Tag Archive for 'chrisosborne'

Nestoria Interview – Chris Osborne – WhereCampEU

Published by Ed on March 9, 2010 in events and interviews. Comments

Fellow Nestors!

I know lately we’ve been on an interview tear, but today we had the chance to speak with Chris Osborne – one of the lead organisers of this week’s WhereCampEU to be held here in London.

Many of you will remember Chris from past Nestoria posts – he’s the man behind the regular #geomob events, and he worked with us last year on our Where Can I Live project. Chris thus officially becomes the first Nestoria team member to move up into the lofty realms of Nestoria interviewee. (And to think I knew him back when…. ). By day he hangs his hat at ITO World, which both fights the good fight to improve public transport for all of us and creates mindblowingly cool data visualisations.

WhereCampEU is sure to be a great event, showcasing the cutting edge of what’s happening in the European online geography space. We’re very pleased that Nestoria is a sponsor (along with geo upstarts like the Ordnance Survey, Google, Bing and Yahoo! amongst many other forward looking oranisations). We’ll hopefully be announcing a little geo-innovation of our own before the event (watch this space). We look forward to meeting any Nestoria blog readers at the event. Please say hello!.

Chris, thanks very much for making the time to chat with us.

1. You are organising the first WhereCamp in Europe. Can you explain what a WhereCamp is and what made you want to organise one?

I went to my first WhereCamp last year in Silicon Valley, right after the Where2.0 conference (editor’s note: Chris was kind enough to guest post a summary of Where2.0 with us last summer), and loved the participative nature of the event. Its an unstructured conference, or unconference as the kids say, with a blank timetable that the attendees create themselves by running sessions or doing a lightning talk. As the name implies, its all about geography, place and location technology. As something of a geography geek, I had so much fun that I just had to organise the first WhereCamp in the EU.

2. Who do you expect will attend the event?

I’ve worked hard to attract a wide cross section of attendees, a quick glance at the ticket list shows over 13 different countries represented from diverse backgrounds – government, web2.0 startups, National Mapping Agencies, OpenStreetMap people, academics, bloggers and your good selves at Nestoria.

3. You say you are passionate about “neogeography”. What is neogeography and what’s so exciting about it?

Neogeography is about community map-making, people generated maps where we remove the separation of the map maker from the map consumer. I’m really excited about the opportunities for an enhanced democracy that comes from people having more knowledge about their environment and being able to participate in decision making. At ITO World, we work on visualising complex transport networks so that communities can view how planning decisions will affect them. In my local community, Clapton, residents have already rejected one new housing development this month partly due to a lack of transport planning.

4. What’s the most exciting development in internet technology in the past few years to you?

Right now, I’m mostly interested in how people are interacting with technology. I have been focused on technology for too long now and am taking a step back and looking at user interaction. I think the touch screen is actually what is going to drive more and more IT/internet usage as it provides a natural interface that we haven’t seen before. The greatest trick Apple ever pulled was convincing people that the iPhone wasn’t a computer but a mobile phone. I expect to see much more embedded, touch-screen computing devices in all manner of places we haven’t seen before.

What’s something that you’re still waiting for, an app, service etc. that you’d like to see in the future?

WhereOnEarthIsMyBus.com

Thanks Chris for the chat, and also for organising the event. We’re looking forward to it!

On a final note: For anyone who needs a reminder of the current age of online cartography awesomeness that we live in, check this sweetness out (made with OSM data, free and open geodata FTW!)

past Nestoria interviews: Kevin Burke, Nick Turner-Samuels, and Josh Devins.

Where2.0 Recap

Published by Ed on May 30, 2009 in events. Comments

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Chris Osborne of #Geomob fame, who last week attended Where2.0, the leading global neogeo conference.

Fellow Nestofari,

As the passing geo-hobo at Nestoria, I was duly dispatched with a shiny dollar to cover the geo-fest that is Where2.0. For those not in the know, Where2.0 is all about the ge-o. Or maps. On computers.

Mapping is a big deal for us, we’ll be presenting again at this year’s State Of The Map conference in Amsterdam, and you may have noticed that all our listings are, yes, on a map! Unfortunately, we weren’t presenting at Where2.0 this year but that gave me more time to soak up the geo-goodness, ruthlessly self-promote and blag as much free food and drink as a geo-hobo can.

As always at these events, there is one act that steals the show, and this year it was a last-minute addition to the lineup. Ludwig from C3 Technologies had been wowing the people in the corridors with incredible 3D models of cities. Not only do they look realistic, but they are automatically generated, utilising technology from missiles. With just a few hours left to go on the final day, C3 were given a slot and took the crowd’s breath away:

Michal Migurski, of map design gurus Stamen, always has something interesting to say and gave not one, but two great presentations. First a crash-course in building your own custom rendered maps with Cascadenik, not for the faint-hearted but a great way of earning your geo-stripes. And ‘Flea Market Mapping‘, an intriguing presentation about using some old school paper maps in thought provoking ways.

Our old chums Yahoo! launced their exciting new PlaceMaker product to universal acclaim. Its a little difficult to do it justice in a small blog article so I thoroughly recommend you watch the video below. Essentially, its a way to find location information about any kind of content; throw some news articles at it and it will tell you where they are written about. For the more techy of you, that means you can get geographic metadata, and WOEID, from structured and unstructured data and start to do some very interesting things with it. Importantly, its contributing to the open data geoweb that is currently evolving.

Speaking of open data, we also had OpenStreetMap’s Steve Coast telling us all about ‘Ubiquitous Geocontext‘. Or, in the future everything will know where everything else is and act accordingly. It was a refreshing change from some of the talks, focusing on the possibilities for the future. A far fetched, but thought provoking view of the geo-tastic future that awaits.

In sum, innovation in the online geography sector is alive and well!

Chris blogs regularly at cloudsourced and is @osbornec on Twitter. The next #Geomob event takes place on June 30th in central London.