The Cicero team welcomes 2012 with a new face and a new engine.  We’ve just launched a new Cicero website (www.azavea.com/cicero).  Additionally we are in the process of developing a Cicero REST API to allow for more integration flexibility (Cicero is currently a SOAP-based API), building an online batch stamping tool, and have just released a vital and timely data set.  We’ll talk about the new API in a future newsletter, but I’ll focus on the new data set here.

Following every decennial census, each state goes through the process of redrawing their legislative district boundaries at the congressional and state levels.  As many of you know, we’ve done a significant amount of research and software development related to making the process of drawing and analyzing new legislative districts easily accessible by anyone (e.g. DistrictBuilder, Redistricting The Nation, “Redrawing the Map on Redistricting” whitepaper, etc.).

We’ve also had to consider the significant impact redistricted boundaries will have on our Cicero users.  Many organizations need to match their members or contacts to legislative districts in advance of organizing a call-to-action campaign or lobbying effort on behalf of their organization.  Many Cicero users expressed a desire to match their address databases to both the boundaries currently in place and those that will take effect in the new legislative sessions.

Because our team is continuously accessing legislative boundary and elected official data  we are  in a great position to quickly serve up this data, and are now able to support both:

• Legislative boundaries currently in use – This includes the district boundaries released after the 2000 Census that are still in effect.  As state elections take place and inaugurations occur (Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia elections used new boundaries in November), we will incorporate those boundaries that have gone through the final approval process by the state and will be in effect following the elections.
• Legislative boundary plans that have been officially approved but will not take effect until the next election - This data set will not provide complete coverage of the United States until all states have completed the redistricting process.  New states will be added as we receive and process the data. 

If you have any questions about any of the Cicero team’s recent developments, please feel free to contact Project Manager, Abby Fretz at afretz@azavea.com or via phone at 215.701.7503.

I’ve never been to Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia, or Budapest, or Ostava in The Czech Republic.  I’ve never even been to Roswell, New Mexico either, but if I did go there and was involved in an accident, I would know exactly how to find the nearest emergency medical facility, thanks to a new free iPhone app we built and just launched.

We worked with the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation (BREF) to build the Emergency Medical Center Locator – a free app for your iPhone.  It makes it easy to access the nearest Trauma, or Pediatric care center (or Cardiac, or Eye, or Burn, or Stroke, etc.) while at home or abroad.  Having that information easily available not only allows for extra peace of mind, but it can mean the difference between life and death.  Indeed, those first few minutes and hours after a trauma can significantly impact chances of survival.

Applications like the Emergency Medical Center Locator that are simple, focused and data-driven are significant equalizers when it comes to making information accessible.  However, this data can change on an ongoing basis.  We built the app in a way that would allow us to update the data as it changes.   The app communicates with a set of database services in order to retrieve the latest information for you medical centers around your location.  If you have your iPhone and a data connection, you can just download the app from the Apple Store, here.

Early November, Philadelphia welcomed one of the most anticipated events of the year: TEDx Philly.

TEDx events are independently organized TED events.  They are held all over the globe and bring together some of the most thought-provoking speakers from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

On November 8, TEDx Philly brought to its stage engaging speakers, performers and artists who explored The City, as this year’s theme.  Through their talks and performances,  600 audience members were challenged to question and examine some of the greatest challenges, innovations and realities that shape our cities — most importantly, our city.

The day-long event was organized in four sessions: Engage, Transform, Converge, Reveal.   While all speakers and performers were truly engaging, a few stuck with me. Jeffery Brenner, a physician in Camden, NJ, painted a devastating picture of the U.S. healthcare system, but told us about his hopeful efforts to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of care in his city.  Keya Dannenbaum, founder of ElectNext, reminded us that voting to get our interests properly represented does not have to be a guessing game.  Spoken-Word poets from the Philly Youth Poetry Movement made us laugh out loud with their wits and word-plays, while demonstrating that education, critical-thinking skills, and self-esteem don’t only happen in the classroom.  Our friend and colleague Amy Hillier, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, explored how our geographic location affects the quality of our health, especially in terms of obesity issues.  Janet Echelman’s magnificent  fishing net urban sculptures made us dream while she and Susan Weiler, partner at the Philly-based landscape architecture firm OLIN, discussed a ground-breaking project that will re-shape the current unwelcoming Dilworth Plaza into a more inviting and artistically playful environment.

Throughout, TEDx Philly was a resounding success.  We were glad to attend, but most importantly, we were proud to have our own Abby Fretz and Tamara Manik-Perlman as part of the volunteer organizers, along with Roz Duffy and former Azavean Reed Lauber!

Why would a GIS software development company attend a forestry conference?  For the last year and a half, we’ve actually been thinking a lot about trees – how to count them, where to plant them, how they impact the environment, and how to get communities enthusiastic about them.

It all started in 2010 when we won a USDA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant to build OpenTreeMap, an open source software platform for collaborative, geography-enabled urban tree inventory.  This fall, we were fortunate to win a Phase II SBIR grant from the USDA to expand OpenTreeMap.  At about the same time, we also learned we had been awarded a Phase I grant to research and create new web-based tools for prioritizing tree planting locations and modeling tree growth and impact over time.

All this tree work made us want to learn more about the urban forestry community and the Partners in Community Forestry conference, organized by the Arbor Day Foundation, is one of the best places to meet “tree people” from across the country. With our partners from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and Strategic Nature, we gave a presentation at the conference on PhillyTreeMap.org (one of our implementations of OpenTreeMap) and our plans for future development of the site.  We also staffed a booth in the exhibit hall where we talked with attendees about OpenTreeMap.org and how it’s being used around the country.  We heard some great feedback about how we can improve the software and were very excited to learn about organizations interested in downloading the code and trying OpenTreeMap themselves.

