We spent yersterday’s Earth Day at our offices in NYC trying to do balloon mapping, a nice way to end an intense EcoHackNYC weekend. It is the second time we co-organized this (un)conference. Last fall we gathered at NYU and this time we met at Parsons.
The event started Friday with a series of 5-minute ignite talks. On Saturday, we divided in small groups and worked on solutions. Here is a sample of some of our favorite geospatial projects.
A five-team group, including three from Vizzuality, worked with a big and interesting dataset of 12 million endangered species trades, to create an interactive visualization called the Species Sphere. All data is fetched from CartoDB and visualized using d3.js. Amazing work done in just 8 hours!
Another group worked on a simple map interface to communicate local demand for community-supported agriculture (CSA). The project is built on Heroku for hosting, MapBox for map tiles, Leaflet for the mapping interface, and jQuery with CartoDB for all the analysis.
Check too this map of global forest height showing deforestation in the Amazon, build at the EcoHack:
This time we also expanded the meeting beyond data and code and we teamed up with The Public Laboratory to add a hardware-hacking to the event. The Public Laboratory has developed a balloon mapping kit that enables you to collect your own aerial photos from up to 1000 ft. Using the open source MapKnitter web-based software, you can stitch the resulting images into a web-viewable map.
The Air Quality Egg team brought also their DYI sensor-box for real-time air column monitoring. It was customized and added to the balloon kit to gain additional capabilities. The system contains sensors to read NO2, CO, temperature, humidity, compass (to calculate wind direction), wind speed, dust (particulate matter), VOC’s, altitude, as well as O3, and streams the data in real-time via XBee to Pachube.com.
It was a great, brilliant event. We are looking forward to the next one!
Vizzuality has contributed this post to the New York Botanical Garden blog. You can read it also here.
This weekend, for the second time in under a year, we are throwing an event to bring together scientists, developers, designers, and others to work collaboratively on environmental projects that matter. We call this event EcoHackNYC. It is a free (un)conference where a small group of people present projects, problems, or data they think need to be developed, and then larger groups of enthusiasts and experts work tirelessly to develop solutions (also check out last year’s event here). For us, this is a special event.
We have been working primarily on projects in biodiversity, conservation, and the environment, guided by a genuine passion and belief in the societal value of such projects and a love of working in domains that present multifaceted challenges, not the least of which is visually explaining meaningful knowledge. We are optimistic that scientific research results will drive forward new ways of understanding and communicating scientific information and will ultimately improve the world around us.
EcoHackNYC was conceived to help reduce one major obstacle in the way of the science we love: scientists, technologists, and designers have very few forums to cross-fertilize and forge new collaborations. Please come and join us with all of your beautiful ideas and diverse talents to help drive forward the technologies and solutions we so desperately need.
Registration for this event is still open.
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) first annual conference started yesterday in Brasilia, Brasil. The meeting will welcome near 1,000 representatives from more than 60 countries to discuss the latest reforms, tools and innovations in the open government field.
The partnership has grown rapidly. Just last September, eight countries launched it to formalize their commitment to a more open, transparent use of information. Another 43 additional governments have joined the OGP in the last months.
The Brasilia two-day event is the biggest conference related with Open Government ever, and it will be supported with the attendance of Dilma Rousseff and Hillary Clinton. You can check the agenda here.
Vizzuality will be presenting several projects, particularly the Open Goverment Experience Locator (image above), developed together with the OGP and the World Bank Institute. This tool allows the exploitation of different Open Government implementation experiences. The Experience Locator features initiatives from around the world, with special emphasis on presenting the insights from practitioners involved, links to implementing partners and related resources for further exploration. It has been entirely developed on CartoDB.
Ruth del Campo will be at the Innovation Village in the Open Aid Register stand (another CartoDB-based platform) showing demos of the OGP Locator tool, together with CartoDB. She will also be showcasing how CartoDB can help you create maps with your data fast and easy. This is especially interesting in the field of Open Government, where Open Data is crucial and there is so much to be visualized and geolocated.
