Events - Development Seed

Advancing Openness in International Development

Development Seed — 2012-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

We're heading down to USAID today to participate in the launch of the Making All Voices Count: A Grand Challenge for Development, a new public-private partnership aimed to support innovative technology solutions for open government, transparency, and accountability. We're excited to join this conversation and talk about the future of openness in development.

A view of Benghazi in the new MapBox Satellite imagery, made entirely of open data.

Alex, DJ, and I will be at the launch joining USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, Madeleine Albright, and a host of other development leaders. We'll be showcasing some of the latest tools we've been developing, including public aerial imagery with the launch of MapBox Satellite and UNDP's new open data portal.

After the morning forum, we'll have a table to demo our recent projects and continue the conversation. If you're down at the event, stop by and say hello or reach out to me on Twitter at @nas_smith if you want to talk.

Workshop: New Tools in Mapping for Disasters and Development

Development Seed — 2012-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

This afternoon InterAction and the World Bank are holding a half day workshop on GIS strategy and open source tools for humanitarian aid and international development. This workshop will be today (Thursday, May 3) from 1:00 to 6:00 pm at the World Bank here in Washington, DC.

This event comes on the heels of the InterAction Forum and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team board meeting, which brought many open geo and development leaders to town. It is designed to be a conversation around the challenges facing many organizations around GIS. Proponents from NGOs, the World Bank, the OpenStreetMap community, and the private sector will share their experiences around mapping in development and aid in a series of panels and workshops.

We will be there giving a workshop showing some of our recent map-based visualizations, talking about storytelling with maps, and diving into how to design and publish custom GIS and OpenStreetMap data with our open source map design studio TileMill. The workshop is geared towards a non-technical audience with our goal being to show what's possible with existing open source tools.

Infant nutrition map we launched with the 1,000 Days partnership and InterAction.

RSVP for New Tools in Mapping for Disasters and Development.

The event is fully booked right now, but I recommend getting on the waiting list for when space opens up. I will tweet about capacity from the venue right around when the event starts. Follow me on Twitter for updates @lxbarth.

Meet Us at the InterAction Forum

Development Seed — 2012-04-30T00:00:00-07:00

The annual InterAction forum kicked off today with leaders from international NGOs, governments, philanthropy and civil society gathering in Washington DC for a three day event on the most pressing issues in international development and humanitarian aid. We're going to be there and are looking forward to connect with attendees over open data, data visualization and most importantly - mapping.

The role of GIS for more efficient and accountable relief and development work is steadily raising its profile. InterAction has recognized this fact by installing a GIS working group in June 2011 and this year's forum will bring a promising workshop on Maximizing GIS Mapping in Monitoring and Evaluation. Two further GIS related events come in the same week as the InterAction Forum, both of them stand to benefit from the number of international development folks in town. On Wednesday night the Geo DC meetup on Crisis mapping will bring lightning talks by leading members of the crisis mapping and OpenStreetMap community. On Thursday afternoon the World Bank's GFDRR and InterAction convene for a GIS deep-dive with an afternoon on New Tools in Mapping for Disasters and Development.

This level of activity is testimony to the increased interest around mapping and we are excited to be able to contribute with our MapBox open source tools. Find us at the InterAction forum at our exhibitor booth or simply tweet at us, our handles are @ericg and @djindc.

If you couldn't make it to Washington DC, you can follow the Twitter discussion at the forum with the hashtag #iaforum.

Mapping and Open Data Events in Lima This Week

Development Seed — 2012-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

We are holding two mapping events this week in Lima, Peru. Last night we held a Geo & Open Data Meetup, the second of its type. We had a great turnout last night, with 30+ people coming out to talk about geo and geodata.

30+ people came out to talk about geo and open data.

The meetup consisted of several lightening talks on topics like scraping for data, reflections on DAL, and OpenStreetMap Peru. I presented on using TileMill and OpenStreetMap to make custom maps, and Ruben presented on on his work opening up data with the local municipality of Huamanga.

Ruben presenting on his work opening data with the local municipal government in Ayacucho.

Tonight Ruben and I are leading a training on designing custom maps with TileMill. We'll cover topics ranging from geographic information system basics, basic TileMill, choropleth map creation, data processing for census mapping, to mention a few topics. If you're new to TileMill, I recommend arriving at 5:00 pm with your laptop, and we can help you get it installed. Full details on the training are posted on opendata.pe. There is no cost for the training, and all are welcome to attend.

Based on last night's turnout and discussion it is clear the community and interest is growing. We hope to hold more events relating to geo and open data in Peru moving forward. Watch opendata.pe for updates on events.

Young Professionals in Foreign Policy: Communicating About the Ongoing Famine

Development Seed — 2012-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight I'm joining Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and USAID's FWD Campaign for a discussion on the continuing crisis in the Horn of Africa. The Director of USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Mark Bartolini, will kick the event off with a keynote on the famine and USAID's response. A panel will follow, which I'll participate in to discuss the maps and data visualizations we developed as a part of the ongoing famine mapping work we've done with USAID, the World Food Programme, and ONE.org. Specifically I'll highlight how critical data can be transformed into a map to become a powerful advocacy tool.

USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah first announcing the famine maps at the Social Good Summit in New York City.

Tonight's overall objective is to continue to advance the conversation around the famine that was declared last summer in the Horn of Africa. As a part of its response, USAID released a series of maps as an integral piece of the FWD (Famine, War, and Drought) Campaign to raise public awareness about the crisis. We worked with USAID to release these maps, as well as with ONE.org on its advocacy campaign Where is the Hunger? and the World Food Programme to map their on the ground response operations.

Latest Horn of Africa map showing the December 2011 food insecurity estimates

From spreadsheet to map

All of these maps leveraged open data made publicly available by organizations to tell the complex story of this crisis. Drought conditions, food prices, and conflict were compounding factors leading to the famine. The key to effectively communicating its extent and impact involved creating visualizations that packaged the data in a consumable way. Spreadsheets don't do this. Maps, on the other hand, can be incredibly powerful in conveying who is affected and to what scale - two key pieces to communicating about the famine.

The Young Professionals in Foreign Policy event is tonight (Wednesday, February 15) from 6:30 - 8:30 pm. While it is currently full, there's a waitlist for those interested in attending.