We came back from the conference with many ideas for our future urban forestry efforts.  Over the next few months, we will be finishing our tree modeling and prioritization work and diving into the next phase of OpenTreeMap with specific focus on creating mobile and tablet versions, adding in more gaming and social networking elements, and building APIs for more efficient transfer of data in and out of the system.  Trees and software to help plant, grow and maintain them seems, dare I say, to have really taken root at Azavea.

To see OpenTreeMap in action, visit PhillyTreeMap.org, UrbanForestMap.org, and GreenprintMaps.org.

Fifteen non-profits nominated over two dozen data sets that they felt should be made available to the public.  While we hoped people would visit the OpenDataRace contest page and vote for the data they wanted more widely available, we weren’t quite sure how much of a response we would get.  As PlanPhilly put it, that’s a “powerfully nerdy” type of contest.  Would anyone actually vote in a contest about data?

Turns out we didn’t need to worry.  Throughout October, over 2,400 new users registered on OpenDataPhilly and cast their votes for a particular data set.  The voting for first, second, and third places was particularly fierce as the top three vote-getters earned a small cash prize for the non-profits who nominated them.  Email pleas were sent, impassioned tweets and blog entries were posted, and in a close finish, three data sets emerged as the most desired data in the City of Philadelphia.

First Place: National Student Clearinghouse Data, nominated by The Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Second Place: Reported Bike Thefts, nominated by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia

Third Place: Vacant Land Data, jointly nominated by Conservation Pennsylvania/Young Involved Philadelphia/Penn Future’s Next Great City

While the voting phase may be over, the OpenDataRace effort is just beginning.  The OpenDataPhilly team will now begin the process of advocating for the release of the data sets.  We also hope to organize hack-a-thons in February 2012 that will encourage software developers and others to take any newly released data and create amazing apps or data visualizations.

For a full list of the OpenDataRace voting results, visit OpenDataPhilly.org.

Thank you for joining us in the race for open data!

We Contain Multitudes  is the name and parallel computing of the game over at the DecisionTree team.  Erik, Tamara, and Josh like to get in the zone by listening to Steve Reich’s concurrent yet carefully orchestrated Music for 18 Musicians.  ”Welcome to a parallel world!” this team says about Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 film Alice, a free adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  Marvel’s Doctor Strange wields occult powers of magic that make him “more powerful by far than any of your fellow humanoids,” an apt analog to this intrepid team as they wield their own brand of multi-threaded geoprocessing magic more mighty than any single CPU.

The Trending Gentlemen – Jeremy, Bennet, David Middlecamp, and Kenny - are in charge at the Law Enforcement and HunchLab team.  Their crime analysis technologies are watching “Every Breath You (criminals) Take” and solve “Murder by Numbers,” making the Police’s A-side and B-Side of the same names logical musical selections.  We might not sell an accompanying full bodysuit with each implementation of HunchLab, but officers won’t need one like that found in Paul Verhoven’s 1987 RoboCop  when they have the power of real-time statistical hunches on their side.  First time users might equate such hunches with the superpower of precognition, but don’t worry, this team doesn’t actually generate them with by sitting in the swimming pool like you saw in Minority Report.

The Cool Kids in the Marketing team – Rachel, Amy, Abby, Jeremy, and Andrew T (yours truly) – have adopted the Bangles’ “Manic Monday” as our anthem as we frenetically write, tweet, strategize, and promote our products.  Christopher Guest’s 2000 Best In Show - consisting of mostly improvised dialogue – is an allusion to our awe-inspiring presentations at tradeshows.  And, like Wonder Woman, our writing and speaking practice gives us the power of omni-linguism, including French, Spanish, and the powerful “Developerese!”

Abby, Dana, Andrew J, Joe, and Daniel at the DistrictBuilder and Cicero team spend their day writing software that keeps the balance of political power stable, hence Van Halen’s Balance describes them.  Johnny Cash may Walk the Line (2005), but so does this team as they help draw fairer legislative district lines.  A politician’s gerrymandering schemes are no match for this team’s Shapeshifting powers that rival the likes of Mister Sinister and Mystique.

Last but not least, Brian and Mike are Scanners!  David Cronenberg’s 1981 film Scanners and its soundtrack match the extreme psychic superpowers this design duo has at creating eye-popping graphics and websites.

OSGeo Code Sprint
Bainbridge Island, WA – Feb 5-9, 2012
David Zwarg and David Middlecamp will be working on PostGIS.

2012 ESRI Worldwide Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit
Palm Springs, CA – March 24-27, 2012
Robert Cheetham is attending.

To encourage further access to data, the OpenDataPhilly team recently announced a new contest we are supporting in partnership with NPower PA, Technically Philly, the William Penn Foundation, and the City of Philadelphia. Called the OpenDataRace, the contest encourages local groups and the public to become involved in advocating for the release of open data while also supporting non-profit organizations and their work to improve the Philadelphia region.

In September, non-profit groups nominated Philadelphia-focused datasets that, if publicly available, would help support their organizational missions. The general public is now invited to vote for the dataset they would most like to see made publicly accessible. The three datasets that receive the most votes will earn cash prizes for the non-profits that nominated them and the OpenDataPhilly partners will lobby the City of Philadelphia for the release of the data. We also hope to organize hack-a-thons in January and February 2012 to encourage developers in the area to build applications using the newly released data.

How can you join the OpenDataRace? Visit the contest page on OpenDataPhilly, vote for a dataset, and spread the word about the contest. Do your part to help local non-profit organizations access data (and a little bit of cash) they need!

Voting will remain open until October 27.

