A couple of months ago I gave a talk at the monthly OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver and I decided to try crowdsourcing the content (in the best OpenStreetMap tradition), and it worked out very well. I received a good amount of interesting content from several folks (thanks everyone!). I rashly agreed to do a keynote at the upcoming State of the Map conference in Denver (rashly since I'm chairing the FOSS4G conference right after that, and am more than a little busy with that, not to mention my day job :O !!). So I thought I would do the same thing again and appeal for ideas on things I should include in a tour of what's new and cool in OpenStreetMap.
You can send me links to stories, slides if you have them, or anything else that you think would be useful. If you did a presentation on something cool and interesting at SotM EU but can't make it to Denver, I'd be happy to mention it over here. And even if you are presenting something over here, I'm happy to include a slide or two as a "trailer" for your talk. Of course I can't promise to include everything, depending on how much material I end up with (and I do have some of my own of course!), but will do my best.
In general I'm interested in hearing about things that you think are (reasonably) new and interesting in the OpenStreetMap world including:
Cool applications using OpenStreetMap data
New (or improved) tools for creating / editing OpenStreetMap data
Examples of businesses or government organizations using OpenStreetMap
Anything else you think is interesting!
Please just drop me an email, or comment below. I will give credit to all contributors, of course!
As mentioned previously, I'll be speaking at tomorrow's OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver tomorrow, at the cool new MapQuest offices downtown. My attempt to crowdsource the presentation got a great response, and I got lots of suggestions for interesting content. I plan to have something for everyone, along the following lines:
A quick intro to OpenStreetMap for any newcomers
Some tips on using the Potlatch 2 map editor, which provides some cool new features - this should be good for both newcomers and experienced mappers
Examples of how government agencies from various parts of the world are using OpenStreetMap
Cool new tools for developers using OpenStreetMap, like Leaflet and Kothic
Some interesting applications using OpenStreetMap
Last but not least, how OpenStreetMap was used to show that you can in fact walk across Dublin without passing a pub (pubs have always been a mainstay of OpenStreetMap!)
We'll also have some discussion about the state of OpenStreetMap in Denver and Colorado, and brainstorm on things that we might want to focus on before State of the Map and FOSS4G are in Denver in September! You can get full details on the meetup and sign up here.
I'm doing a couple of upcoming presentations on OpenStreetMap, the first one next week at the very cool MapQuest office in downtown Denver, so I encourage you to come along to that if you're in the neighborhood ... and this may well evolve into a presentation for State of the Map in Denver too!
So in the best OpenStreetMap tradition I thought I'd try a little crowdsourcing to help me pull this together. I'd be interested if you could send me links (or other info) about things that you think are (reasonably) new and interesting in the OpenStreetMap world including:
Cool applications using OpenStreetMap data
New (or improved) tools for creating / editing OpenStreetMap data
Examples of businesses or government organizations using OpenStreetMap
Anything else you think is interesting!
Please just drop me an email, or comment below. In fact if anyone has presentation slides covering interesting stuff that would be relevant, those would be great too. Happy to give credit to all contributors, of course!
As mentioned previously, earlier in the week myself, Brian Timoney and Chris Helm did a set of presentations and demos on geospatial technology in the cloud, to the Boulder Denver Geospatial Technologists group. We were aiming to give a quick taste of a variety of interesting geo-things currently happening in the cloud, and we did it as six slots of about ten minutes each, and apart from my introductory opening slot these were all demos:
Peter: Why the cloud?
Brian: Google Fusion Tables
Chris: the OpenGeo stack on Amazon (PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, etc)
Peter: Ubisense myWorld and Arc2Earth
Chris: GeoCommons
Peter: OpenStreetMap
We got a lot of good feedback on the session. Here's the video (for best quality click through to vimeo and watch in HD):
Just a quick post to say that I'll be speaking at the Boulder-Denver geospatial technologists meeting tomorrow, together with Chris Helm and Brian Timoney (and maybe Andrei Taraschuk, though he's doubtful because of other commitments). We'll be doing a pretty informal set of demos and discussions on geospatial in the cloud. Examples we'll cover will include Google Fusion Tables, GeoCommons, the OpenGeo stack (PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers) running on Amazon, and Arc2Earth Cloud and Ubisense myWorld running on Google App Engine. It's at the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks Building at 6pm tomorrow, Jan 25.