Open Climate Data Meeting with the World Bank

Development Seed — 2012-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

Over lunch on January 31, the World Bank is holding a meeting with developers and data and climate change experts to discuss how open data can help address some of the challenges of climate change. Eric and I will be there to talk open data best practices and specifically on our experience mapping open data for the World Bank and the Global Adaptation Institute.

This meeting comes on the heels of the COP 17/CMP 7 Climate Change Conference in Durban two months ago, where the World Bank released a series of climate data sets to improve climate and development decision-making. Now that this climate data is available to a broader audience, the World Bank is bringing together an overlapping community of development practitioners, climate change experts, and programmers to further explore how to use open data to improve decision making, planning, and communications. This meeting takes place in addition to the World Bank's efforts to get a larger audience using its data through the ongoing Apps for Climate Challenge.

Eric and I are looking forward to discuss using open data with an eye toward visualizing it, specifically by creating compelling map-based visualizations like the climate change maps on climate4development.developmentseed.org. We'll also show how easy it is to add more data to existing maps like this through overlays, to tell new and different stories with your data.

You can find more information about the event on the World Bank's site, and rsvp to attend the event in person or online.

Projected temperature changes by the year 2100 according to one scenario.

Mapping for Nonprofits at Tonight's NetSquared DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2012-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight's NetSquared DC meetup will look at how nonprofits are using web maps and discuss emerging tools that are making custom mapping easier, more flexible, and more affordable. I'll be there presenting on where we see the future of web mapping heading. I'll specifically discuss the open source map design tool TileMill and how it allows users to quickly turn a spreadsheet of data into a beautiful, custom online map.

Speed, design, and usability are what really matter when communicating data, and custom maps are now a viable option for nonprofits of all budgets. I'll highlight how three nonprofits have leveraged open source mapping tools to change the way they communicate, showing how A Wider Circle maps its furniture donors and recipients to better target its efforts, how ONE.org has used maps and data to boost public awareness of a humanitarian crisis, and how the urban history initiative People's District maps its storytelling. Danny Harris from the People's District will be joining me to talk more about their map tells the stories of DC.

Screenshot of ONE.org's famine mapping presentation

Lastly I'll give a sneak peek of our coming soon minimal OpenStreetMap baselayer, which serves as an alternative to the common Google baselayer map we've all seen a million times. InterAction will also be presenting tonight on how they use maps to help their member organizations connect and collaborate with the NGO Aid Map, made by our friends at Vizzuality and also powered by open source.

I'm looking forward to meeting with the local NetSquared community and helping more nonprofits communicate their data through smart maps and visualizations. TileMill is only getting easier to use, and with new $5 a month plans for MapBox Hosting, custom web mapping is in reach of a much larger audience.

Geo DC Meetup Tonight: User Experience

Development Seed — 2012-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

The first Geo DC meetup of the year is tonight, January 11, at 7:00 pm at Stetson's Bar and Grill, and will focus on the user experience behind maps. Our cartographer AJ will present on the design and user experience of maps integrated into websites, such as the World Bank's climate change maps, and map-based web interfaces like you see on the Opportunity Index. He'll run through key points to keep in mind when designing online maps and interfaces that users enjoy, understand, and get more meaning out of.

Tim Deegan from Forum One will talk about how map design has evolved over the years and touch on some of the latest thinking in user experience, and Andy Chosak from the Mobility Lab will talk about designing Transit Near Me, an application that shows transit services near your current location.

The Geo DC meetup happens once a month, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. The next meetup will be on February 1 and will focus on slum mapping. For updates, join the meetup group and follow @geonerdsdc on Twitter.

See you tonight!

Leveraging Data to Improve Social Inclusion at TechCamp Bucharest

Development Seed — 2011-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

We just wrapped up two days of mapping strategy and TileMill training with a group of Romanian NGOs supporting the country's Roma minority at the State Department's TechCamp Bucharest. The NGOs strategized ways to share data and publish better data on the Roma population to leverage in discussions with local governments around social inclusion plans and better provision of public services.

But NGOs need more accurate data than what is currently available - even basic data like how many Roma are in the country is highly questioned. According to the 2002 Census, there are 535,140 Roma people in Romania, accounting for 2.5% of the country's population. These estimates are thought to be wildly low because Roma's generally do not declare their background in the Census. Several NGOs we worked with quoted wide ranging estimates from 1 to 2 million, with that taking into account large population decreases starting in 2007 after Romania joined the European Union and emigration increased.

A look at the questionable 2002 Romanian census figures on the Roma population percentages in each county.

The main focus in breakout sessions was on getting better data to make better data driven decisions. "We are making decisions based on numbers that are not correct" emphasized Elena Mihalache, Public Policy and Advocacy Senior Advisor at the Roma Civic Alliance of Romania. This need was furthered by Ana Ivasiuc, Research Coordinator for Agentia Impeuna, who said "we need better data on housing and infrastructure in Roma communities. Without good data we can't gage what better services are needed." While the country just completed a new Census this year with official population figures expected in May 2012, ethnicity data is not expected to be released until 2013 and the NGOs we are working with expressed little confidence that the data will better count the Roma.

What makes this especially complicated is that the lack of data can be self perpetuating. "This false data problem is a symptom - we need to make people aware that being Roma is not a bad thing," says Ana Ivasiuc. But getting over stereotypes requires good data to dispel folklore. NGOs are working to help more Roma students graduate high school - but it is hard to solve a problem when the causation of dropping out of school are based on data. For example, it is often suspected that Roma girls drop out of school because of early marriage, but this is based mostly on interviews with teachers. "The lack of data perpetuates the stereotypes" Elena added. "There is a little running around our tail in order to map the data we need to correct the data."

TechCamp ended today with the Roma NGOs sketching out plans of how they will better share data together to help fill the wider data void. The group presented their action plan to TechCamp's lead facilitator Noel Dickover and asked the State Department to help them fund a new data collection push that was all focused on open data. I look forward to see how their efforts work to improve data moving forward.

Nonprofit Mapping Showcase at Tonight's Geo DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2011-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight's Geo DC meetup will look at how nonprofits are using maps to streamline operations, coordinate with the people they serve and other practitioners, and improve their work. People from four different nonprofits - with focuses ranging from international development to reproductive health to helping lift DC families out of poverty to the global environment - will present on specific ways that they use maps in their work. Presentations will include:

Shiv Ramachandran from InterAction will show off NGO Aid Map, an online map that improves coordination betweens NGOs working in the same towns and countries.
Mark Bergel from DC-based A Wider Circle will show how they map their operations to improve their outreach efforts to collect furniture and other household donations from those who have them and deliver them to people without.
Gina Rumbolo from Population Action International will present a map of population and climate change hotspots.
Robin Kraft will talk about how the environmental thinktank World Resources Institute uses maps to communicate its data.

