Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010 | Azavea Journal

Vol. 5 Issue 2
May 2010

Azavea Makes the List of Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies Nationwide… Again

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

Thank you so much for your support and trust!

For the second consecutive year, Azavea made it to the ICIC Inner City 100 List of the fastest growing companies nationwide, at number 28. And the Philadelphia Inquirer claims that “Azavea puts Philadelphia on the Map“.

inner_city_100_collage2

The Inner City 100 program recognizes successful companies and their CEO’s as role models for entrepreneurship, innovative business practices and job creation in America’s urban communities. The list is intended to demonstrate the idea that doing business in an urban environment holds a distinct competitive advantage. ICIC (Initiative for Competitive Inner City) has been studying the economic condition of the largest 100 American cities for more than a decade and is working to revitalize inner cities across the country by promoting entrepreneurship.

We want to dedicate this award to all of clients, our partners and our talented staff. Thank you.

We look forward to working with you on more thought-provoking projects and software that continue to bring together the best aspects of geography and the web.

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We’ve Become a Certified B Corporation. What the Heck is This? You Might Ask

By Rachel Cheetham-Richard Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

We have joined over 280 other leading companies who are setting a new corporate standard for social and environmental performance, by becoming a Certified B Corporation, a.k.a B Corp.

What is this? The B Lab organization was created to promote the designation of a new corporate form, the “B Corporation”. Under current IRS regulations, there are several types of private for-profit businesses including C Corporations, S Corporations, LLC’s, LLP’s, partnerships and sole proprietors. B Corporations are a new type of for-profit companies that use the power of businesses operating in a market-based economy to solve social and ecosystem problems, while committing to creating benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. B Lab is working with state legislatures to try to have the B Corporation status added as a new corporate form.

To become certified, B Corporations must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards, and amend their corporate by-laws to incorporate the interests of employees, community, and the environment. They also agree to undergo an audit of their business practices once every 2 years to ensure that their business practices continue to align with the B Corporation’s principles.

You might now wonder why Azavea would qualify. While terms such as ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)’, ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘sustainable development’ are increasingly being used to describe the behavior of for-profit corporations, whether or not we live up to those aspirations boils down to the choices we make as businesses and the values we actually apply in our day-to-day operations. The B Corporation status emphasizes the triple bottom line of social responsibility, sustainability and profitability (people, planet, profit). At Azavea, many of our business decisions stem from these three principles.

We were founded in 2000 with the vision to build innovative location-based web and mobile solutions and perform spatial analysis for clients committed to making positive and enduring impacts in the communities they serve. We have worked with numerous non-profit, academic and government clients to answer complex geospatial questions in a wide variety of domains including natural resource planning, neighborhood revitalization, economic development, crime analysis, real estate property analysis, redistricting, political advocacy, and cultural resources.

Our 10% personal research and pro bono programs have enabled staff members to spend some time working on projects that are not focused on the immediate needs of a particular client, while at the same time enabling the company to expand its skill sets and broaden its business opportunities in areas and domains not explored before. These programs have been at the source of projects such as Walkshed (to calculate and map walkability), BusMinder (a real-time bus notification application), a white paper on Gerrymandering, geographic service maps for MANNA, and the Haitian Earthquake Registry, to name a few.

The same service-oriented attitude extends to Azavea’s commitment to redistributing a minimum of 2% of our annual profits to charitable organizations selected by staff through the company’s “Time to Give Back” program.

We also try to treat our staff as if they were family members. In addition to our nifty benefit package, we also believe in financial and corporate transparency and hold at least two meetings per year to report on company performance.

But we’re not resting on our laurels! In addition to the business benefits, the B Lab also highlighted some areas where we can improve. Here are some of the ideas:

Establish a Board of Advisers made up people independent of the company
Give customers representation on a Board of Advisers
Develop an environmental policy
Conduct environmental review / audit and share with staff and customers
Measure our annual energy consumption and use it to develop metrics by which we can reduce it

We are proud of our new corporate status and look forward to implementing some of the above ideas in our business practices.

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Philadelphia Water Department: An Innovative and Transparent Stormwater Billing System

By Aaron Ogle Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

Like many old cities in America, Philadelphia has a complicated relationship with rain. Centuries ago this “greene country towne” was streaked by streams and covered by a thick blanket of vegetation that naturally filtered and absorbed storm water. But much of the city’s green space has since been covered with pavement and its streams converted into a combined storm water/sewage management system. The consequence is significantly more runoff from impervious surfaces funneling into a finite system of underground tunnels and pipes. In other words, too much runoff causes the system to break down, forcing a combination of storm water and untreated sewage directly into the rivers.