As a few people have remarked to me recently, I haven't posted anything in a while ... have been otherwise occupied the past few months, between some interesting new work projects and some personal things. But I have quite a few talks coming up, and next week will be launching an exciting new product at the Smallworld User Conference in Baltimore, which is what I've been focused on the past few months, and I'll be blogging about a lot of interesting things relating to that in the near future.
So here's a list of upcoming events:
I'll be talking on "Smallworld and Google: the best of both worlds" at the Smallworld conference, on Friday September 10 (there's a clue about in the title of the talk :) !!)
The latest version of my "Geospatial Revolution" talk has a double outing the following week, with keynotes at the NSGIC conference in Minneapolis on Monday September 13, and at GIS in the Rockies in Loveland, CO on Wednesday September 15
Sneaking in between the previous two on September 14 is the second Ignite Spatial NoCo (Northern Colorado), in Windsor, CO, where the title of my talk is "Don't make me think", after the excellent book of the same name by Steve Krug, which is all about usability, something I've been working on a lot recently. I guess that's kind of a busy stretch, with four presentations at four events in four consecutive working days, plus a product launch right before that :O !! There's a good lineup of speakers for the Ignite event, with Brian Timoney, David Cole, Kate Chapman, Matt Ball and Mano Marks among those I know.
The week after that it's off to the UK for the Ubisense User Conference, where I'll be talking about Ubisense applications on September 22
I plan to stay on in the UK for the one day W3G (un)conference in Stratford upon Avon - it being an unconference there's not a formal agenda, but I hope to do a slightly expanded version of the "Don't make me think" talk there, if they'll have me
And for the benefit of our Danish readers, I'll be doing a keynote at the Geoforum.dk Kortdage in Århus on November 1-3 ... my mother is from Denmark so it's always nice to have an opportunity for a visit there.
In other news, Denver has been selected to host FOSS4G in 2011, the annual OSGeo conference which is being held this year in Barcelona, next week in fact. Congratulations to my friend Eric Wolf for leading the Denver bid, and I'll be one of the local committee supporting him in the organization of that.
I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends at the Smallworld conference next week, which will be the first I've been to since 2004, as I've been off roaming around other parts of the geo universe. Talking of which, I'd better get back to writing some code! Not to mention writing a presentation or two :O.
Last night I presented at Ignite Spatial NoCo (Northern Colorado) in Fort Collins. There was a great turnout of 200 people and some excellent 5 minute presentations (plus a few that I thought were a bit too much "corporate sales presentations" for an Ignite event). There was a fun map competition, in which teams had to create a relief map of Colorado using an assort of supplied materials like cardboard, egg cartons, cloth, cotton wool, pasta, etc - I was impressed at what everyone came up with! Congratulations to Brian Sullivan for organizing a great event. And thanks to Glenn Letham for videoing the presentations.
You can see my presentation below, which was on "Location and the Internet of Things". The Ignite format allows you 20 slides which advance every 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes - it's quite tricky to get the timing right. I will try to post with a few tips on doing Ignite presentations soon, this was my third go at this format.
Update: Glenn has now posted a better quality video of the presentation on youtube (original ustream video included below too, just in case):
And here is the ustream version as a backup (clicking the small play icon at the bottom of the window below seems to work better for me than the large play icon in the middle, an eccentricity of ustream :) !)
I recently came across a nice flickr search tool called ViewFinder (for Mac), which makes it very easy to search flickr for photos with appropriate Creative Commons licenses, and then download a suitably sized version and insert it into a Keynote presentation. There's a way to copy attribution information too, though that's not done automatically with the "insert Keynote slide" function - hopefully they will provide an option to do that in a future update. But even as it is, it will save me a lot of time putting together presentations with lots of photos.
