build have been commoditized, and their ability to plug and play has made it so that you and I, who in a previous era may not have had the technical skills necessary to create the things that we want, actually can now. We've all heard of 3D printers, we've all heard of, well some of you may have heard of do-it-yourself drones. There are many technologies out there that because of the Makers Revolution are becoming available, and I'd argue many of you, we're starting to see the location enablement of that. One of the pieces of the Makers Revolution, or one of the things that is supercharging the Makers Revolution, is the intellectual property regimes out there around sharing. We hear about Creative Commons, we hear about open database licenses for all of the references. You hear about OpenStreetMap and things like Wikipedia. Those are enabled by an intellectual property regime that allows for a global data commons to accumulate around certain kinds of data. And certainly something I haven't heard here is about open educational resources. We've heard references to STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math, and a lot of lament about why won't the future generation get more interested in what we're doing. Open educational resources leverage that intellectual property regime to teach future generations about the world, not just using textbooks and not just using all the things you and I went to school with, but a host of digital resources that can really excite future generations. So we'll see how this build slide works.

So in the United States, and I'll speak only for the United States here because I think we're actually lagging in some things. We talk about education, we talk about education about English and math. And in English and math, we look at our test scores compared to the world and go, man, I wish we were doing better. Then there are some other people that look at science, engineering, and let's take maybe the physical geography side or the highly technical side of the geography world, and we say there's stuff called science, technology, engineering, and math, and boy we wish we did it better, kind of like we wish we did better at English and math to begin with. But then there are all these other things that kind of get ignored when we focus on education, at least in America. I'm not sure how your countries work on humanities, social science, and history, and let's say the arts, the cultural side of our education. But there's that other side of geography, right, that is actually tied to those. We learn history through geography, we learn the social sciences around the countries, the countries and cultures around the world, we understand our humanities based on that famous Dutch painter or the famous Italian musician, and this is all tied back to geography. And so we understand that place or geography is actually central to all learning. It's central to how we learn as a species. And the Makers Revolution is interesting because it teaches us that we shouldn't be on the receive side, right, just sit there as a good student and receive learning, but learning is something we make. I put beer here because that's something I enjoy making. You may not go home and make your own beer, you may go home and make something else. But what if we could actually make our own history? What if we actually had the tools available to us where we could go to City Hall, we could bring all that information together, and we could contribute back to society our understanding of our world? And that's roughly what we tried to do with MapStory. We operate at the intersection of crowdsourcing, and I don't mean that in the term of the wisdom of the crowd. I'm not under the illusion that all seven billion people on Earth are brilliant and have great information and knowledge to share. However, seven billion is a big number, and I bet there are many tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people that have something to share. Actually, I'll go back. Storytelling is the other thing that we're talking about, right? That's a way of making. We often look at the data that we have, we parse that data, we do analysis, but then what do we all do? We have to tell a story with it, and that's actually making something. So I think it's important to understand space and time, our knowledge about the world, through what all of us together can do, how we can converge and collaborate, but also how we can make a future understanding for our society.

So with that story, we simply created a new dimension to the global data commons that lets you organize what you know about the world spatially and temporally. You're going to hear me talk quite a bit about time, not just space. Instead of what Wikipedia lets you do, right? Wikipedia lets you organize what you know about the world encyclopedically. You can go sign in and write a page about whatever you want, that thing that you happen to be passionate about, that thing that you happen to have understanding about. You can go create an account and do that. So all we did, kind of like Wikipedia installed a MediaWiki, which is maintained by the MediaWiki open source community. MapStory installed a thing called a GeoNode, which is a collaborative spatial data infrastructure, managed by the OpenGeo community. If you haven't heard about GeoNode and OpenGeo, Google it, I encourage you. But it was a great little platform. And then we partnered with the Corps of Engineers. If you're not familiar with the Corps, the Corps not only maintains the Mississippi River Basin and all of our navigable waterways in the United States, but has a long history of supporting geospatial engineering. For those who've been in the industry a long time, there's a thing called GRASS, which is one of the oldest digital raster processing softwares, and they sponsored that development early on when the commercial marketplace had not yet supported those advanced capabilities. So they shared our vision for understanding not just space but time, doing it in a social setting so we collaboratively can converge in a way that allows us to communicate our stories.