In 2009, the Furman Center began work on a new dataset focused on tracking information on the status of the hundreds of thousands of publicly subsidized housing units in New York City that were nearing the end of their subsidy terms.  These units are considered a crucial source of housing for low and moderate income families, and many are at risk of being converted into market rate housing.    Identifying  properties that participate in the varied subsidy programs, along with a lack of information on their history, finances and physical condition makes it difficult to develop policies that could preserve their affordability.   Along with their partners, the Furman Center has begun consolidating that information in their Subsidized Housing Information Project (SHIP), and hope to make it accessible to the public and to public agencies interested in housing affordability.

The Furman Center asked Azavea to develop a new online Data Search Tool that would combine this new housing affordability data with their existing neighborhood data, and show  individual or grouped housing units against broader geographic neighborhood indicators about the housing market, land use and demographic data. This new site acts as an analytical tool to help researchers track trends, and create customized maps, tables and data extracts based on very detailed queries and filters.

The application splits apart the two datasets, SHIP and Neighborhood Information, into separate query interfaces.  This lets users query each data set individually, merging the results of both queries  into a single map for analysis.  The query interface itself is entirely dynamic — it can be changed on the fly to include new search fields, re-prioritize popular search options or even  allow role-based authorization to search on specific attributes.  Queries on the SHIP database, based on location and subsidy participation generates markers on the map, and populates a customizable table view on the housing units that match the filter.  Queries on the Neighborhood Information database for unemployment rates by sub-borough area from 1990 to 2008, generate a chloropleth map where a user can cycle through the years to observe  employment trends over time, geographically, and the number and types of affordable housing available in that area.

The application also enables a user to generate aggregated counts of properties by multiple attributes.  For example, to see how housing subsidies will change over the next 40 years, a user can filter the SHIP data for units whose subsidies will expire between 2010 and 2050.  By choosing to aggregate on Overall Affordability End Date and Borough, a table is generated showing the counts of properties and housing units that expire within that time frame, by year and borough .

To develop this application, Azavea used two popular open source geospatial tools: OpenLayers, a cross-browser javascript library to access and display geospatial data on the web, and GeoServer, a map server that we used to generate choropleth map images of the Neighborhood Information data.  The application also makes use of the jQuery javascript libraries to provide a seamless experience while browsing the data and updating the map.  The application is available at http://datasearch.furmancenter.org/.

Fix Philly Districts was a collaborative effort between several local organizations:  WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com, Penn Project for Civic Engagement and Azavea..  While the DistrictBuilder software had previously been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, this Philadelphia implementation was the first time it was being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

The competition ran for only a few weeks in August, but we were overwhelmed by the degree of engagement by the public.  We had participants from all over the United States, and almost 500 people registered to use the application.  More than 1,200 plans were started, and more than 70 complete plans were submitted to the leaderboards.  The final competition garnered submissions from 31 teams or individuals.  Representatives from each of the partners reviewed the submissions and selected several winners.

Did we have an impact?

This wasn’t a typical Azavea project: there was no funding to support it; all of the partners did the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.  Was it worth it?  Did we have an impact?

Our ultimate goal would be to see the rules changed so that redistricting is taken out of City Council’s hands – I strongly believe that an independent process is the only way to ensure a fair and transparent process that reflects the public’s interests, rather than legislators’ interests. But we were not so naive as to believe that was going to happen because of our contest.  Did we change the way that Council acted or change the outcome of the redistricting process?  I think we did.  In addition to pressuring council into scheduling three public hearings, they delivered a plan that was an improvement over the current one.  But we did more than just place public pressure on council to be somewhat more responsible.  We successfully demonstrated that, given some online tools, there are hundreds of people that are sufficiently interested in the redistricting process to commit hours of their time to drawing their own districts plans.  And they did that in the middle of August, during a hurricane, several storms, an earthquake and anxiety about the Phillies.

The public process represented by the Fix Philly Districts contest demonstrates that many members of the public want to be engaged in a civic dialogue, both with their elected representatives and with each other.  They will work hard to do so.  And our democracy can be better for it.

Azavea was proud to be a sponsor for three events over the past few weeks. THATCamp Philly was a local version of the annual digital humanities conference.  FOSS4G was the annual open source geospatial event, whose global peregrinations landed it in Denver this year.  Apps4SEPTA is a local hack-a-thon (to be held Oct 8 and 9) aimed at creating apps that use data feeds from SEPTA, the Philadelphia regional transit agency.  Each of these events represents a spirit of open collaboration between members of a community, and those are values we want to cultivate and support.  Through our Sajara product and other projects, Azavea has been working with the digital humanities community for several years, and THATCamps are a way to make a contribution as well as learn from the regional humanities community.  We are also both a consumer and contributor to several opens source geospatial projects, including OpenLayers and PostGIS, as well as our own DistrictBuilder and OpenTreeMap projects.  FOSS4G is the vibrant annual gathering of people that share similar objectives.  It has usually been held overseas, but the event in Denver was a great chance for several of our staff to engage with and learn from this community.  And, since many of our staff use public transit, we share the love-hate relationship that many people have with their local transit agency, but we love the fact that SEPTA is making its data available through open APIs and want to do everything we can to support this.

Now in its 66th year, the Leadership in History Awards from AASLH are awarded annually for projects that demonstrate excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history.

Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood or your house looked like 50 or 70 years go?  The photographs and maps on PhillyHistory.org enable you to discover more about the history of Philadelphia and its many neighborhoods and communities.  Take a stroll down memory lane at: http://www.phillyhistory.org/

Read about our favorite teachers »

Joe Tricarico joined Azavea in August as a Software Developer Intern working on the Cicero team. He is currently pursuing his Bachelors of Science degree in Environmental Planning and Design at Rutgers University.

Before joining Azavea, Joe worked for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority at the Middlesex County Office of Planning.  There, he performed GIS analysis and wrote portions of the Route 9 Corridor sub- regional study.  He has also helped develop a data feed for Middlesex County Area Transit that can now be used by several online transit trip planners.  As a student, Joe has also become interested in urban design, sustainable energy, and enabling the public to participate more fully in the planning process.

