Tidbits from the #Geodesign Summit

“Is what I wrote on your white board yesterday still there?” “Yes.” “Then I need to get into your office.”
- Conversation between Carl Steinitz and an ESRI employee.

I ran into Zsolt Nagy once of the state of North Carolina and NSGIC fame. He now works for AECOM, a nationwide engineering firm. While it saddens me that we no longer have his strong voice in the public sector, I do applaud his and other NSGIC efforts to grow the next generation of leaders and look forward to hearing their voices grow geospatial within their states and the country and the world. He notes he is still involved in NSGIC in his new capacity.

“Fear is a great motivator. It’s how we get out in front of an enormous challenge.”
- Will Rogers, CEO of the Trust for Public Lands

Many conversations I had on the first day of the summit at some point came to the same statement: “My organization is already doing geodesign, we just are not calling it that.”

You can follow the summit on twitter: @geodesign2010 penned by ESRI’s Matt Artz.

ESRI helped cover some travel and lodging costs related to Directions Media’s attendance at the Summit.

ESRI #Geodesign Summit Day 1 PM

The afternoon of the first day began with a series of Lightening Talks. Most were not the quick, caffeinated ones I’ve seen elsewhere. These were very calm - and eclectic - a term I heard many times, mostly discussing the attendee population.

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Jack Dangermond’s Research Vision for #Geodesign Parallels that for GIS

During a break at this week’s summit,  I got a chance to talk with Jack Dangermond. He shared the background to this event, just one among many already completed and more to come that focus on the topic. Dangermond has a longer term plan than just “spreading the geodesign” vision.

He explained that back in the 1980s a group got together to develop recommendations to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a research agenda for GIS. That work enabled the creation of the The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and its three centers at UC Santa Barbara, U Maine and SUNY Buffalo.

Dangermond is looking to lead the same type of effort for geodesign. He noted to me that while geography has support at the NSF, architects and other design players don’t engaged in academic research (at least in the U.S.; Internationally he noted, that sort of research is done). This event is a step towards defining a research agenda, that hopefully NSF will one day embrace and fund, ideally creating a research organization for geodesign.

ESRI helped cover some travel and lodging costs related to Directions Media’s attendance at the Summit.

Scoble and others Pick Hot Startups to Watch: Many are Geo

Some of those on Scoble’s lists (part 1, part 2) have been covered in this blog including waze, Foursquare and Aloqa (post).

I’m looking for the ones of which I’ve not heard. Scoble includes NextStop, a site where users share guides to great experiences in different cities focusing on one theme such as vegan food or architectural landmarks. Those two are among the 42 guides now available for Boston. Each guide is a series of points of interest. Each POI has a thumbnail, which if clicked takes you to a full page with a map and of course, other recommended POIs nearby. You can “like” guides and recommend POIs. It may well be best of breed - but there sure are a lot of sites like this!

He also notes Redbeacon, a site where you can post requests for services (in an area) and make appointments with bidders directly. For now it’s only available in certain parts of the San Francisco Bay. Clearly, the plan is growth!

CitySourced is a “tell the local government where the problems are” type app. The idea is that cities would come to the company to develop specific apps for their city. Oh, and there are no products - yet. I wonder if this is a bit late since many city’s have their own iPhone apps (Boston does) and other solutions, like SeeClickFix are already in play.

Over at the New York Times Jenna Wortham identifies Five Tech Themes for 2010, including, no news to us, “Location, location, location.” Among her examples, “Hot Potato, Foursquare, Grindr and UrbanSpoon.” Grindr is a dating app and Hot Potato an event app. Grindr says of itself: “Unlike other dating or social network sites, Grindr is meant to be mobile.” Hot Potato‘s tag says it all: “Find events. Join the crowd. Share the experience.” The name makes me wonder which other childhood games will name location-based social apps.

In Craig’s Chicago Business Monica Ginsburg asks not what’s the next Twitter, since we know its Foursquare, but what’s the next Foursquare? Among the answers:

ShopSavvy - take a pic of a bar code and the app finds the product, competitively priced online.

GoMobo - key in an address and find local restaurants from which you can order and have the food delivered (2007 launch)

Groupon - city based deals are only available if enough people commit to a particular deal