The meetup will start at 7:00 pm tonight (Wednesday, December 7), with presentations starting at 7:30 pm, and will be held at the upstairs bar at Stetson's.

The Geo DC group meets monthly, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. You can join the meetup group for updates.

Inter-American Development Bank Raising Awareness of Open Source and Open Data in Tourism

Development Seed — 2011-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

Eric is in Punta del Este, Uruguay for the Inter-American Development Bank MICTTing conference to discuss how open source technology and open data can improve the international tourism industry and specifically sustainable tourism. Today he presented on this with Javier de la Torre from Vizzuality, focusing on offering concrete examples of open source tools attendees can use immediately to improve their services.

Much of this presentation centered on interactive maps, which is particularly relevant to the tourism industry given the geo nature of much of its services, with both Eric and Javier showing what is possible to do with open source tools like TileMill and CartoDB. Tomorrow Eric will be on hand to walk attendees through how to use TileMill to design fast, interactive maps and further discuss how they can be used to improve tourism services.

More than just presenting together, we are excited to be working more closely with Vizzuality. Their team gets how open source and open data can change international development. We will be collaborating a lot more as we continue to push hard in this thought space.

The MICTTing conference brings together people working in tourism and technology to work together. While in the past the conference has primarily focused on proprietary tools from Microsoft, this year the Inter-American Development Bank included open source solutions as well, identifying that often they are more relevant to the needs of tourism operators around the world. To get a feel for the conference, view the full agenda and read Javier's blog post on our presentation together.

If you're are there, look for Eric to learn more about TileMill and open source mapping.

Packaging Open Data for Desarrollando América Latina

Development Seed — 2011-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

We spent several days this week preparing data for Desarrollando América Latina, a 30 hour hackathon focusing specifically on Latin America that kicks off next weekend (December 3rd and 4th). The competition spans across six countries in Latin America - Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico - which shows how much traction the open data movement is making in Latin America. I will be representing MapBox in Lima along w/ Ruben Lopez, an open data intern working with our team and the Municipality of Huamanga, Ayacucho, Peru, while Eric judges entries in Mexico City.

At the Lima hackathon, I will have a MapBox appliance with TileMill set up and available to use for anyone who wants to build maps and take advantage of its fast processing power. To make it easier for teams to make incredible maps Ruben has packaged up Peru's 2007 Census data. Part of this work involved taking a shapefile of all state, province, and district boundaries and joining each row to the state, province, and district identifiers in the Census data. With this data post processing task out of the way, teams can focus on finding interesting and valuable stories to tell with Census data for their hackathon application. For example, our hackathon team plans to incorporate Census data into maps that visualize the education quality across Peru.

Ruben and I will be at the Lima competition all weekend and available to offer tips on using TileMill to make maps with the Census and other data, as well as to talk more about open data in general. I will also be running an adhoc TileMill tutorial early on Saturday to introduce people to the open source tool, show what is possible in mapping open data, and quickly walk through how to use it for anyone wanting to develop a map-based application during the hackathon.

If you want to join us in Lima, there are more specifics on the event posted by Escuelab. To get in touch with me directly about TileMill and mapping in general at the event, message me @ianshward.

You can also download TileMill in advance, and find support and documentation on how to use it at support.mapbox.com

Vote for Mapping and the Future at DrupalCon Denver

Development Seed — 2011-11-09T20:00:00-08:00

We've submitted two sessions for DrupalCon Denver based on our work making beautiful custom maps with MapBox's toolset and fast data sites with Node.js and Javascript. Session voting is now open and anyone with a Drupal.org login can cast a vote to help shape the schedule. Voting closes at midnight on Monday, November 14 so if you'd like to see these topics covered at DrupalCon, vote now.

Here are more details on our two sessions. Follow the links for additional information on both and to cast your vote.

Designing Fast, Beautiful Maps

Alex and Eric will show how to design beautiful custom maps with any data set using open source tools from MapBox. They'll show examples of what's possible - like NPR's Census map and the World Food Programme's Horn of Africa famine map - and then dive into how to do it. By the end of the session, everyone will have seen an interactive, mobile-friendly web map made from scratch and launched on a Drupal site. Vote here.

Node.js, JavaScript, and the Future

For the past year we have been using Node.js and JavaScript to build fast data sites. Jeff will talk about what it's like to use JavaScript for everything, going in depth on node.js, its 'event loop' execution model, and async. He'll then compare it to PHP, talking about what each does well and where they're lacking. Vote here.

You can vote on the full DrupalCon Denver schedule here.

Open by Default

Development Seed — 2011-11-09T00:00:00-08:00

Tomorrow at 11:00 am I'm participating in the open data panel at the DC Week conference, along with open data specialists from the Sunlight Foundation, USAID, Maryland's state government, and Phase2 Technology. While I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion about the merits and challenges of the free exchange of data for governments, NGOs, and citizens, what's most interesting to me is the answer to this question:

What's needed for organizations to be open by default?

Two years ago Vivek Kundra, then CIO of the United States, called for an Open by Default policy urging the disclosure of all U.S. government data, excepting only data that is sensitive for privacy and security reasons. This thinking is steadily gaining ground and is already the existing policy at the World Bank. More organizations are realizing the benefits of opening up data to enable communities of problem solvers, to alert the public to important issues, to foster transparency, to streamline communication within organizations, and possibly most interesting in the current economy to cut costs involved in collecting, analyzing, and providing data.

Open data creates so much opportunity because of the low transaction cost in providing it: the internet makes it cheap to host information online. Publishing data in structured formats, free of charge, and in open licenses removes any expensive approval processes for data reuse. This enables an incredibly liberal disclosure policy (exactly the one that Kundra is calling for) allowing data providers to just put out their raw goods and still justify the cost of a long tail if only a few data sets among many generate any real benefits.

But still, as anybody in the business of publishing data will testify, the remaining costs are significant. Being deeply involved in helping clients set up open data workflows, I have experienced this pain many times myself. The everyday tools we use for managing data (Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat, shared hard drives, email, and the like) are simply not up to the job. They are too beholden to a world in which paper was the medium, copies were expensive, and requests were handled by humans. For data to be open, the common minimum requirement is to use a structured, non-proprietary format, cleanly referencable by URLs. Alas, usually this is not how data is managed internally. This practice of doing business in two different ways introduces a conversion and maintenance process for publishing that might not be expensive, but is significant and to a large extent simply unnecessary.