Over the past year, Joe has helped build with Habitat for Humanity in Warren County, NJ, and hopes to continue serving the community after moving to Philadelphia.  In his free time, he enjoys traveling around the country, hosting strangers from out-of-town, and paddling or biking along the river.

International Association of Chiefs of Police
Chicago, IL – October 22-26
Jeremy Heffner and Dana Bauer attending.

Business of Software Conference
Boston, MA – October 24-26
Robert Cheetham attending.

CCAHA Exploring Maps
Philadelphia, PA – November 2-3
Deb Boyer will be attending.

Partners in Community Forestry
Lake Buena Vista, FL – November 15-17
Deb Boyer and Carissa Brittain attending and presenting OpenTreeMap.

American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting
Washington, DC – November 15-19
Jeremy Heffner will be part of a panel presentation with Joel Caplan and Les Kennedy from Rutgers on the subject of high performance geo-processing for Risk Terrain Modeling.

IACO Fall Conference
Chicago, IL – November 21-23
Robert Cheetham and Abby Fretz attending and exhibiting our DistrictBuilder product.

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it – all of the partners are doing the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.

So, why get involved?  In 2006, using our Cicero database of global legislative districts, Azavea released the results of an internal research project on legislative district compactness in the form of a Gerrymandering White Paper.  In 2010 we released a revised version of the research, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and the 2011 redistricting process.  Both studies revealed that Azavea’s home town, Philadelphia, has some of the most contorted local council districts in the United States.  We want to leverage the DistrictBuilder software we’ve been creating over the past year (in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project) to make a contribution toward changing this poor showing.

In Philadelphia, the redistricting process is controlled by City Council.  We believe that the best government is one in which citizens are engaged in the democratic process, and drawing the lines that determine how our representatives will be elected is a critical part of this process.  We have created FixPhillyDistricts.com to both enable the public to learn about redistricting and to encourage public engagement in the process.  The effort is also meant to demonstrate that an open, public process based upon objective criteria can produce fair, legal council districts in Philadelphia.

How can you help?  Take a few minutes to visit FixPhillyDistricts.com.  From there you can do two things: 1) you can create an account and draw a Philadelphia City Council district plan (even if you don’t live in Philadelphia); and  2) using the social media buttons available on the site, help the Fix Philly Districts partners tell other civic-minded organizations, researchers, and members of the public that web-based, collaborative and public redistricting is a reality that can be implemented in other cities, counties, and states.  Together, we can redraw the map on redistricting.

Key Dates for Fix Philly Districts Competition

• Wednesday, August 3, 2011 – Competition Opened
• Thursday, August 11, 2011, 6:30pm (tonight) – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
• Monday, August 15, 2011, 6:30pm – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
• Sunday, August 28, 2011, 11:59pm – Competition Ends
• Early September (TBD) – Winners Announced

More about DistrictBuilder
DistrictBuilder – the software that powers the Fix Philly Districts site — was developed in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project.  It is open source, which means that the software is transparent and available to anyone to build their own redistricting web site.  Azavea folks are also available should you be interested in an online redistricting project in your area.  In collaboration with the Public Mapping Project, we will be continuing to add new features and capabilities over the next several months.

While this proved to be an effective method, the criteria used in generating the Priority Areas was static and only suited to examine a particular aspect of what makes communities flourish.  Instead, what if the disparate sources of demographic, economic and social service data were brought together in such a way that anyone could create their own priority areas based on the factors of their own choosing?  Neighborhoods could be analyzed by service organizations to see where the highest needs for their services were required, and as the data is updated, the same tool could be used to determine the effectiveness of the services provided.  Similarly for determining potential business and economic investments, real estate decisions and municipal services: if the data is available and tools for analysis provided, the power to identify and direct the future wellbeing of Toronto’s neighborhoods is opened to a wider audience, increasing awareness and promoting greater civic participation.  It was therefore vital to develop a common fact base over time that could be used for place-based decision-making across all service perspectives.  It was also determined that this “fact base”, include all neighborhoods across the City ofToronto, and not just the 13 priority areas.

Drawing on our experience developing data visualization and decision making tools such as our Kaleidocade Indicators Framework and DecisionTree products, Azavea was hired by the City of Toronto to develop a web based mapping and measurement tool to help gauge wellbeing amongst Toronto’s neighborhoods.  The result, Wellbeing Toronto, combines a list of over 150 (and growing) indicators of wellbeing and the corresponding data for each of the city’s 140 neighborhoods.  The datasets are grouped into 10 categories including Demographics, Health, Safety, Transportation and Environment.  Users are able to select up to 20 indicators, and the website generates a thematic map showing how strongly the set of indicators is represented in each neighborhood.  The selected indicators can be further weighted so that the values of certain indicators are more heavily represented in the map.  In addition to the map analysis, the application also produces tabular data showing the exact values of each selected indicator for each neighborhood.  Charts and graphs showing the distribution of an indicator set and statistical information on each indicator are available as well.  For further analysis, a variety of geographic reference points, such as day care centers, police stations, public transit locations – from up to seven categories – can be overlaid on the thematic map.

All geographic data is accessed through the City of Toronto’s ESRI ArcGIS Server infrastructure.  The website itself is built using the latest open source JavaScript technologies, including jQuery and the OpenLayers web mapping framework.  Several components in the OpenLayers project that allow it to operate with ESRI’s ArcGIS products were developed and contributed by Azavea.  The back-end application supports the web app with a REST API developed with Java, and several open source GIS toolkits, Java Topology Suite and GeoTools.