So a couple comments here to understand the challenges of today and tomorrow, which is pretty much what this conference is about. We have big daunting issues that we as a community, a global community, have to collaborate on and somehow find our way. You can't understand those challenges of today and tomorrow without an understanding of the past. So we must, as a community, self-consciously think about change over time and demand that everything we do is spatially and temporally enabled. To understand the value of data from the crowd, these seven billion people on Earth, right? You don't just look at it and say, oh, it's all the same, it all has equal credibility. You must understand the lineage or the social context of the production of that data. You just can't take it and say, I assume the quality is good. You want to actually understand who produced it, how they produced it, how everybody has used it, what their comments on it have been. And so it's incumbent upon us to build high-attribution social platforms that allow us to actually engage in dispute resolution with each other. To understand the world, people must do more than put together a well-ordered accumulation of facts. That's really what we've done in GIS for years, and it's been amazing, right? It lets us structure all that unstructured information in the world in terms of space and increasingly time. But that's not enough. You could put the same data with two different analysts, and they will be conveying two different stories. So we have to self-consciously empower everybody to compose spatially and temporally enabled narratives.

So here I just put this up. This is just our main splash page to show that to us there are three components: story layers. We talk about map layers a lot, but what about that continual change over time? Then there's map stories, a narrative that I can compose out of multiple story layers or just an individual story layer that really communicates a lot, but I need to annotate it and convey the historic inflection points or the things that must be teased out of the data. And then map storytellers, because you can't understand any of the data or the stories unless you know who the author is, the person who actually made it, the person who actually dug in the archives, the person who actually collected all that data, and understand who that person is and how the community views them, how they've been rated, et cetera, et cetera.

So I've talked a bit about passionate information communities. There are a lot of them. They're not geographers, right? They're passionate about something in the world. Empires, kingdoms, and dynasties, how they've evolved over time. They may create crops, they may domesticate animals, or they may study that. They may be from the energy sector or analysts of the energy sector. They may be interested in human trafficking. They might be interested in biological stress, right? These are people who are not geographers, they're not even historians, they're just from an information community. So I'll take this one right: demographers. They're an information community, they're not geographers, and they'll tell you that much. We have this thing in the U.S. Constitution called a requirement for a U.S. census. So what do we do? We collect this information every 10 years. But when you look at it, it tells you much more than I collected a census. It tells you a story of westward expansion from 1790 till now. It tells you a story of political evolution. When land was annexed into territories, those territories petitioned to become states, those states were broken into counties, and then you see a story of urbanization, right, where people actually moved to those places, they had children, they raised families. So this is just one story layer collected by demographers under constitutional mandate in the United States, funded by the federal government. But until we loaded it up here, it was by and large completely lost to all the people in the United States. A third grade teacher could not hit play and let the children see it, right? But somebody loaded it up, and no one will ever have to do it again, right? It is their contribution to the world and makes the world a better place.

This one is work by historians that were very interested in the political evolution in Africa from 1879 till now. They had many stories they wanted to tell. One of them was one of colonization and decolonization, right? This will go all the way until current day, and I'm probably going to advance the slide before it does, but you can actually see what countries were colonizing the continent, you can see the Boer, you can see the results of the various wars, battles, and treaties, although I don't have a story layer here for the wars and the battles. Et cetera, et cetera. And this is all about change over time, not just about geography. People go, well, things don't change that much. This is annual change. This isn't every 10 years, this is annual change. Things change a lot, they change really fast, and the accumulation of change can be shocking. But it's also important to note that this is just one person's interpretation. Rolando Penate, who was at the Brown Center for African History at Brown University, did this work as a student, helped generate, pull this out of Adobe Flash where they lose all of the geography in it, and loaded it up so that everybody else could have access to this and smash up, mash up all their own African history layers. And Harry up in the sound room is going to help out with this because this is Ames, Iowa from 1862 till now. Oak Ames built his house, Iowa State University in the yellow, the first building, and it takes like nine minutes to show 150 years worth of a city's history. So Harry's just going to pull it to the right and let you understand there's a lot of change that happens in a town. And when you grow up in a town, you have absolutely no idea what order any of this stuff got built. Your own history is pretty much lost to you. And that information is just sitting in City Hall, it's sitting in GIS systems, it's sitting in ways that it's not organized so you can understand change over time. That's a little bit of a pity. Just kill it, Harry, just take it all the way to the end. Iowa State University gets very big. Thank you.