So if you're into Presentation Zen style and use a Mac, I recommend you check it out. And if you're not into Presentation Zen, you should be - read this :) ...
I talk at quite a few conferences, as regular readers will know, and have been experimenting with videoing some of my presentations for a little while now. I thought I would share some of my experience on techniques I've tried and how they've worked.
Basic Approaches
Of course a basic option is just to take a single digital video that includes the speaker and/or the slides. Options include setting this up yourself by putting a camera on a small tripod, or even a table, or getting someone else in the audience to do the filming. You can get reasonable results doing this - certainly better than not seeing the presentation at all! A recent example of this approach was my "cowboy georant" at AGI GeoCommunity.
That was just taken on a cheap Flip video camera and it gives a good idea of the presentation - but it misses out quite a bit too. You don't get to see most of the carefully crafted slides :) (though maybe the cowboy hat was more interesting in this case!). One way to enhance a basic video like this is to upload files to SlideShare, and then imbed the video and slides next to each other, like this.
One other scenario where it makes sense to use a simple approach like this is when doing live streaming. Dave Bouwman and Brian Noyle have done a good job in live streaming presentations from various events for geogeektv (some older recordings here). This is very easy to do - all you need is a webcam (an external one is probably most flexible in this scenario), and a free membership of one of various online streaming services like ustream. Most of these services have the ability to both stream live and record for later viewing.
Using ScreenFlow
But with just a little effort you can combine videos of the presenter and the slides so you get a good view of both. The software I use to do this is called ScreenFlow, which runs on Mac only. It can record everything happening on your screen (from basic slides to video and software demos), and also gives you the option to concurrently record video from an internal or external webcam on your computer. ScreenFlow gives you nice capabilities to position the two (or more) video streams within your final output. I have used this on quite a few occasions with my built in webcam and a "picture in picture" style. The following is an example of this:
This approach works pretty well. If you watch for a few minutes you will see that the small window showing me talking can be easily moved around the screen, to avoid overlapping with significant items on a slide. This adds a bit of work to run through the presentation file in ScreenFlow and move the video window as needed depending on the current slide, though it's straightforward to do this. If you designed your slides appropriately with this approach in mind, you could potentially avoid (or at least minimize) the need to move the video window ... though I have to confess I haven't been organized enough to do that yet! But this definitely works well and doesn't need any equipment other than a laptop with a webcam.
A couple of minor drawbacks with this approach include the fact that using the built in webcam gives a slightly odd angle looking up at the presenter, especially if you are tall as I am, and the video window showing the presenter is rather small. I recently bought a new HD video camera (a Lumix GH1), and decided to try a different approach for my recent presentation in Duluth. I set up the video camera on a separate tripod focused on the presentation podium. I could have recorded the slides while I presented (which would have been easiest), but actually I recorded them separately in ScreenFlow after the fact (following along with the video to get the timing right). This is a useful option to have if you don't record the slides at the time for some reason, but you have a video of the presenter.
Having the video of me presenting in a wide screen HD format (1280x720 pixels) gave me the idea of putting the slides and presenter video side by side as in the following (click through to see it in a larger format, including the HD version):
ScreenFlow has this nice ability to rotate the videos in a 3D space, which makes them slightly narrower without losing any content, as well as giving an interesting perspective effect. Putting the slide video on top crops out one side of the presenter video (which is just static background) and the other side is cropped by the edge of the overall frame. Overall I really like this layout - it gives you a clearer view of the presenter, from a better angle than using the webcam, and you can also see the whole of all the slides. One other nice little graphical touch I added is to include a 50% reflection below both videos - another cool feature of ScreenFlow. I can provide more specific details on putting this together if anyone needs that.
Specific tips on using ScreenFlow
Make sure you have plenty of spare disk space - ScreenFlow stores video in high quality for the full screen resolution and the webcam, so a raw file can easily take up a few gigabytes (once you output the final presentation video it will be compressed and a lot smaller). Once I didn't have a lot of spare disk space on my laptop, and got into a long discussion after the presentation without turning recording off, then the disk filled up and I lost the whole recording (enhancement request to the ScreenFlow folks ... it would be great if you could recognize an impending full disk and stop recording cleanly before crashing!)