Not only should the policies for data be open by default, but our tools should open data by default. The software we use should not hamper openness and sharing data, it should facilitate it.

To open data in an efficient way we need to further reduce transaction costs by converging how we share data within an organization and with the outside world. Open by default has profound consequences for the data management processes and tools we set up in organizations. For future investments in information technology, two questions should be asked: "how can internal infrastructure facilitate being open?" and "how can external data services be better leveraged internally?"

I'm looking forward to talking about this, more specifically about open standards, and about how open source tools can facilitate openness tomorrow at the Open Source and Open Data panel at DC Week. Hope to see you there.

Expanding Open Data for the Horn of Africa

Development Seed — 2011-11-04T00:00:00-07:00

On Wednesday the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (GFDRR) team at the World Bank ran a full day deep dive meeting to discuss data and maps in the Horn of Africa. The meeting focused on creating better data collaborations for the regional response to the ongoing famine and continued development with a purpose of bringing together parties invested in a making data more accessible to all humanitarian actors and governments working in the region.

The larger goal of the meeting was to create longterm momentum in the open data space in the Horn of Africa. Robert Soden of the Open Disaster Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) and Stuart Gill of GFDRR Labs led the meeting, which brought together the World Bank Disaster Risk Management Team, the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), World Food Programme, Humanitarian Open Street Map Team, Google, NASA SERVIR, USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), and the Department of State Humanitarian Information Unit. Much of the discussion revolved around tools, data types and format, existing partnerships, and how all can be embedded into the region. A common theme highlighted throughout the day was the lack of data and information sharing that is happening now, and how this is a key barrier to a more effective response to the famine. Incredible results can happen when data is shared, and we want to continue to support efforts like these.

Robert Soden speaks on data collaboration in the Horn

Eric and I attended the meeting to share details about our mapping work with USAID and how we are using these publicly available maps to tell complex stories around the famine with ONE.org. We also talked about how speed matters, particularly for on the ground responders, and how open formats are required for sustainability and collaboration. Others also shared about their data work in the Horn, kicking off some initial sharing and focusing on how to better collaborate in the future.

I had the chance to share our experience of working with data in the Horn and the need for open formats

Maps in the Federal Government at Tomorrow's Geo DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2011-11-01T09:00:00-07:00

At tomorrow's Geo DC meetup, three federal geographical information officers will discuss how their agencies use maps and geodata in their work. Jerry Johnston from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Tony LaVoi from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Mike Byrne from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will all share the unique geospatial opportunities at their agencies, what they're doing, and what challenges they face in better visualizing data and utilizing maps. They'll also demo some of their latest geo-related projects.

The meetup, held at Stetson's at 16th and U streets NW, will get started at 7:00 pm, with presentations starting at 7:30 pm. There will be plenty of time to ask questions after, and to talk with the speakers and everyone else who attends. For more information and to sign up for updates, check out the group's meetup group or follow it on Twitter at @geonerdsdc.

The Geo DC meetup is held on the first Wednesday of every month and next month will feature a Nonprofit Mapping Showcase. If you'd like to volunteer to show off your work, send a message to @geonerdsdc or talk to an organizer tomorrow.

Keynote at WhereCamp Boston

Development Seed — 2011-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

Tomorrow I'm giving a keynote at WhereCamp Boston about the state of open source mapping tools and possibilities for the future of GIS. The conference, themed around 'Spatial Society, Hacking, and Connections', promises to include many of the cool things happening in the Boston geospatial scene, which meets regularly under the iSpatialBoston group.

Building MapBox has meant building a lot of open source: we host 39 projects under our GitHub organization and contribute to many more like Modest Maps. Development Seed also has BSD code on GitHub that we use to build all of our websites.

My presentation will touch upon the tools that we've made, like TileMill, those we contribute to, like Mapnik, and the places where the future is being built, like vector rendering in d3 and usage of WebGL like MapsGL.

see the presentation

See the presentation fullscreen (powered by big)

I'm also planning to lead a session on map design and demo some of the newest open-source code in our toolset, like the professional map previewer lots and UTFGrid 1.2's advanced templating support. I also just propsed a session on Javascript and would love to share some insights from developing and deploying both client and server-side Javascript applications.

It's exciting to talk about the bigger picture that we're seeing from being deep in implementation at MapBox, and I'm looking forward to hanging out with the Boston scene.

Mapping Training at Tomorrow's Drupal4Gov Event

Development Seed — 2011-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

I'll be at tomorrow's Drupal4Gov event, a hands on training event designed to get government folks playing with new open source technology, participating in a session on tools for telling complex stories with maps. I'm excited to show off some open source mapping tools from MapBox, including our map design studio TileMill and high-speed map hosting from MapBox Hosting. Mike Reich from Seabourne Consulting will join me in this session and will talk about how he took maps designed in TileMill and hosted with MapBox and integrated them into the Drupal site FCC.gov. It will be great to walk folks through the entire lifecycle--from designing a map with a custom data set, to getting it online, to seeing it live on a Drupal website.

I'll start the session by showing a few examples of how putting data on a fast, interactive map can tell a clear visual story. Specifically I'll talk about how maps made projects like Violence Against Journalists in Afghanistan and Mapping Aid and Need in the Horn of Africa successful. I'll then lead a demo that shows how MapBox tools make it possible to design custom maps with only a basic understanding of HTML/CSS and a set of geodata. We'll make a map live in the session from data stored in a tabular CSV file.

Mike will talk about how Seabourne and the FCC have been able to leverage these online mapping tools to design custom maps from large datasets and host them on the web. He'll also talk about strategies for using the MapBox API to get highly custom maps embedded into Drupal sites, and other CMS platforms. He'll take the map we make in TileMill show how he is able to integrate it into a website.

You can download TileMill for free and find documentation and support for using it at support.mapbox.com.

Innovation Lab Pakistan

Development Seed — 2011-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

I'm in Islamabad this week for Innovation Lab Pakistan, a hands on conference organized by Bytes for All Pakistan and Internews that is bringing together journalists, bloggers, civil society leaders, and developers from across Pakistan and Afghanistan to introduce them to and train them on using new technology. The idea behind the Innovation Lab is to showcase digital tools that can amplify the communications and advocacy strategies these leaders are pursuing and give them an opportunity to experiment with the tools.

