Call for Technologist(s) - Emotional Mapping Project to prevent Youth Suicides.

I am more than happy (pun intended!) to pass on this message from Tanya Notly from the University of Western Sydney, who is embarking on a project to map young people's happiness, as a way to contribute to their well-being and ultimately help with suicide prevention.

She is looking for (geospatial) people to help them out with setting up mapping technologies. 

Sound interesting? Of course it does! 

Read Tanya's message below, and please spread the word!

We only have a small budget but we are looking for a technologist to help us develop a mapping project between now and September. Our project will work with young people in Paramatta to map their emotional responses to public spaces in the city in order to start a dialogue about how different environments in the city impacts on the wellbeing of young people. We’d like to use mapping software to do this and expect we will want to link this to related work that supports young people to share creative content relating to these places. 

We know about (and were initially inspired by) online emotional mapping projects like We Feel Fine <http://wefeelfine.org/> or Christian Nold’s emotional mapping work. But we want to create a project that is place-based, not that scrapes online data (though I know Nold’s work does not do this). Ideally inputs could be made via an app and the web (perhaps also via SMS).  

We’d also ideally like to use open source software and to create something fairly simple that we can keep building on with future projects. I’d be especially keen to talk to anyone who is familiar with Ushahidi and their latest releases to see if this may be relevant. 
The results of this mapping will be exhibited as part of a festival in October 2015. 

Dr. Tanya Notley 

Lecturer, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. 

Digital Humanities Group member 

video4change network researcher

t.notley@uws.edu.au 

Twitter: @tattinot

Call for Presenters – OGC Forum Showcase at Locate 15

The Australia-New Zealand Forum of the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC ANZ Forum) will be hosting a ‘Showcase’ event at the Locate15 ‘Open Day’, Tuesday 10 March, 3-4 PM in Brisbane.

During this event, OGC members have the opportunity to showcase their projects and achievements to conference delegates, during a dedicated OGC session in the conference exhibition area.

If you are an OGC member, and are interested in presenting your organisation’s capabilities, please contact maurits.vandervlugt@mercuryps.com.au.

Speaking slots will be allocated based on relevance combined with a first-come, first-serve basis. Presentations are expected to be brief (5-10 minutes) and focus on the business outcomes of deploying OGC standards and –architectures.

About the OGC ANZ Forum: http://www.opengeospatial.org/node/1643

About Locate15: http://www.locateconference.com/

What3Words – The biggest disruption since Google Maps?

I have an addressing problem. The apartment block I live in has a rear entry for visitor parking. It doesn’t have a street number. I direct guests to the right alley, and then make them call me, so I can tell them which garage door to access. I am usually in the middle of cooking something complex when they ring.

Until recently, the only alternative I had for directing guests to the right spot was “-33.884891, 151.217647”, and hope they can remember and interpret these numbers. Good luck with that. (I’m not even mentioning datums or projections, or visitors who don’t know what to do with GPS coordinates)

Chris Sheldrick

Three months ago I spoke with a young Briton named Chris Sheldrick. He used to work as an event manager, organising festivals and the like, and was paying people to meet delivery trucks at the edge of town, and explain to drivers exactly where to park, drop the chairs, or unload the catering.

Chris wondered why there wasn’t a simple, clear-cut, easy to remember system to communicate location in natural language. Addresses don’t work if there isn’t a property or building to address, and coordinates are hard to remember or interpret.

That’s why Chris created What3Words (http://what3words.com/; available for IOS and Android), and it’s now taking the world by storm.