These days when presenting I usually use "presenter mode" where I can see speaker notes and other information such as elapsed time and the next slide on my laptop screen, while the projector displays just the current slide - both Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint have this feature. It's especially useful if you're using more of a "presentation zen" style where you have simple pictures on most slides and do away with bullet point lists (which I highly recommend!). Anyway, if you do that you need to make sure that ScreenFlow is recording what is happening on the external display rather than the built in display. It defaults to using the internal display so this is easy to miss, especially in the heat of the moment when you're just about to start presenting. An added complication is that if you don't get to plug in your laptop until immediately before the presentation, you can't select the external display until the last minute (once you are connected to the projector) - which increases the chance of messing up this step. I have done at least a couple of presentations where I accidentally recorded the presenter screen instead of the audience screen. That's not the end of the world as you can re-record the slides after the fact, but that takes extra time of course. So another enhancement request for the ScreenFlow folks is to either default to recording the external screen (or have a preference to specify this), or at least give a warning when starting recording if there are two screens connected.
I have mainly used the internal microphone on my Mac for recording, and that has generally worked pretty well, but on some occasions the sound has been a little quieter than I would like. So it is worth considering an external microphone - one that I have used is the Snowflake, which worked well for my presentation in Perth but unfortunately I left it on the floor afterwards and someone stepped on it :(!
Publishing your video
YouTube has an annoying 10 minute limit which makes it inconvenient for traditional conference presentation formats. I like to use vimeo, which doesn't have this limit and also handles high definition videos nicely (though youtube has upgraded its support in that area recently). Vimeo also gives you the option of letting users download the original video file, if you want to. I now have a geospatial presentation channel on vimeo.
How does this impact conferences?
Kirk Kuykendall commented on my recent video post and wondered how this type of video recording may impact conferences - is there a risk of reducing conference attendance? There might be a slight risk of that, but overall I think it is probably more likely to have the opposite effect and encourage people to attend. A lot of the value of attending conferences is in meeting people, and in the informal (or formal) discussions that happen there. Conferences like Where 2.0 already video their presentations and put them online. TED is another example of a conference that puts all its presentations online, but still charges $4500 for conference attendance and sells out. But hopefully it will help conference organizers focus on providing a good all round experience for attendees.
It also presents a similar dilemma for speakers like myself who talk at a number of conferences. Obviously you sometimes re-use some material, so publishing online increases the risk that some attendees have seen parts of your presentation before. But again I feel the benefits outweigh the risks - you get an additional audience for your presentation, it may encourage some additional people to come and see you speak live, and it also gives you an incentive you to keep refreshing your material!
Here is a video of my recent keynote talk at the Minnesota GIS/LIS conference in Duluth, which was an excellent event. There were about 500 people there, which is great in the current economic climate. It was mainly a "traditional GIS" audience, and I got a lot of good feedback on the talk which was nice.
I talk about current trends in the industry in three main areas: moving to the mainstream (at last!); a real time, multimedia view of the world; and crowdsourcing. There's a lot of the same material that I presented in my talk with the same title at AGI GeoCommunity (which doesn't have an online video), but this one also has additional content (~50 minutes versus 30 minutes).
Click through to vimeo for a larger video, and if you click on "HD" you will get the full high definition version!! I used a different approach to produce this video compared to previous presentation videos, using a separate camera and a different layout for combining the slides and video. I like the way this came out - I'll do a separate blog post soon with some tips on how to video presentations, I think.
Just a quick post to say that I will be doing the opening keynote talk next week (Thursday October 22nd) at the 19th annual Minnesota GIS/LIS conference, in Duluth. It should be a fun and interesting event, so if you're up in that part of the world I encourage you to stop by!