Based on the pre-conference listserv traffic I saw in the last few days, the group looks to be amazing and fired up. I will focus my presentations on how to leverage maps in communication strategies. Specifically I will present on how the Afghan media advocacy group Nai leveraged the Violence Against Journalists site we launched in Kabul this summer to improve their outreach on the issue, as well as share strategies for designing custom maps in TileMill, our open source map design studio.

I'll post new maps throughout the week as we play with people's different data sets. So far Internews Pakistan is pulling together radio coverage shapefiles that we plan to use, and the New America Foundation’s Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative might let us play with some of their drone strike data as well.

To follow the event watch #InnovationLabPk on Twitter, and I'll be posting updates as well from @ericg.

TileMill Training at World Bank's WaterHackathon Today

Development Seed — 2011-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

Today Matt is down at the WaterHackathon here in Washington, DC training water and sanitation experts on how to use the open source toolset TileMill to make fast, custom online maps using data related to water. The hackathon, one of ten happening simultaneously around the world, is organized by the World Bank to bring together technology folks with water and sanitation experts to work on technical solutions to real world problems in the water field.

Matt recently helped create our set of famine maps that we created with USAID and the World Food Programme to show the extent of the famine in the Horn of Africa as well as root causes of it like drought and conflict and early indicators such as rising food prices.

Maps like these could also be used to help better address problems in the water community, perhaps by mapping communities without access to adequate sanitation or clean water against related issues such as health and school attendance. It will be interesting to hear what problems are facing the water and sanitation field and to see how better mapping of data could help them streamline operations and communications, as well as analyze what is happening on the ground.

Node.js Meetup Tonight in Washington, DC

Development Seed — 2011-10-19T00:00:00-07:00

We're excited to be hosting the November Washington, DC Node.js meetup tomorrow in our garage. The last two meetups have brought out a great group of both Node developers and the curious to talk about what they're doing in Node, why they're interested in it, and what the benefits and pitfalls are of using the server side JavaScript environment. We hope to continue these conversations tomorrow.

We'll start things off casually with beer, conversations, and ping pong at 7:00 pm and then jump into introductions and a round of lightning talks at 7:30 pm. So far, we have two interesting talks on the lineup.

Will White will talk about testing node.js web applications with expresso, an async testing framework.
Ryan Roemer will talk about Sunny.js, a multi-cloud datastore client for Node.js with read/write streams and async.js.

There's space for a couple more talks, so if you'd like to give a five minute talk on anything related to Node, come ready to talk this evening.

We'll have some Bud light, snacks, and Halloween candy to share with the group, and please bring your own drinks and treats to add to the mix. For more details, check out the event page and subscribe to receive future events relating to Node.js.

Presenting on Cartography for the Web at NACIS

Development Seed — 2011-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

I'm heading to Madison, Wisconsin this week for the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS)'s annual meeting, which kicks off tomorrow. The first day of the conference offers a series of extended sessions that will make up "Practical Cartography Day." I'll be giving a presentation on how to use open-source tools like TileMill, Carto, and Mapnik to achieve beautiful cartography for the web and mobile devices.

Attractive, effective design is a driving goal behind all of our cartography, and my presentation will detail specific techniques we use with our free and open-source cartography toolset. I'll also be talking about things to keep in mind when designing maps for the web and how to leverage interactive elements to tell deeper stories. I'll include specific case studies of approaches we've taken to rapidly design and deploy highly custom and highly interactive maps on the web and iPad, such as the Census map we made with NPR and our maps of the famine in the Horn of Africa.

If you're going to be at the conference, sit in on my presentation "Advanced Interactive Cartography for the Web" at 2:00 pm on Wednesday or find me some other time during the conference to talk about fast, beautiful maps for the web and mobiles. This will be the first NACIS conference for both me and Development Seed, and I look forward to meeting plenty of new people and learning the latest from the rest of the cartographic world.

MapBox at Fourth Annual WhereCamp PDX

Development Seed — 2011-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

I am excited to be participating in the 4th annual WhereCamp PDX event this weekend in Portland, Oregon.

WhereCamps are unconference style events that draw a diversity of people interested in creative tech around mapping and the web. We've reported in the past from WhereCamps in San Francisco and DC. This PDX event is the second longest running after San Francisco thanks to the leadership of Anselm, and Portland is a town rich with innovators in the mapping space which will surely make the event amazing.

I'll be talking about the latest developments of TileMill, our map design studio. The project is rapidly developing and unconference sessions are a great place to trade ideas and think through bold new steps. I am pleased to see that one of the organizers, Rafa Gutierrez, has already proposed a session on "TileMill show and tell". This echoes a great theme of talented TileMill users, like James Fee, leading forward thinking discussion on where mapping tools are headed.

Geo DC Meetup Tonight: Octoberfest

Development Seed — 2011-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

The October Geo DC meetup is tonight at 7:00 pm at Stetson's. There will be one 15 minute presentation on the geographical history of beer from Joy Adams, a senior researcher with the Association of American Geographers. As usual, there will be a lot of time before and after the presentation to talk with other folks interested in mapping, data visualizations, GIS, and geo over drinks.

Next month the meetup will be back to the usual format of several short presentations, looking at how maps are used in the government, to look at NGOs work across the world, and visualize Census data in fast, meaningful ways.

For more details on the Geo DC meetup check out the meetup page, and join the group to get regular updates about these and related events. Hope to see you tonight!

Mapping Educational Data at TechCamp Montevideo

Development Seed — 2011-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

The State Department's latest TechCamp - which brings together technology and civil society folks to learn from each other - is taking place now in Montevideo, and Eric is attending to talk about our mapping and data visualization tools and do several deep dives on how to use TileMill. This TechCamp is focused specifically on education, and how technology can be better utilized to drive and improve education in South America.

Yesterday, Eric gave a lightning talk on the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project data browser and the Department of Education's map of schools access to fast internet. This fired people up for several trainings on how to use TileMill to make maps with educational data. Today's focus is specifically on working with data sets people have, giving people a chance to see step by step how to take data, geo-locate it, map it, and share that map online.

Photo by Suzanne Hall.