Many cities have taken a “gray” approach to this problem, building additional capacity into its existing infrastructure. But the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) has opted for an entirely “green” approach and stands to save a lot of green in the process. The plan? Phase in policies that charge commercial property owners for the actual impervious area on their parcels and provide financial incentives to adopt storm water management practices (SMP), such as green roofs and porous pavement, to decrease runoff before it even enters a storm drain.

This is a massive undertaking for PWD and Azavea has played an important role in supporting it. A critical component of this plan is to maintain an accurate record of impervious surface areas and property boundaries for the entire city. Two Azavea GIS analysts have been working onsite with PWD to validate and make corrections to these extensive spatial data collections.

Philadelphia Water Department's Stormwater Billing Application

One of PWD’s goals was to make this fee restructuring as transparent as possible. To that end, Azavea built the PWD’s Stormwater Billing application, PhillyStormwater.org, to allow property owners to see exactly how PWD is calculating their new storm water charges. This web application lets users explore parcels on an interactive map, including high resolution ortho-photography, transparent overlays of impervious surfaces, and tools to do approximate measurements of length and area. It also provides a charge summary for each parcel, detailing how each component of the bill was calculated and how it will be phased in over time.

Behind the scenes, PWD is running Azavea software to manage each financial credit issued back to its customers for every SMP added, ensuring that land owners are not being overcharged. Our software is also tracking customer appeals so that data can be promptly corrected when errors are found.

As with so many things, what was old is new again. It turns out that Mother Nature has been pretty good at managing storm water all along. It is encouraging to see innovative agencies like PWD leading the way with sustainable, cost-effective solution for managing storm water.

More info:

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PhillyHistory.org Adds Historic Images from the Free Library of Philadelphia

By Deb Boyer Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

PhillyHistory.org, the Philadelphia Department of Records’ historic photo and map website powered by our Sajara product, now features two new groups of images from the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The Historical Images of Philadelphia collection includes over 170 photos taken throughout the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With images of everything from Memorial Hall to the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty, the Centennial Exhibition collection contains 1,600 beautiful photographs documenting America’s celebration of 100 years of history and progress.

Since the geographic search option on PhillyHistory.org is such a popular feature, we wanted to geocode the Free Library images as well. This proved to not be so straightforward for the Centennial images. The exhibition was located in Fairmount Park, an area that has changed dramatically since 1876. To find the coordinates of the original locations of the Centennial buildings, we needed to georeference an historic map of the Centennial grounds. By overlaying the historic map with a current street map in ESRI’s ArcGIS and finding a few buildings and intersections that still existed to serve as anchor points, we were able to create a new image that showed the locations of the historic buildings. We then found the coordinates for specific buildings and used them to geocode photos of those buildings, making the images searchable by location.

Including collections from multiple organizations in the system is something that we’ve always hoped to be able to do. When PhillyHistory.org first debuted, it contained a few thousand images from the collection of the Philadelphia City Archives. Over the next couple years, the Philadelphia Water Department contributed 1,500 historic images, the Department of Records provided 4,800 property maps, and the Free Library added nearly 200 historic maps dating from the 1850s and 1860s. The addition of the Free Library images provides PhillyHistory.org users with even greater access to the historical resources of the city.

Of course, including the collections of various organizations in a single database is not as easy as signing an agreement and uploading some images. Institutions have different needs ranging from collection size to collection management processes to available metadata. We built Sajara, our geographic digital collection management system, to accommodate these different needs by a series of features that enable watermarks, metadata and activation of features (like commenting, photo print sales, licensing, etc.) to be configured on a collection-by-collection basis. Web-access prevents the necessity of installing software at different offices, and a system of roles and levels of access ensures that while multiple organizations may have their data in the same database, they have the ability to manage only their own collections.

The result is a database that enables several organizations to pool their resources and increase public access to their collections. Rather than switching from website to website, users can visit PhillyHistory.org to view amazing images and maps from three separate organizations. And we are now working with additional institutions to add their images in the future.

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Geographic Statistics and Indicators Heavy Lifting at a Glance

By Chip Hitchens Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

KIF—the Kaleidocade Indicators Framework—has proven to be a powerful tool for organizations that want to share with the public large amounts of data, visualize it, and provide sophisticated analytical tools to help people interpret it. But what about those organizations with much less data or the need for a more streamlined, simple approach?