And then this last one's kind of short. I went to school in New York City, and I always wanted to see how the New York subway system evolved. I just assumed it was in Manhattan because doesn't everything happen in Manhattan first? No, it starts in the beach in Brooklyn. So it also turns out the change over time is non-obvious, and we all smooth out history to conform with our own world view, with our own values, and our own personal experiences. Sometimes history and actually the world around us isn't what we thought it to be. And unless the actual change over time is there, you don't understand if you're at a historic high, a historic low, an uptrend, or a downtrend. You just don't know unless your information is managed that way. And you also want to be able to superimpose what was going on there. I want to put an annotation to let you understand that this mayor passed that law, or money was raised by these people to do this and that, and that's important. It's more than just a well-ordered accumulation of facts. It's more than just a progression of dots on a map.

So I'm going to try to close this out quickly because I know I'm over. So this is all about empowering participation, right? Sorry. Convergence and collaboration is about participation. It's about getting all those people that sit on the sidelines to participate. So you need to give them tools. You need to let them all edit each other's stuff in a way that's versioned, where there's an audit record. You need to let people upload not just features but vectors. You need to let them tell their own stories, etc., etc. You need to empower these passionate information communities that are not geographers. They're just people that have a freakishly weird, intense interest in some particular thing, and they hail from all parts of the world. So we can't be closed and isolated in how we view geography.

So some final points. I'm off. Global data commons, or I couldn't figure out the plural for global data commonses. I don't think that's proper English, but global data commons and collaborative platforms that support them, whether it's a wiki, whether it's a GeoNode, whether it's what OpenStreetMap uses with their Ruby on Rails platform, they help support the unleashing of the dark matter of the universe. We all have heard that there's all this dark matter out there, and that's what actually drives the universe. Well, it turns out we have the same thing here on Earth. We have a bunch of really smart people. We have a cognitive surplus. We have a bunch of people that went to school and they have spare time, and they're looking to do fun things in their spare time. And too often their government or the corporations that they interface with don't necessarily scratch all the itches, right? But they should be empowered to use their brains and use that platform of participation to make the world a better place, or to just share that thing that they're passionate about. Change over time in place is the thing that can inspire future generations. It's not geography. One man's opinion. It's not geography, it's not place, it's not location. It's change over time. It's understanding how the world that we live in got to be the way it is. And that may be ancient history. You know, I want to watch Pangea till now over 290 million years, and maybe I want to watch my hometown evolve. It may be I just want to watch every runner in the Boston Marathon that just occurred an hour ago so I can replay it, right? There's no temporal scale or spatial scale that we must stay to to understand our world. But we do need to enable those passionate information communities to articulate what they know in terms of change over time in place. Otherwise, you can't possibly understand your rich past, the complex present, or the uncertain future. Kind of the uncertain future that's been a big theme of this conference. And I always like to point out that storytelling is a preternatural human impulse. It's who we are as animals. We experience the world, we go back to the cave, and we try to communicate the world that we just saw when we were out there getting chased by the saber-toothed tiger. And it's necessarily communal. It's not something you do to yourself for yourself. It's something you do within a community. So how do we enable people to actually tell stories in terms of place and time in a collaborative and communal manner that allows us to not just grapple with our rich past and our complex present, but to actually talk about our uncertain future? That's it. Thank you for your time.