So, if you are around in Brasilia feel free to pass by our booth at the Innovation Village and say hi or try to reach @ruthdelcampo at anytime. We would love to show you how Open Source CartoDB can enable you to do much more with much less.
We want to share a remarkable step for the open data movement in Spain. Based on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Spanish government unveils today a new transparency law for a more open government.
Following there’s a quote for the English edition of Madrid-based daily El País: ”The Cabinet on Friday will approve a far-reaching government transparency law that will give citizens full access to official documents and records, and enforce open government policies at all public agencies to break open the tradition of secrecy in Spanish bureaucracy”.
According to El Pais, three-pronged proposal of the new transparency law covers public contracts, right to information and good governance. Spain is the only EU country with over one million inhabitants with no access to information law.
Research shows that over one in two requests (54%) never gets any kind of response, while only 20% receive the information requested, according to Access Info Europe, which recently launched a new site called tuderechoasaber.es following the success of projects like whatdotheyknow.com. Users can make and track requests for information from Spanish public bodies.
Last November, we helped create the first ever EcoHack unconference here in NYC. The idea was to bring together people from different backgrounds into the same room to tackle real problems related to the environment. It was an amazing event that drew project ideas and solutions from a diverse crowd of designers, coders, scientists and other amazing people. At the end of that first weekend, we asked the participants how soon they would like to see another event. Overwhelmingly the answer was in less than a year. So now, we are announcing the second EcoHackNYC to be held April 20th and 21st] at the Parsons Design and Technology lab. We will also be working to find places to showcase some of the outcomes on Earth Day, April 22nd!
In order to keep growing and bringing new ideas to the event, we have joined forces with the Public Laboratory to help draw a community of hardware hackers and data collectors to EcoHackNYC. Think balloons, air sampling, and image collection! They are also making hardware available for hacking during the event. This doesn’t mean we wont still be doing all the data and code hacking from last year too!
Just like the first EcoHackNYC, we will kick off the event with Ignite talks where you can present the ideas you want to work on for the weekend. So start thinking about what data, technology, or hardware you think we should be creating or improving and submit those ideas. This will be a really exciting weekend that offers the chance to work on projects that may help change the world. So head over to the site], register, and get ready for a great time!
This week we are taking part in the Kenya Biodiversity Atlas and Decision Making Platform planning workshop hosted by the ACC. There are two medium term goals of this workshop: the first is to produce a hard copy Biodiversity Atlas for Kenya, the second is to produce broader and evolving online resource for the data, information, and analyses that go into a Kenyan Biodiversity Atlas. There is a longer-term goal to then make the technologies available throughout the region. To help make the work successful, the ACC has brought together representative many regional organizations and agencies such as TAWIRI and ARCOS as well as global organization such as the WCMC, WWF, and members of the group at WRI responsible for virtualkenya.org.
The discussion has been exciting, positive, and very on target. I was asked to give a presentation and focused on several ideas, including the importance of data access and availability, supporting science at multiple levels, work toward immediate deliverables and successes to drive continued development, and being open openly. In some of the breakout sessions I have also presented some of the technologies we have been building into CartoDB and have discussed how our cloud based solution (especially for large geospatial data) could very capably support many goals of the project.
Before we have even completed the meeting, I think I have come to understand a few key take aways here. First, data openness and accessibility in Kenya and regionally is still lacking in many areas key to an online Atlas’s success. Bandwidth and accessibility are ever-present concerns when building an online tool in Kenya. These challenges are not insurmountable, and all parties at the meeting are aware of the need for such a resource, both to ensure Kenya is recognized as a biodiversity knowledge and wealth, but also to help drive forward data and communication in Kenya.
I am excited for this project to take off, as I am confident it will be a valuable resource for Kenya and beyond.
The Eye on Earth summit started on Monday 12th in Abu Dhabi. The conference is addressing the crucial importance of environmental and societal information and networking to decision-making.