The KIFlite global sample application assembles hundreds of statistics and indicators

KIFlite is a new option for organizations that wish to publish geographically aggregated indicators. It combines the analytic power of KIF with a simplified user interface, making it easy to quickly dive into maps and charts.

KIFlite was originally conceived as a way for KIF to operate on a touch screen. Potential users of KIF may not have the luxury of sitting comfortably at a computer, thinking through questions in detail, and then saving their work and returning to it later. We had to think of a way for KIF to be immediately engaging and easily manipulated without the use of a mouse or keyboard by someone passing a kiosk at a conference or other interactive display. Even though KIFlite has been expanded to work from a regular computer and not necessarily only from a touch screen, that initial focus led us to differentiate KIFlite from the full KIF package in several ways:

A Single Geographic Level— The full KIF application supports the inclusion of several different geographies in one implementation. Depending on the coverage area of the client’s data, it might be broken up into states/counties/tracts or municipalities/ZIP codes/school districts. The end-user chooses the area and associated data they are interested in. KIFlite analyzes and displays all data at a single geography, simplifying the user experience.

Live Indicator Selection—In KIF, before performing analysis, a user chooses a subset of indicators relevant to their interests and adds them to their own “indicator collection” before doing any analysis. These can then be saved to a user account and retrieved later. KIFlite makes any indicator available for any of the available analysis tools, but doesn’t save data to a user’s collections.

User Accounts – Though user accounts are extremely useful in an application where people are likely to want to save their work, the quick in-and-out approach of KIFlite makes user accounts unnecessary.

Reports—KIFlite’s rapid and temporal style of interaction inherently de-emphasized the need for highly detailed reports. KIFlite offers a smaller range of simplified reports.

KIFlite - Scatter Plot

If you’d like to check out KIFlite, check out our global sample application; it focuses on global socio-economic indicators, ranging from health to freedom of the press worldwide.

We hope that this addition to the KIF family of products will bring the power of Kaleidocade to an even wider audience who deals with large amounts of geographic indicators that need to be interpreted and analyzed quickly and efficiently. For examples of organizations that use KIF already, please visit our KIF clients’ page.

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Behind the Scenes at Azavea – Our Current Reads

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

thumb_john John Semmel, software developer, has a weekly ritual. On Sunday mornings, he listens to NPR’s notorious “Puzzlemaster”, Will Shortz’s weekly word puzzle. John then promptly puts his mental lexicon to work to figure out next week’s challenge and to submit his answer to the show. Though his submissions nearly always match the intended answer, he has never been selected to participate in the on air quiz. He remains hopeful and eagerly awaits his 15 minutes of enigmatological fame.

John’s current read: On Language, by William Safire

thumb_tamara

Tamara Manik-Perlman, GIS Analyst & Project Manager, has often been called a materialist, and she can’t really dispute the label since it captures both her tactile and academic obsessions. Although she’s fascinated by all aspects of material culture, Tamara is particularly taken with textiles and the various techniques for knitting, weaving, dyeing, printing and manipulating fabric. The anthropologist and economic geographer in her is also fascinated by how the desire for and trade in commodities has shaped the course of human history around the globe. (If you’re also curious about supply chains, check out developer David Zwarg’s recent research project Sourcemap.org)

Tamara’s current read: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz

John and Tamara are not the only avid readers at Azavea. We’ve polled everyone in the office on their latest reads which resulted in a pretty stellar list. Check it out!

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From Our Blogs

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

Azavea Enters MassDOT Developers Real Time Challenge

Crime Science vs. Criminology

Azavea’s Coffee Helper: Caféduino

Philadelphia Civic Hackathon Creates a Gang Survey App

Getting an ArcGIS Server Map Cache in S3

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Conference Schedule

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 2, May 2010

Law Enforcement Information Management (LEIM) Conference
Atlanta, GA – May 24-27
Sean McGinnis exhibiting HunchLab at the ESRI Booth

Personal Democracy Forum
New York, NY – June 3-4
Robert Cheetham and Abby Fretz attending

ESRI Homeland Security GIS Summit
San Diego, CA – July 10-13
Robert Cheetham presenting HunchLab and the Firearms Analysis System

ESRI User Conference
San Diego, CA – July 12-16
Robert Cheetham and Tamara Manik-Perlman presenting: Walkshed, HunchLab, and a Sea Level Rise application

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