Presenting on Data Visualizations and Interoperability at Tech@State

Development Seed — 2011-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

Today's Tech@State conference will focus entirely on data visualization, looking at examples of how data was successfully communicated and shared via compelling visualizations, tools to take data out of PDFs and get it into a more digestible format, and strategy for how to do this and get the best results. Much of our team will be there to talk about our work creating data visualizations around topics like the famine in the Horn of Africa, violence against journalists in Afghanistan, and microfinance in Africa, as well as our open source mapping tools that make it easy to create and share fast, custom maps.

We'll participate in two sessions. Eric will be on the panel discussion Visualizations for AID Transparency and Management at 1:30, where he'll discuss some strategies and examples of how data visualizations and open data can make operations more efficient. Dave will speak at the Best Practices for Visualization Interoperability session, also at 1:30, about how to use open formats and open tools to give your visualizations more reach and ensure they're accessible no matter where they're being accessed.

We're particularly excited to see some new maps shared for the first time by the State Department, including HumanRights.gov's new maps showing Anti-semitism in Europe, Internet Freedoms in the Middle East and North Africa and Criminalization of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in South Asia.

If you'd like to talk about custom map visualizations or about how you can create and host your own maps using TileMill and TileStream, look for someone from our team. Eric, Dave, Alex, AJ, Nate, and myself will all be there throughout the day and sticking around for drinks after. We'll also be at tomorrow's unconference walking through how you can make and share your own custom maps with our tools.

Telling Stories with Maps at Open Government Partnership Launch

Development Seed — 2011-09-20T00:00:00-07:00

Today Eric and Dave are at the launch of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international effort to secure commitments from governments to promote transparency, participation, and use of technology to improve government. The United States posted its plan to achieve this in the Open Government National Action Plan. We are there to talk about how to use maps to tell stories and improve the services of government. This morning Eric and Dave participated in a "How To Alley", where they demoed how to use our map design studio TileMill and map hosting service TileStream to quickly and easily make compelling maps with geo data and get them online.

They also showed how USAID is doing this with the maps they released yesterday around famine in the Horn of Africa. USAID created a series of maps on factors around the famine such as rainfall, rising food prices, and relief organizations locations to more efficiently communicate this information to decision makers, aid organizations, and the public. The agency then released the maps and the data powering them all openly so they can used by other organizations to aid relief efforts.

*Eric and Dave demoing our mapping tools at the How To Alley, photo by Alex Howard.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international effort to secure commitments from governments to promote transparency, participation, and use of technology to improve government. In addition some great technology demos and panel discussions, several heads of state spoke on behalf of transparency, including Philippines President Benigno Aquino, Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and even President Obama via live feed.

President Obama speaking via live feed on what the United States will do to improve openness and transparency in government.

For more information on what happened at the OGP launch, check out Alex Howard's live blog of the day on O'Reilly Radar.

Presenting on Fast, Beautiful Maps at FOSS4G

Development Seed — 2011-09-14T00:00:00-07:00

This week Tom, AJ, and Dane are in Denver attending FOSS4G, the annual open source mapping conference held by OSGeo. We're excited to learn from the other folks attending the conference, and we'll also be talking about the open source mapping tools we're working on with our mapping projects and MapBox's suite of mapping tools.

Today Tom will lead a session on Turning Data into Beautiful Maps, where he'll talk about the current ecosystem of open source mapping technologies and then dive into detail on the stack that we use - Mapnik for rendering, TileMill for designing, Wax as a mapping API gateway, and TileStream for map hosting. Tom will talk briefly about what each of these tools can do on their own, and then walk through how we use them together to create fast, beautiful custom maps. You can get a sneak peek of his presentation here. This session is at 11:00 am today (Wednesday, September 14) in the Silver room.

On Friday, AJ will present on Advanced Cartography for the Web where he'll introduce strategies to design beautiful, effective, and interactive maps with open source mapping tools that are accessible for designers - and not just developers. Specifically on the tool side he'll talk about how he designs maps using the CSS-like Carto styling language, TileMill, and data from OpenStreetMap. He'll also walk through the design decisions behind some maps he's recently made, including Open Streets, World Bright, and one of our headquarters here in DC. This session is on Friday, September 16 at 10:30 am in the Silver room.

Also yesterday Dane led an advanced workshop on leveraging Mapnik and TileMill for custom mapping. If you missed it, he'll post a tutorial and other materials from that online later this week.

If you're interested in learning more about any of these tools or strategies, check out these sessions, follow Tom, AJ, and Dane on twitter, and of course look for them at the conference.

Discussion Today on the Future of Open Data at the World Bank

Development Seed — 2011-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

Today at noon the World Bank's data team will lead a public discussion on what is next for open data at the World Bank, sharing their plans to open up more data - including financial and operational data - and make it more accessible via visualizations, maps, and more. You can find out how to attend and submit questions in advance over at the event listing.

This is part of the World Bank's larger push to open up their data, which they started last spring by opening up data on 2,000+ development indicators for the first time on data.worldbank.org. At the time this was one of the most aggressive shifts to open data in the international development sector, and the World Bank aims to continue to lead the way by releasing more data in smart, practical, and usable ways.

We are working with the World Bank on the strategy of how to make more data public, make the changes internally to support this, and to release the data in a usable way to the public through open formats, useful visualizations, and useful content. Today's discussion, led by Tariq Khokhar, will be interesting and give good insight to their plans and the reasoning behind the decisions.

Previewing the Speed of Mapnik 2 at State of the Map Conference

Development Seed — 2011-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

Dane previewed the performance features in the upcoming Mapnik 2 release at the State of the Map conference today. Spoiler Alert: Mapnik 2 will be released next week.

Check out the improvements in the video of Dane's talk, as well as slides - both embedded below.

Preview of Mapnik 2 @ State of the Map by Dane Springmeyer from Development Seed on Vimeo.

Designing Transit Maps with TileMill at Transit Hack Day

Development Seed — 2011-09-10T00:00:00-07:00

Today is Transit Hack Day, an event aimed to bring together transit application developers, designers, and others interested in improving how the public uses transportation. I'll be there to present on TileMill, our open source tool for designing custom maps with any data set. Specifically, I'll discuss how to use TileMill with road data from OpenStreetMap and additional transit data from sources like WMATA and local governments to make transportation maps. I'll also walk through how to make maps like this one of the DC metro made with OpenStreetMap data and shapefiles available on the DC government GIS data catalog.

Additionally I'll talk about some of the outcomes from Open Data Meetup Peru that relate to transit, and open data work we're doing in Ayacucho, Peru with OpenStreetMap and the local bus transit system.