The application was launched to much excitement in early July, and received a considerable amount of television and newspaper press.  There were nearly 18,000 unique visitors on its initial launch day alone, making it the most popular page on the toronto.ca domain for the day.  The application is also a triumph for the City of Toronto in its commitment to Open Data policies, as well as fostering a comprehensive understanding of neighborhood wellness across a broad range of perspectives.  Instead of fearing the exposure that comes with transparency, the Wellbeing Toronto application proves that putting the data and the tools in the hands of the public can engage people in their own communities to evaluate and assess the wellbeing of the neighborhoods in which they live, work and play.

Important Links:

Main page: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/
Tutorial: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/tutorial.htm
FAQ: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/faq.htm
Description: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/about.htm

A good example of driving decisions with data is how police departments have leveraged crime data to better police our communities to improve public safety.  Most police agencies examine historic crime data to determine where and when crime hot-spots are occurring and then deploy their resources to react to the changing environment.    Departments are beginning to go beyond looking at simply the dots on the map to also determining what is occurring that is unusual, as well as modeling crime to forecast risk in the coming days and weeks.    It is impossible to address an emerging crime problem without first identifying that something unusual is occurring, and with departments producing ever more volumes of data, law enforcement agencies need tools to automatically sift through datasets to produce synthesized information upon which they can act.   Ideally, this information can also be shared with the public to further accelerate its impact on fighting crime.

The MetroPulse site and app are an initiative of the Regional Indicators Project, created in partnership by CMAP and The Chicago Community Trust. Like many urban areas (including Azavea’s hometown of Philadelphia), Chicago is changing rapidly, and the goal of the MetroPulse app is to facilitate informed and effective decision-making by providing citizens and other stakeholders with ready access to current data about issues that shape the livability of communities.

People can take advantage of their device’s location services to retrieve a selection of indicators—Arts and Culture, Demographics, Economy, Environment, Property, Safety—for their current location, or can select a location from a list.  Alternately, they can compare values for a single indicator across multiple locations—counties, municipalities or Chicago Community Areas— and view the results in a table or graph.

As an app developed natively for iOS in Objective-C, MetroPulse represents one key aspect of Azavea’s mobile development work.  We recently released the PhillyHistory Augmented Reality (AR) application for both iOS and Android by employing wrappers around the Layar framework, and other teams and individuals have been experimenting with PhoneGap and HTML5-based apps.  There are many ways to do mobile application development, and Azavea is committed to exploring all of the options and employing the solution that is most appropriate for a given project.

The title is a seemingly innocuous question at first – what purpose do our desks have but to be a repository for our current projects and their supporting materials? Paper clips, envelopes, contracts, notes, magazines and other paraphernalia all pile up depending on what we’re working on that day. Look a bit closer at many desks though, including many of the 20-odd ones dotting the Azavea office (plus our two remote “Davids” off in Boston and Minneapolis), and you can find much more peculiar personal decorations, objects, knick-knacks, and “tchochkies”, each with their own story. We spend 40 hours a week or more at our desks, and after a while they accumulate bits of ourselves and become reflections of our personalities.

Here are the trinkets decorating some of the desks of Azavea HQ:

Amy received her Associates of Science degree in Business Administration & Marketing from Peirce College this year, and is currently pursuing her Bachelors of Science degree at Peirce as well.  Before coming to Azavea, she was an Executive and Marketing Assistant at a GPS fleet tracking company.

Outside of Azavea, Amy likes to attend sporting events in South Philadelphia where she lives.  She also enjoys trips to the beach and walking around exploring the Old City and Rittenhouse areas in downtown Philly.

Adam Hinz joins Azavea as a software developer on the DecisionTree and Sajara teams.  He has over 7 years of programming experience programming applications from Rails apps to enterprise Java.  He graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Before joining the team at Azavea, Adam worked at the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit designing enterprise-level project management software, as well as working on new interfaces for the iPhone and iPad.

When you can tear him away from his computer, you can find this Wisconsin native skiing in the Poconos in the winter and running down the Schuylkill trails.  He also loves living down in Center City and the amazing food scene.

FOSS4G – Free and Open Source Software 4 Geospatial
Denver, CO – September 12-17
Justin Walgran, Matt McFarland, and David Zwarg  attending and will be talking about our open source solutions DistrictBuilder and OpenTreeMap. Azavea is also a sponsor of FOSS4G.

International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA)
Hyannis, MA – September 19-23
Jeremy Heffner presenting HunchLab and load forecasting.

Crime Mapping Research Conference: Crime, Social Ills, and Place-Based Solutions
Miami, FL – October 19-21
Jeremy Heffner presenting our risk forecasting research and HunchLab.

International Association of Chiefs of Police
Chicago, IL – October 22-26
Jeremy Heffner and other Azaveans attending.

Partners in Community Forestry
Lake Buena Vista, FL – November 15-17
Deb Boyer and Carissa Brittain attending and presenting OpenTreeMap.

American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting
Washington, DC – November 15-19
Jeremy Heffner will be part of a panel presentation with Joel Caplan and Les Kennedy from Rutgers on the subject of high performance geoprocessing for Risk Terrain Modeling.

The US Census Bureau began releasing demographic profiles and reapportionment data for each state in March and we are excited to see both state-wide and municipal/county implementations of District Builder are popping up across the country.  In some cases, District Builder is being used to support an open, public competition to draw fair and legally compliant legislative maps.  In other cases it is being used by redistricting authorities to publish their proposed plans and provide the public with easy-to-use tools to modify and recommend alternative plans.  Even as some states and cities are implementing District Builder, we continue developing and releasing new features that support the wide range of legal requirements in the United States and around the world.

So, where and how is District Builder being used?

