Location based services are going to compete on trust, except Facebook

Two articles recently came to my attention - one describing how location based services like FourSquare are used by some vanishingly small percentage of young people and basically no one else. This could be rather bad news for such services, as young men are a group that will try anything at least once regardless of its practicality or common sense.

The other article described how some mobile applications are secretly sending GPS coordinates to advertisers. This is both good and terrible news for developers of location based services. To me, it suggests two things:

1. They'll be competing on trust, which is remarkably difficult to do if you get big. Even if you are internally careful about the sharing of information there are third parties that can make your whole idea look like a bad one.
2. Quite a lot of money is being invested into location based services - startups like CloudMade and Facebook (Places) for example. Is it potentially because things like sending GPS coordinates and other personal information was what the funders were ultimately expecting in the future?

People will still use Facebook even if they find out it's been sending GPS coordinates and personal information to advertisers because everyone knows what they are getting into (or should). Everyone else has to worry about the incompatibility of competing on trust and potentially being funded on the notion that in the future you will be asked to betray your users.

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WhereCampPDX 2010: Some of the Sessions

It's going to take me some time to fully decompress and write this up, as a good portion of what I saw in Portland was new to me in some form. It is easy enough to read about the hacker community and fiddle with the cutting edge stuff like GeoCouch: it is quite another to actually meet the people and see what they are cooking up.

QTDesigner (Holly Glaser), GeoCouch/GeoJson (Max Ogden)

I hopped between sessions on this one, so I missed about half of Max's talk. The QT talk was small and had David Turner walking Holly through making a survey plugin.

The latter session was showed off an interop tool for converting shapefiles into GeoCouch and why you might want to use that datastore over say PostGIS. The larger point here, which was only briefly mentioned and which I'd like to examine more closely at a later date, is the assertion that simplicity in this sphere breeds adoption. I don't know I necessarily agree.

Domination of the Shapefile (James Fee)

I don't recall the real title, but the alt title was "Why I was Wrong in my last Keynote". It turns out Spatialite, though it was an improvement over the traditional method of bulk data delivery (masses of shapefiles), didn't have enough going for it to actually see mainstream adoption. There just isn't enough wrong with shapefiles to bother switching for data providers. Worse is simply better, at least in this case.

Still, there are problems in data interchange that need to be addressed, the big ones being (1) styling, (2) attribute relationships. I honestly don't see too big a problem with the shapefile being multiple files, since people have a tendency to zip up such things anyway and you probably want more than one shapefile at a time.

This was an interesting discussion and probably merits its own post, the examples were particularly illuminating (FGDC, GML, Gulf Spill map styling).

Keynote (Nathaniel Kelso)

Nathaniel works for the Washington Post making beautiful maps. He showed off examples - the accuracy of the coordinates for WhereCamp, Top Secret America, people estimation at the Obama inauguration - around the theme of "filling in" the map. Of an estimated 2.3 million habitated places we have good maps for a small fraction of them.

Multimodal Trip Planner (David Turner)

This talk is an odd intersection of network topology, real-time scheduling, dynamic mobile resources, and human behavior. When people say they only want to travel on bike lanes, does that mean they'll go five miles out of their way to do it? What if they want to bike only downhill by cleverly leveraging Portland's excellent mass transit system?

One thing I didn't bring up, and wish I had, is that this is an app that essentially lets people plan their travel around a relatively fixed mass transit schedule. What happens when everyone is using such information all the time? Would it be possible to start dynamically modifying the transit system itself to best integrate with user demands?

Geodata for the Masses (various)

I caught part of this talk late after briefly stopping in on the OSM editing and civic apps sessions. By the time I got there it appeared to have devolved into a talk on DIY data collection by kite and balloon.

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"How do I get a GIS job?"

I got this question from a recent grad and I'm not sure if I gave a good answer. Or, for that matter, if there is much advice that would help someone graduating into this job market. One theory going around is that timing like that can hurt forever.

This was my response:

What kind of GIS job do you want? I see the GIS field as roughly divided into administrative, technical, and special domain-specific knowledge areas. You can specialize and in some cases earn more, or diversify and be able to potentially apply for a larger number of positions. Everyone falls a little into all of these categories. Decide to what extent you wish to specialize, and in what area.

1. Administrative
Your project managers, leaders, and communicators. Even the nerdiest technical expert needs to be able to properly gather objectives and communicate requirements. The deeper you go into this, the more likely you will be delegating the actual GIS work.

You get better at this by getting better at written and verbal communication in general. I don't feel exceptionally qualified to talk about leadership, though increasingly I have been thrust into project management work.

2. Technical
GIS is a technical field. If you lack technical skills in a technical field you should fully expect to be mocked. This area can actually be further subdivided into the people leaning toward system admin/computer janitor work and dedicated developers.

I can recommend some fantastic books if you were interested in development - starting with The Pragmatic Programmer, CODE, Code Complete, and Programming Pearls. Just reading isn't enough, I would look into contributing to open source projects.

For the GIS admin/analyst types, I'd recommend working through the entirety of the book GIS for Web Developers. You can go from nothing to managing an entire open source GIS stack (which is fairly similar to ESRI's in terms of architecture).

3. Domain knowledge
Geographic information systems are usually serving some greater business need such as the mandates of public agencies or the profit center of a private corporation. Specialized knowledge of those needs are a career in themselves, and the more you specialize in this the more that career becomes yours. People that fall closer to this area exist on the fuzzy line between actual GIS professional and being a professional in something else.

I'm not going to claim I am the best authority on this particular topic, but I've had success with this particular mindset. A good discussion on what skills you need for each can be found on the new GIS -StakeExchange website here: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/883/gis-development-skills

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Geometric Network Geoprocessing

I've been hammering away at a GIS migration project that has been going on far longer than anyone expected it might take, but I've gotten the opportunity to hack away at some Python to more or less fix a problem I found on TheGISForum:

I currently have a geometric network that I've been working with using the Utility Network Analyst tools. However, I've been trying to perform a few tasks that I've noticed the Network Analyst tools provide, but the Utility Network Analyst does not.

Specifically, I want to place barriers at all locations specified by a point feature class - a functionality provided by the "Add Locations" tool in the Network Analyst Toolset.

Is there a way to use the network analyst tools on a geometric network?

The answer, sadly, is no. As far as I can tell, ESRI has not released any geoprocessing tools for their Geometric Network.

But it is possible to roll-your-own solution to get the same kind of tools by using existing open source libraries. I have a newbish work-in-progress project along these exact lines.

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