Transit Hack Day is co-sponsored by OpenPlans and Greater Greater Washington. It's open to the public, and you can sign up for it on Eventbrite and learn more about the event on the Transit Hack Day wiki.

If you'd like to learn more about TileMill, our map hosting service TileStream, or anything else map related, come find Eric or me.

Updated: Here are my slides from the presentation.

Headed to Denver for State of the Map

Development Seed — 2011-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

This weekend I, along with Dane and Tom, will be attending State of the Map in Denver (as well as FOSS4G immediately afterwards). OpenStreetMap is an invaluable asset in our mapping toolbox, and we'll be there to share how we've been making use of it (particularly with TileMill, our custom map design studio, and TileStream, our map hosting service) and get insight from the community on improvements that could be made to our tools. On Sunday I will give a talk in the OSM Tech Talks track about our OSM Bright Template, a map stylesheet intended to provide a good starting point for creating a custom map with OSM data.

I'll discuss how we're making the template easier to understand, more efficient to modify, and faster to render by leveraging new and improved tools that weren't available when we first started working on it - such as Carto, a CSS-like map styling language, TileMill, and ImpOSM, an OSM data importer. I'll show examples of the template's flexibility and how it's been used in mapping and visualization projects.

Check out the full State of the Map schedule for more details on the conference. If you're in Denver, be sure to find Tom, Dane, and I - we'd be happy to answer all your TileMill and MapBox questions.

Presenting on Mapping the Horn of Africa at Tonight's Geo DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2011-09-07T00:00:00-07:00

Update: Slides of the presentation are embedded below.

The monthly Geo DC meetup is tonight at 7:00 pm, and I'll present on our work mapping the famine in the Horn of Africa with USAID. We've released several maps showing the extent of the famine and aid efforts happening in response to it, and are slated to release new ones today with updated data from USAID. Visualizing this data on a map makes it more consumable and usable for relief organizations working on the ground in Africa and more understandable for the general public. I'll walk through these maps and give a sneak preview of a new one we're working on that shows the number of refugees and people displaced by the famine.

Haley Van Dyck from USAID will join me to talk about how USAID is advocating for open data and what it can mean for the international community. Data transparency aids collaboration between relief workers and increases the spread of information - and that's never more crucial than in a crisis situation like this with so many lives at stake. Haley will talk about some of the higher level thinking around open data at USAID, and I'll talk specifically about the open data sets that power these maps.

The Geo DC meetup starts at 7:00 pm tonight (Wednesday, September 7) at Stetson's, with presentations starting at 7:30 pm. There are some other great talks on the lineup, with Juan Marin Otero talking about the National Broadband Map, Joanne Tu Purtsezova talking about cartographic illustration, and Eric Carr talking about Geo-Django.

There's also a a Crisis Mappers meetup happening next door at Local 16 from 6:00 to 8:00. We recommend checking that our first before coming to Geo DC to hear about this and other mapping projects and techniques.

Here are slides from my talk:

Mapnik and TileMill Workshop at FOSS4G

Development Seed — 2011-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

FOSS4G, the annual international OSGeo conference on open source mapping software, is coming up in just three weeks in Denver, CO. We'll be there talking about our mapping stack, as well as some of the open source tools that power it.

Along with Iván Sánchez Ortega, I'll run an advanced workshop on how to leverage Mapnik to build scalable mapping applications. Participants will learn how Mapnik can be used as a modular toolkit via Javascript/NodeJS and Python, how to achieve top level rendering performance with it, and how to design beautiful Carto CSS stylesheets using TileMill - an open source map design studio. Since TileMill recently added PostGIS support, I will also show how to render OpenStreetMap data in it via PostGIS.

Because the workshop machines are Windows, each participant will be equipped with a VirtualBox machine with the latest Ubuntu release with Mapnik, TileMill, PostGIS, and OpenStreetMap data running and ready to go. Download the TileMill 0.3 VM at support.mapbox.com if you'd like to play around with the exact machine we will be using. This three hour workshop will take place Tuesday, September 13 at 8:00 am, and you can find out more about it on the FOSS4G website. You must also pre-register for this and all workshops, and we recommend you do that soon before they fill up. I will also post tutorials from the workshop online and available to download after the conference.

For those attending the FOSS4G workshops, we recommend checking out two other workshops in particular. On Monday Kate Chapman, president of the U.S. Chapter of OpenStreetMap, will lead a workshop on how to contribute to disaster response and humanitarian mapping. Also on Tuesday afternoon, after our Mapnik workshop, Chris Helm of FortiusOne is leading a talk on NodeJS called There's JavaScript in your backend: Front to Back JavaScript with NodeJS that looks to be fascinating. You can find a full list of workshops here.

We'll also be leading two sessions at the FOSS4G conference. Tom will talk about how to turn data into beautiful maps, and AJ will discuss advanced cartography for the web.

Alternative Mapping on iOS at Tomorrow's iOSDevCampDC

Development Seed — 2011-08-12T00:00:00-07:00

Tomorrow I'm attending iOSDevCampDC, the third annual one day iOS conference held in Washington, DC, and will be giving a "blitz talk" on creative mapping approaches for the iPhone and iPad.

In this talk I'll share our experiences making tile-based maps for the iPad, including problems we encountered, how we solved them, and open source projects that you can use for mapping in iOS. I'll also show some example maps that we've made for the iPad, including those in the latest release of the MapBox iPad app and ones utilizing MapQuest Open's map tiles.

If you've ever used Apple's Google Maps-based MapKit and wanted more, whether for aesthetic, licensing, or source material reasons, or if you've wanted the ability to use maps offline, you'll definitely want to catch this talk. We'll make the slides available after the event too, as iOSDevCampDC looks to be a pretty crowded event.

If you're attending iOSDevCampDC and would like to talk about mapping, iPad app releases, or anything else, come find me. I'll also be tweeting from the event from @incanus77.

Demoing TileMill to International Development Practitioners

Development Seed — 2011-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

This week Eric and I are at the InterAction Forum talking to international development folks from around the world about how to tell stories with their data. Development practitioners interact with a tremendous amount of data, such as the locations of project sites, the performance of individual activities, and project operations details. With TileMill and the rest of the MapBox suite of open source tools, we're showing that development data doesn't need to be trapped in spreadsheets or databases and that better visualizing this data can make projects more efficient.