Virginia College and University Legislative Redistricting Competition:
The Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University and the Public Mapping Project sponsored the competition to “help educate students and the public about the process of redistricting.”  55 valid plans were submitted by fifteen student teams.  A total of $13,500 was awarded to 12 winning submissions of Congressional, State Senate, and State House plans.

The Arizona Competitive Districts Coalition’s (ACDC) “Redistrict Arizona” Competition:
ACDC, a “non-partisan coalition of 501(c)3 non-profit organizations and individuals working to promote competitive districts during the 2011 Arizona redistricting process”, launched their competition to the general public at the beginning of May.  Arizona citizens have been encouraged to create new district maps on their own or attend a series of ‘map-a-thon’ days around the state.  Plan submissions are due on June 22nd.  On July 6th ACDC will announce the winners and present the winning maps to Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.

Contra Costa County, California
The 2011 Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors Redistricting Commission is committed to an open and transparent redistricting process. The Commission is hosting community workshops throughout the County, providing all maps and data on-line and supporting an ability for citizens to create redistricting plans on-line.  They launched CCC District Builder on May 2nd.  On June 28 the Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing to consider redistricting map proposals for County Supervisorial districts based on the 2010 Census and input from citizens.

Midwest Democracy Network
The Midwest Democracy Network member organizations have partnered with the Public Mapping Project to provide District Builder implementations in five state – Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.  The implementations are part of their Midwest Campaign for Accountable Redistricting and the “Draw The Line Midwest”  campaign.

What’s Next for District Builder?
Each state’s redistricting schedule is different and though a few states, counties and municipalities have completed their redistricting process, many others are just beginning.  District Builder is a new kind of software, designed for an open process, citizen engagement and public participation in this important part of our democratic process.  If you have questions about District Builder or are interested in a demo, contact Abby Fretz at afretz@azavea.com or 215-701-7503.

More on District Builder:

• Implementing District Builder: http://www.redistrictingthenation.com/services.aspx
• District Builder on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/publicmapping/
• The Public Mapping Project: http://www.publicmapping.org/
• Azavea’s Political and Elections Projects:  http://www.azavea.com/services/political-tools-and-services/

This is pretty cool, and we are totally excited, but this isn’t just a listing in a magazine – there is a way for you to get involved as well! Businessweek is asking readers to pick their favorite choice.  So if you like what we do and what we stand for, let them know.  You can cast your vote on slide #27.  No login is necessary.  Your vote is just one click away.  Thank you!

The Wilma Theater marketing gap analysis

When we think of marketing, we might think of the colorful and playful Target commercials, or the humorous ones from Progressive Insurance,  or even the tear-jerking ones from Hallmark.   Attracting new patrons, cultivating existing ones, diversifying audiences and programing certainly sound different from selling car insurance, but let’s not be fooled. It takes savvy individuals to get patrons through the doors of arts and culture institutions!

Arts organizations (and non-profits in general) are turning to GIS for the same reasons commercial organizations do – to better understand the geographic distribution and demographic composition of their current support bases and compare them with the total market potential for their programming or services.  What are some of the questions they’re asking?

• What is the geographic extent of our current patron/ member base and how far are our services reaching?
• What are the communities that match our patron base’s demographic characteristics that we are not targeting? (Read The Wilma Theater marketing gap analysis).
• What are our constituents’ demographic characteristics and how do they compare with regional demographics?
• How far do our patrons have to travel to reach us?  What are the most time-efficient routes?  What are some of the venues along the way that we could make deals with or sell ad placements to, like restaurants or cafes?
• What is the correlation between the demographics of patrons from show/ exhibit A and from show/ exhibit B, and how do their geographic distributions compare?
• In what legislative districts do our patrons live?

L.A. Stage Alliance arts census market penetration analysis performed for TRG Arts

Clearly, these questions do not pertain to arts and culture institutions only.  Spatial analyses can foster decision-making processes and reveal trends and issues, as well as provide stronger cases for support.  Our team of GIS Analysts, Tamara Manik-Perlman, Dana Bauer — and joining them in June, Daniel McGlone — have worked on multiple spatial analysis projects for a range of different nonprofit organizations including: Common Cause NY, the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, Germantown Friends School, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Sustainable Business Network, among many others.

What are your geographic questions? Let us know. We can probably help you find the answers.

Drew Griffin of CNN and his crew paid us a visit to interview Robert Cheetham, Abby Fretz and our development team about our work on redistricting and District Builder, the open source web-based redistricting application we built in collaboration with George Mason University’s Public Mapping Project.

That same week, we participated in several events organized by Technically Philly as part of Philly Tech Week. Tamara Manik-Perlman was our ambassador for the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org, a first-of-a-kind catalog of Philly-centric datasets, while Deb Boyer announced the rollout of PhillyTreeMap, a citizen-driven application for the inventory of Philadelphia’s urban forest based on the OpenTreeMap framework.  Tamara was interviewed by WHYY‘s Shai Ben-Yaacov and the project received accolades from NewsWorks.

Meanwhile, intrigued by our use of Animoto, an easy-to-use video slideshow product, the company contacted Jeremy Heffner to understand how we had been using their software for our marketing purposes, which ended up as a “Business Spotlight” on their website.

And in May, Technically Philly was in our office to interview Deb, Robert and Tamara after the publication of our white paper on  “Implementing Mobile Augmented reality Technology for Viewing Historic Images” (download here at the bottom of the page).

How do we keep track of everything that’s happening in the office, you might ask?  Jeremy and Brian Jacobs have been experimenting with an internal company dashboard that lists our company’s metrics as varied as web traffic on all of our web domains, our tweets, blogs and google alerts, conference room schedules. Most recently, we’ve even beta tested their map widget with our CiceroAPI‘s calls. Very handy to visualize where Cicero’s users are the most active nationwide!