I'm very much looking forward to the AGI GeoCommunity conference which is coming up in Stratford upon Avon in a couple of weeks. Apart from Stratford being the birthplace of Shakespeare and a great place to visit, it's also very close to Leamington Spa where I used to live when I worked at IBM UK many years ago, so it will be a chance for me to catch up with old friends. It will also be the first time I've presented at a major UK conference since moving to the US 16 years ago, so I'm looking forward to talking in my homeland!
More importantly, from a general rather than a personal perspective it looks as though it will be a really interesting and fun event. I think Steven Feldman has done a great job introducing some new ideas this year, including the addition of a strong neogeography/geoweb element which really hasn't been there in previous years (see Ed Parsons' thoughts on this year and last). There will be a really strong geoweb track organized by Chris Osborne, founder of #geomob. And Andrew Turner and myself are giving the opening keynote talks - I know that mine will include a strong "neo" element, and since Andrew's is titled "How neogeography killed GIS", I'm guessing that his just might too :). I think that some of the most interesting conferences I've been to recently have been those that combine both traditional GIS and "neogeo" elements - like GeoWeb in Vancouver and, on a smaller scale, the WhereCamp5280 event we held recently in Denver. So I'm hoping that we'll get a lot of interesting discussion about how to combine the old and new geo worlds. Chris is also offering discounted day passes on his blog, in case you need any further incentive to attend!
There is going to be a "soapbox" event with lightning "Ignite" style talks on contentious topics, with a beer-fueled crowd, which sounds like a lot of fun. To get in the spirit of things I have submitted a talk called "The grass is always greener ... in defence of the Ordnance Survey" (for those not familiar with the UK national mapping agency, they tend to be a favorite punchbag for everyone in the UK geo industry ...)
So I'm slightly concerned that my talk may look like the famous "Rawhide" scene from the Blues Brothers - I hope they have the wire fence in place to protect the speakers :) !!
The conference party has a "black and white" theme and I think I have a prize-winning outfit lined up for that (actually I'm not sure if there are prizes or not, but I may try to wangle a bottle of Lagavulin out of Mr Feldman).
So all in all I'm looking forward to what should be a really fun and interesting event ... I guess I'd better get working on wrapping those presentations up!
Here is the second (of two) short video presentations on what the Smart Grid is, at a high level. This follows on from my previous one on why we need a Smart Grid - you should watch that one before watching this one.
In future installments I'll talk more about some of the IT challenges in making the Smart Grid happen, the impact of geospatial technology / GIS on the Smart Grid and vice versa.
Here's a video of my GeoWeb presentation on "Building a new location-aware infrastructure for calendaring and scheduling". Recorded and edited using ScreenFlow.
I'll post more thoughts on GeoWeb soon - in the mean time you can check out my tweets and the geoweb stream on twitter. And there are some pics of the social event here.
A video of my presentation at the recent OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference is now online at Vimeo. There's also a copy of the slides at SlideShare. I talk about the four major business models that have been tried in regard to creating geodata, and how they are all handicapped by the very high costs involved when you use the traditional approach which involves paying the people who create the data. And I discuss how crowdsourcing completely changes things by reducing this labor cost to zero. From everything I saw at State of the Map, I am convinced that use of crowdsourcing in general, and OpenStreetMap in particular, is going to massively grow over the next couple of years.
Other videos are being posted online at the sotm09 channel on Vimeo - I recommend you take a look. There are lots of great presentations, but one that I guarantee will make you smile is this 5 minute one on Mapping of Historical Sites in Japan - check it out :).
Here's the (5 minute) video of my presentation last week at the Ignite Where event, part of the Where 2.0 conference. It was a great week - will be posting lots more on my impressions over the next couple of days.
Here's a video of my recent keynote address at the WALIS CIO Forum in Perth, on "The Geospatial Technology Revolution" - it covers a wide range of thoughts on recent and future developments in the geospatial industry. It's an hour long but most of you will save a lot of travel time by not having had to fly to Perth :) !!
This was produced using ScreenFlow incidentally, which I think is a brilliant piece of software (as I have mentioned before).