We're also showing off the new release of TileMill, which is faster than ever and can now be installed on a Mac with a single click. If you're at the InterAction Forum this week, come to the exhibit hall and say hello. We're demoing just how easy it is to use TileMill to design beautiful maps with free and open data and talking with participants about how to bring their own organizations' data to life.

TileMill at Open Data Event in Lima, Peru

Development Seed — 2011-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

Next Saturday on August 13th I’m helping organize an open data and mapping event in Lima, Peru to connect individuals interested in open data issues in Peru and create more awareness around related tools, projects, and needs. The event, organized by several people in the Open Data Peru community, will bring together developers, government leaders, policy makers, and others interested in open data to share what we’re working on, discuss how to advance Peru’s open data movement, and build out and contribute to projects in the space.

I’ll bring a TileMill Appliance (a custom quad core, multi-user, powerful TileMill server designed for geodata crunching) to the event so that we’ll be able to have several people build out maps in TileMill. The appliance can be used by any operating system, you’ll just need a web browser to access its web interface.

The one-day event will take place at Escuelab, which with their mission seems like a perfect fit for this event. The tentative schedule is below. We’ll post final details and the agenda on the event page by the end of this week.

La mañana

Café e introducción
Del e-Gobierno al Gobierno Abierto: Oportunidades y Retos - Juan Camilo, Social Media Group
Buenas Aplicaciones y Programas en el Mundo con Datos Abiertos / Públicos - Edgar Marca
Monitorio medioambiental-activista con hardware y software libre - Jeff Warren, Grassroots Mapping
OpenStreetMap Perú - Johna Rupire, OSM Peru, Saberes Nomadas
Creando Mapas Hermosas con TileMill - Ian Ward, Development Seed, MapBox
Datea.pe y Participación Ciudadania -Rodrigo Derteano
Espacio Abierto / Discusión / Discursos rápidos
Almuerzo

La tarde

En la tarde, nos enfocaremos en creando algo con datos abiertos sobre Perú, y creando nuestro propio datos abiertos.

Taller de experimentación con TileMill
Agregando datos a OpenStreetMap
Mapeo Aéreo de la base
En busqueda de datos abiertos o datos no tan abiertos del Perú

Conclusión

Parrillada, o sea BBQ!

I’ll also be tweeting from the event at @ianshward if you’d like to follow along.

Lugar

Showing Media Violence Map of Afghanistan at Tonight's DC Geo Meetup

Development Seed — 2011-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

The August DC geo meetup is tonight, August 3 at 7:00 pm at Stetson's Bar and Grill and will feature three short presentations on topics like 3D maps, building maps in Ruby, and a case study of map and data visualization.

Dave will be giving a talk on the latter, walking through a map we released last week showing violence against journalists in Afghanistan. Using data on incidents of threats, intimidation, and physical violence over the past ten years, the map shows what areas are the most dangerous for journalists and how that has changed over time.

Dave will talk about how this map, which we built with Internews, is part of a larger effort to improve media freedom in Afghanistan and the region as a whole, and the specific question we aimed to answer with it. He'll also quickly talk about how we built the map, designing it in the open source map design studio TileMill, adding interactive charts and graphs to the points on the map, and ensuring performance was great so it would stay fast in low bandwidth environments like Afghanistan. For more information on the project, check out Eric's blog post from last week and Paul's summary on PBS' Idea Lab

We're looking forward to talking with people about this work, learning more 3D maps and other mapping technologies, and catching up folks on what they're working on these days. Hope to see you there tonight! For updated on future Geo meetups, join the meetup group.

TileMill Training at Capital Camp Today

Development Seed — 2011-07-22T00:00:00-07:00

Capital Camp kicks off today, and Dave will be there leading a session on Making Beautiful Maps w/ Open Source + Open Data. Specifically he'll talk about TileMill, our open source map design studio that makes it easy to design and share custom maps online, and how to use these maps in Drupal sites.

Visualizing data in maps helps you quickly and compellingly tell the story behind your data, as you can see above in the map of excess properties owned by the Federal government in Washington, DC. New open source software makes it easier to make fast, beautiful, and entirely custom maps with your own data. In this session, Dave will talk about the strategy behind using custom maps in websites and then give a step-by-step walk through on how to take data from spreadsheet, populate it on an interactive map, design that map however you like, and get it working on a Drupal website and on mobile devices.

He'll also walk through the strategy and design process of several maps we've created using TileMill, including one of the areas hardest hit by the Japan earthquake intended to drive giving to those regions, Data.AWiderCircle.org, one showing a local nonprofits operations and constituents, and one of U.S. Census data.

This session takes place today at 1:00 pm in Session Room 307 at Capital Camp.

TileMill Introduction for NGOs in Kabul

Development Seed — 2011-07-21T00:00:00-07:00

We will be leading a two hour introduction to TileMill, our open source map design studio, here in Kabul on Monday, specifically looking at how NGOs can tell better stories with their data by visualizing it on beautiful, fast maps. The training will take place at Internews' office near Shahr-e-Naw Ansari Square from 1:30-3:30 pm, and is open to local civil society organizations and international NGOs. It will have a two part focus on:

An introduction to using TileMill to make custom maps and how and overall how to better communicate about your operations with online maps.
How to share maps with other NGOs to magnify the impact of your work and create open data efficiencies.

In addition to giving an overview of TileMill and discussing the strategy behind using maps, we will design several maps with folks at the training to give everyone a feel for how powerful the software is. The hands on portion will include a step by step walk of how to turn a spreadsheet of project data into an interactive project map for the web that will be really fast, even in Afghanistan. Bring your laptop - we will have a MapBox Appliance set up with TileMill running to let folks quickly start playing with TileMill.

Once we make our project maps, we will show how to combine these maps with other existing maps to demonstrate the efficiencies of sharing data. We will share some new maps made with Internews and some maps from our work last year around the elections with National Democratic Institute.

A bigger open data vision

This training is part of a larger effort to improve development efforts in Afghanistan by opening up data. We have partnered with Internews on an Open Data Initiative in Afghanistan to help build capacity and leverage open source tools to enable local civil society groups to analyze, map, and share data.

We are currently building a pilot application to enable media advocates to analyze data on violence against journalists (more on this next week), and we'll work with civil society organizations to promote the benefits of sharing data and hear their requirements throughout the rest of the year.

Email me (eric@developmentseed.org) for directions to the office.