Scala was created in 2001 by Martin Odersky.  Odersky wrote the modern Java compiler — Java is an extremely widely used programming language in the enterprise, especially popular because of the way it enforces “type safety” and the correctness of a programmer’s program.  While Java was designed to be state of the art in 1995 and to help programmers solve the problems they were facing at the time, when he began the work on Scala, Odersky wanted to take a few steps back and think about what kind of language could help programmers tackle the new types of challenges they were beginning to face: for example, high-level domain modeling, rapid development and concurrent programming.  With these goals in mind, he built Scala on the JVM, which means that organizations could use existing software libraries written in Java.  Now, Scala is being used to solve those problems, and has a quickly growing user base with some significant adopters who have needed its power, most visibly including companies like Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, the Guardian, Novell, and companies in the UK and US financial services.

One of his core intentions when creating Scala was to make programmers happy — by making their work easier and more productive.  It’s very concise and eliminates the boilerplate code that you see in languages like Java and C#.  This means that programmers can focus on the logic of their problems — it’s like when you can think of the perfect phrase or metaphor that exactly captures the problem.  Some languages feel very heavyweight and verbose, but they offer safety assurances and  the high performance that you need.  While Scala has all of the same safety assurances and performance characteristics, it feels like a lightweight and elegant “dynamic” language.

Here’s a simple example, comparing Scala to Java.  Say we want to create a dictionary where we can use the English word for a number to find the actual number.  For example, we could use the word “one” to look up the word 1.  For numbers 1 to 3, this would look like the following in Java:


Map numberMap = new HashMap(); numberMap.put("one", 1);
numberMap.put("two", 2);
numberMap.put("three", 3);


In Scala, it looks like this:

var numberMap = Map("one" -> 1, "two" -> 2, "three" -> 3)


Scala is also very expressive, as it combines two different programming paradigms: object-oriented programming and functional programming.  While I can’t fully explain the two paradigms here, let me just say that most programming these days is in the object-oriented paradigm, but functional programming is having a powerful resurgence.  In functional programming, you “compose” your program with functions — the basic idea is that you are building something complex with simpler parts, and everything is the same kind of thing (technically, everything is an expression or function).  But these parts need to be entirely self contained (they can’t have side effects).

The name “Scala” itself is a combination of the words “scalable” and “language”, because Scala is a language that’s designed to be extensible — it’s a language that can grow and change as the needs of programmers change.  And one reflection of this is the support for the Actor Model that the developers baked in to the language that simplifies the developer of parallel and distributed programs.  Another advantage of this flexibility is that when other developers weren’t satisfied with the implementation of the “Actor Model” in Scala, they just wrote their own and other folks could use it as if it was baked into the language from the start.  This started the “Akka” project, which has now joined together with the core Scala team in a company called Typesafe, to provide  enterprise support and tooling for Scala and Akka.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Scala and why we chose it, but it’s worth mentioning that it is a very practical language.   We can use a wide selection of GIS libraries available in Java.  And Scala gives us enough control to optimize our code to run extremely fast.  (See Erik’s technical blog about his R&D work on high performance Scala.)

If you’re a programmer and want to check out Scala, I highly recommend checking out the Scala website and the Typesafe website and the Typesafe blog.  If you’re especially interested in concurrent programming with Scala and Akka, I recommend the Typesafe ‘getting started’ tutorial which will walk you through putting together a parallel implementation of an algorithm to compute the digits of Pi.

Michael Tedeschi joined Azavea in May as a Web and Graphic Designer after graduating with honors from the University of the Arts with a bachelor’s in Graphic Design.  He works with the marketing team to create promotional collateral for conferences, and advertising, as well as the software development teams to design, implement, and enhance user interfaces for our projects and client applications.

He previously worked with Night Kitchen Interactive on digital projects for cultural and educational institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Art and Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.  In addition, he works as a freelance designer on projects for local and national organizations, including the National Association of Federal Credit Unions and Rope-a-Dope, a Philadelphia-based music and culture organization.

A fan of everything design, Mike is always exploring new ways to grow as a designer.  In his spare time, he spends many sleepless nights on personal design projects, enjoying a good meal (with a great beer), and learning new technology.

Andrew Thompson also joined Azavea in May as a Marketing Intern.  He works with the marketing and business development teams by writing website copy, blog entries and other marketing materials, as well as helping out with whatever else needs to get done.  A native of Massachusetts, in past summers he worked as a software testing intern for Axeda Corporation, where he performed user interface accessibility testing on Axeda’s internet applications.

Andrew is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College in Growth and Structure of Cities, with a minor in Computer Science.  At Haverford, he has worked as reporter, editor, and webmaster for his college newspaper, The Bi-College News, where he deftly tackled every systems administrator’s nightmare: a sudden and irrecoverable failure of the newspaper’s main server.

Outside of Azavea, you might find Andrew writing for fun, working with his beloved newspaper and college computing club, exploring Philadelphia (or any other city close at hand), fantasizing about travel, or virtually experiencing it through ham radio.

Daniel McGlone joined Azavea at the beginning of June as a GIS Analyst Intern.  He works with both the spatial analysis and the Cicero teams, supporting cartography and analysis projects as well as Cicero research and data entry.

Daniel graduated from Harrisburg University with a bachelor’s in GIS last year, and is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Urban Spatial Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Particularly interested in transportation planning, for his graduate research Daniel  is looking into demographic and economic changes near public transit stations in the Philadelphia area.

Before coming to Azavea, he was a GIS intern at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, where he scooped up as many transit related tasks as possible and participated in the DVRPC’s Regional Student Forum.

In his free time you can find Daniel boasting and bragging about Philadelphia, biking the Schuylkill River Trail, exploring the city’s up-and-coming neighborhoods, or absorbing city life at Rittenhouse Square.