Vizzuality is very aligned with the objetives of the summit and the declaration that has been signed. We have been working on Biodiversity and Conservation since we started and we hope that the work we do with our partners help move toward a more sustainable world.
Javier de la Torre is been presenting also some of our projects in the conference, like Imazon, a project together with Google and Imazon and OldWeather, but many of other of our projects where presented, like GeoCAT, ProtectedPlanet, GBIF, etc.
Now, that we have launched CartoDB, our Open Source geospatial database on the cloud, we are working with many different organizations to help them analyze, visualize and share their environmental data.
We look forward to join forces with partners to develop the technologies and platforms that will enable a truly integrated environmental data network that will help to make better conservation decisions. And if this movement is driven by Open Source so that everybody is included, we will be delighted.
Today we presented at MICTTing in Punta del Este, Uruguay, talking about how open data and open source can be leveraged for sustainable tourism programs.
Eric Gundersen from Development Seed joined us on the panel and presented on the open source mapping platform TileMill and Javier presented on Open Data, environment and CartoDB. The balance was great. There is a few companies out there that share the same vision as we do, and Development Seed is one of them. They are the authors of some really cool projects and pretty amazing technology. They also are an open source company and we have been following some of their creations code for a while in CartoDB. This exemplifies to its best, the great outcomes that can happen between small companies supporting open source and innovation.
Our collaboration extends well beyond the stage. Additionally, Development Seed and Vizzuality are talking a lot about future joint workshops, sharing projects, ideas and in general closer relations between the companies as we both work to push open source in the development and environmental space. We can not be more happy to be so close to such a talented company and we are sure we will all have lot of fun in the future.
At Vizzuality, we are passionate about biodiversity and the natural world. That is why we do what we do. Over the past few years we have made an attempt to work almost entirely on projects that we felt could have a positive impact. Working with amazing teams from GBIF to botanical gardens and from Google to NASA has given us the opportunity to interact with some really amazing people: scientists, engineers, designers, and librarians. Each time, we are humbled and amazed by what these people can accomplish.
Now, we want to share that with you!
With the help of our sponsors and friends, we are organizing an unconference called, EcoHackNYC, on November 4th and 5th at NYU. The purpose of EcoHackNYC is to bring together diverse minds to tackle real global environmental change problems dealing with data analysis, information access, communication, and data visualization. We are already so impressed by the reception from the community.
From our end, we are working with REDD Metrics, Brighter Planet, the Citizen Cyperscience Centre, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and NYU to make a really fun event. More amazing though, some world-class scientists, developers, designers, writers and others have already signed up to give their time freely to environmental and global change projects we haven’t even announced yet! It is these passionate people that we were excited to see come together in the same room. More than that, it is exciting to bring together people and communities that otherwise may not have the opportunity to work with one another. It is the synthesis of the diverse communities that we think could lead to some powerful results.
The event is going to be held at NYU in coordination with friends in the ITP department. We are less than two weeks away, so get involved, sign-up, submit a project, let us know you are interested from afar, tweet #EcoHackNYC!
This week we helped launch a new project on Zooniverse Labs, called NEEMO. For 13 days NASA astronauts, scientists and technicians on a mission called NEEMO-15, where they will be living in an underwater habitat called Aquarius to research marine life and prepare explorers for missions to far-off planetary destinations. During these missions, NASA collects thousands of images of underwater life and features. They need your help to analyze those images and help us guide the scientists on their excursions around the habitat!
NEEMO is a collaborative, spatial annotation, application built using Node.js. It allows users to race one another to identify and annotate seafloor biodiversity quickly and accurately. NEEMO is all about seeing how we can quickly build accurate sets of spatial annotations using crowd sourcing. The race is on! Using socket.io, NEEMO allows users to see and validate each other’s findings in real-time and all of the annotations are being stored, tracked, and served using CartoDB.
After only the first few days of collecting data, we have thousands of identifications and thousands more validations. We are really excited about it, keep the annotations coming NEEMOers!
