The Extraordinaries

Volunteer Mapping

Thanks to Christine Egger for pointing the way to this video from the CloudMade guys describing openmapping volutneering. This really cool part at left shows a time lapse of volunteer mapping parties with mobile phones and GPS transmitters spreading out across the city, generating valuabe data the whole way. 

A couple of weekends ago, we tasked the Stanford Hackathon guys with building out a GPS ping function for The Extraordinaries app - and now it's in there... and we're very excited about using The Extras for open source mapping. See this post about Route Tracking. Here's how I described the potential of open mapping to a friend the other day:

The most committed of urban-geeks can tag and rate their city as they move through it. Come to a dangerous intersection? Tag it with "danger" and take a photo. Or record yourself talking about why the intersection is dangerous. Create a living narrative of the city. This approach is reminiscent of Christian Nold's work - but requires no special gear. 

Go further and cover the buildings, sites, and sounds of your city. Tag, rate, photograph, record audio. Create urban folksonomy. Turn it into the best damn tour guide system in the world... heads and shoulders above the likes of Frommers:

* Give me a walking tour of 3 miles or less that focuses on architecture.

* Give me an architecture tour narrated by architects only

* Give me an architecture tour narrated by by artists

* What is this building? 

* Show me the 10 happiest places in the city

* What does this street look like at night? 

* Am I safe here? 

* Show me the best taquerias

So, clearly, we're outside the domain of The Extraordinaries, which would serve only as a data gathering mechanism... but the potential for an iPhone app in this domain is extraordinary. Does anyone know of any existing apps? What's out there and what's in development? 

Here's the cloudmade video: 

and a hot visualization of one year of open mapupdates:

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

thanks to Michel Bauwens for the post.

Route Tracking

We're working on enabling GPS route tracking in our app... a superb way to donate your spare time to generate valuable data sets. Imagine this:

Crowdsource Your Ped/Bike Route

As you begin your commute to work (via ped or bike), you launch The Extraordinaries on your phone and press "Track Route." Every 20 seconds, your GPS coordinates are sent to the server. At the end of your commute, you press Stop. You then tag & rate your route for a variety of factors: safety, scenic-ness, physical difficultly, your mood on this route. 

So, now we've got the holy grail for GIS-geeks: data. We can see route heatmaps, average commute time, safe routes, dangerous routes, hilly routes, fun routes, miserable routes, desire lines. You can put this data in the hands of the geeks and see what they come up with.

We can imagine a whole array of (non-Extraordinary) uses for this data either online or on another iphone app:

* Show me a scenic route that is safe

* Show me a physically challenging route that makes people happy

* Show me how to get downtown via a highly rated walking route

* Give me a hilly 60 mile cycling loop from the Golden Gate Bridge.

* Give me a flat 40 mile route from from my house that passes the beach

* Show me how to commute to work in the fewest minutes by ped or bike

* Shake the phone and show me a random new fun route

To close the feedback loop with the Extraordinary user, maybe we can display a bumper page that shows how many routes have been submitted along with a summary of the user's commute data - such as average time, time leave every morning, etc - interesting data to make the user feel like they're doing good for their city - and also getting some valuable personal information. Maybe we can list all of the other apps that have been created with the data that they've contributed to. Or we can suggest alternate routes submitted by other users who live nearby.

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Since coming up with this idea, we've found a couple of orgs creating similar apps. I'll use this post to list those I find. If you know of any, please post a comment.

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UC Berkeley & Nokia

"Cars at the Mobile Century command center in Union City head out on their 10-mile driving route on I-880. The drivers, all UC Berkeley students, carried GPS-enabled cell phones that transmitted speed and position information to researchers at the command center, creating a nearly real-time picture of traffic flow. 

There is currently no projected date for commercial launch of such a system, but when it does become available, its benefits could be huge. In the United States alone, traffic congestion leads to 4.2 billion hours in extra travel time and an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel burned, for a total cost of $78 billion, according to a 2007 report from the Texas Transportation Institute. With the number of vehicles on the road increasing rapidly around the world, a cost-effective method of travel planning could help drivers make smarter decisions about which routes to take, the researchers say.

Today's experiment was supported by a $186,000 grant from Caltrans. Additional support came from the National Science Foundation, Nokia, Tekes, the University of California Transportation Center and the Volvo Center of Excellence for Future Urban Transport at UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, which is also home to CCIT."

http://www.physorg.com/news121845452.html

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