2011 Esri International User Conference
San Diego, CA – July 11-15
Robert Cheetham presenting OpenDataPhilly at the Sunday news workshop and HunchLab‘s Risk Forecasting; Tamara presenting OMB Watch Equity Mapping; and Dana Bauer presenting PhillyStormwater.org

Scalathon – International Scala Hackathon
Philadelphia, PA – July 16-17
Erik Osheim and Josh Marcus showing off their Scala statistical hacking skills.

Association of Public Safety Communications Officials Conference
Philadelphia, PA – August 7-10
Jeremy Heffner attending.

FOSS4G – Free and Open Source Software For Geospatial
Denver, CO – September 12-16
Jeff Adams, Justin Walgran, Matt McFarland, and David Zwarg attending.

International Association of Crime Analysts Training Conference
Hyannis, MA – September 19-23
Jeremy Heffner presenting HunchLab’s Risk Forecasting.

I’m excited to announce that we will be rolling out a new open data portal for the Philadelphia region, OpenDataPhilly.org on April 25.  Open data and government transparency have been increasingly visible concerns over the past few years.  Almost 10 years ago, the City of Philadelphia made its GIS data available to the public at no charge, and, at the time, was one of the first and largest municipalities in the world to do so.  That data has been available on PASDA, the spatial data clearinghouse for Pennsylvania, ever since.

In the past few years, many municipal governments have been making a public and concerted effort to improve the transparency of their government operations by releasing significant and useful data sets.  Washington DC deserves credit for playing a leadership role in this respect.  DC was arguably the first major city to not only release downloadable data sets but create real-time streams of data from operational databases.  Today the District provides access to 475 datasets from multiple agencies and in a variety of formats, CSV, RSS, KML, XML and shapefiles.  In May 2009, the federal government launched Data.gov with just 47 data sets.  Today there are 380,000 data sets (of which more than 376,000 are geospatial). Many other cities have followed suit. A few of them include:

• London
• New York City
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Toronto
• Washington DC

But Philadelphia isn’t in that list.  While the City was an early and unsung leader 10 years ago, these recent efforts by other governments have left it behind.  There is no Philadelphia Open Data web site.  So why is Azavea building one? Well, we really have Roz Duffy to thank.  She encouraged me to get involved with the Open Access Philly task force, a group sponsored by the City.  I attended my first meeting in January and was impressed by the range and diversity of the people who have been attending these meetings over the past year.  After the first meeting, I felt like Azavea was actually in a good position to create something that would both serve to bring the various City data sets together in a single catalog as well as extend the catalog to other resources.

So while the Open Access Philly task force is supporting this new catalog, OpenDataPhilly.org is not a City project.  The City government doesn’t have the resources to build something right now.  But I’m proud that Azavea is building it.   That said, this is not a typical project for us.  We don’t build open data portals – we build spatial data analysis and visualization tools.  But I felt this was important for a number of reasons.  First, I kept hearing other technology people in the region lamenting how Philadelphia was being left in the dust by other cities.  That’s sad because there’s actually far more data available than most people realize, but that was certainly a common perception.  Second, much of Azavea’s work depends on open standards and the broad availability of useful data sets.  By making it easier to find data, we are supporting the ecosystem that supports our business.  Third, I buy into the idea that open government can encourage both better government and a more engaged citizenry.

Because Azavea is not the City, OpenDataPhilly.org is different from most other open government data portals.  We have taken a look at a lot of them and we’ve done our best to incorporate what we thought were the best parts.  But we’ve decided to try some different ideas that we hope will make the catalog more useful.  First, the catalog is not limited to data from the municipal government – we have also incorporated data from non-profits, universities and commercial organizations.   Second, this catalog is not just about data; we’ve also included data-centric web and mobile applications as well as developer-oriented APIs and other structured data feeds.  Third, we realize that data for its own sake is not really all that helpful.  To be useful, the data needs to actually be put to use in new applications, visualizations and stories.  So the OpenDataPhilly.org site includes an Idea Gallery, a feature similar to London’s Inspirational Uses page.

When the site rolls out on Monday, it will not only be a catalog of existing data sets, applications and APIs, it will also include a series of new geodata APIs that the City has implemented over the last few weeks.  So the act of constructing the catalog has inspired the City to release some data sets in a new and useful way.  That’s pretty exciting.  From our perspective, that means the effort is already a success.  Furthermore, while the City didn’t pay for the development of OpenDataPhilly.org, that doesn’t mean they didn’t help.  Several staff at the City’s Office of Information Technology, including Jeff Friedman, Stuart Alter, Paul Wright, Jim Querry, Brian Ivey, Walter Svekla and others have supported it’s development through both encouragement, suggestions and the hard work required to roll out these new APIs.

The rollout will also coincide with Philly Tech Week, a week-long celebration of technology and innovation in Philadelphia organized by Technically Philly.  Open data serves as bookends for the week.  Azavea will be rolling out OpenDataPhilly.org on Monday at noon at WHYY.  On Saturday as part of the BarCamp NewsInnovation at Temple University, Tropo is organizing an Open Government Hackathon.  The Hackathon will aim to build new applications that use the data listed in the catalog.

Want to get involved? Here are a few ways:

• Show up on Saturday for the Hackathon and join a team.
• Got data? We know we probably missed a bunch of useful data sets. There will be a mechanism for organizations to submit information about their data sets for potential inclusion in the catalog.
• Is a critical data set missing? We’ll have a way for you to ask for it and vote on other people’s requests.
• Write to your city, state and federal legislators and ask them to support open government data policies. We can help you with that too. Check out Azavea’s Cicero API.
• If you are a developer, build some apps that use the data. Or, better yet, apply for Code for America, an innovative approach to public service where you can apply your skills to making government work better for everyone.
• Say something with the data. Download some data and develop a beautiful visualization that tells a story. Then submit it to the Idea Gallery.