Events

Posted

Thu Sep 23 2010, 12:12pm

By Aaron Parecki

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Geosketching – Cyborgs are Mapping Portland

The Grassy Knoll Gallery presents:

Geosketching – Gallery Show and CyborgCamp Pre-Party

Grassy Knoll Gallery
123 NW 2nd Ave
Portland, Oregon 97209
Friday, Oct 1st, 2010 6-9 PM

Exhibition Dates // Oct 1 – 29
Artist Reception // Friday, Oct 1st, 2010 6-9 PM. Free and open to the public
Gallery Hours // by appointment
DJ set by Let’s Go Outside

Where a person goes can reveal a lot about who they are and how they live. Thousands of people can live in the same city and have drastically different experiences.

GPS maps are a kind of technogeographical self portrait; a way of showing how one has lived during a certain period of time. The methods for taking data can reveal something about a person as well. There is no standard way of taking GPS data. One’s map may differ greatly from another. For the past two years, Aaron Parecki has been carrying a GPS tracker with him at all times, walking, busing, biking, driving and flying. Amber Case has been taking data since January 2010. Together, they have logged over 10 million GPS points. These points have been plotted onto paper, then color-coded by time of day and speed of movement to render beautiful and thought provoking prints that serve as “geotechnological” self-portraits.

Portland-based PHP developer and GPS enthusiast Aaron Parecki experiments with automatic location check-ins and proximal notification systems. He also began using GPS to control the lights in his house and perform other automated actions.

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds.

Together the two founded Geoloqi.com in an effort to make GPS tracking and advanced co-location protocols available to the general public.

How Can I Do This?

Geoloqi, a GPS tracker app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm is in constant development. It will allow anyone to take data and make maps like these. If you’d like to beta test or help us develop it, sign up at Geoloqi.com or follow @geoloqi on Twitter.

Geosketching will also be an opening celebration for the upcoming Cyborg Camp Portland 2010 on October 2nd.

About Cyborg Camp

CyborgCamp is an unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.
For more information and to register go to portland.cyborgcamp.com or contact Amber Case.

Fashionbuddha Studio creates world-class animations and interactive experiences. Fashionbuddha Studio is featured in Communication Arts Design and Interactive Annual, how Magazine, and Best of Show at the 2009 Webvisionary Awards. www.fashionbuddha.com

About the Grassy Knoll Gallery

The Grassy Knoll Gallery began in August 2007 as a venture between Robert Lewis, owner of Fashionbuddha Animation Studio, and curator Renee Marcotte. Located on the second floor of the historic Merchant Hotel in Old Town, Grassy Knoll Gallery provides a unique outlet for illustrators and animators.

For more information on past, current and future shows or to purchase artwork online, please visit our website at www.grassyknollgallery.com.

Posted

Fri Sep 10 2010, 8:20pm

By caseorganic

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Events

Post-CyborgCamp Open Government Hackathon: 8 Hours of Open Source Action on Sunday, Oct. 3rd!

Geoloqi and Tropo will be sponsoring an 8-hour hackathon to see who can build the best open government application in just one day!

It’s free! You can participate as an individual or a team. Prizes will be awarded to the winners by the Hackathon Partners. Breakfast, lunch, coffee and beer will be available throughout the day, and there will be high speed Internet access and comfortable couches.

REGISTER HERE

Schedule

  • Breakfast and coffee will be served at 8:30am, followed by Lunch at Noon.
  • Coding will stop at 5:30pm, and teams and individuals will demo their apps.
  • Prizes will be awarded at 6:30Ppm.

Location

NedSpace Old Town, 117 NW 5th between Couch and Davis.

Backspace is right downstairs, Davis Street Tavern is right next door, there’s a parking lot across the street, and it’s right on the MAX line.

Who Should Attend?

Ruby, Python, PHP, web developers, coders, interaction designers, graphic designers and anyone who has a passion to code, hack or conceptualize applications that will free (or otherwise enhance) the accessibility and usefulness of government-shared data.

Although the sprint takes place On Oct 3rd after CyborgCamp Portland, you don’t have to be attending the conference to join us.

Participation is free and open to anyone… we just ask that you register in advance so we know how many individuals or teams we need to accommodate.

What’s Going to Happen?

There will be organizers onsite to help get things rolling. At 5:30pm, each app will be evaluated by the Hackathon Partners and prizes will be awarded to those teams or individuals that develop the best applications in the 8 hour. Participants need not show up right at 8:30am, but those who do will have the most time to code!

Hackathon Partners

Partners are companies and organizations that provide tools or services that can enhance open government apps. They’re also providing the prizes and will be choosing the winners. If your organization has tools or services that you think would be useful to the Hackathon, contact @aaronpk or @caseorganic and we’ll see about adding you to the list:

* Tropo – Tropo is a powerful yet simple API that adds Voice, SMS, Twitter, and IM support to the programming languages you already know.
* Geoloqi – A secure, real-time mobile and web platform for location sharing.

REGISTER HERE

Posted

Sat Aug 28 2010, 1:13pm

By Aaron Parecki

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Software Association of Oregon – Location-Based Apps

There’s a message from your future and it’s telling you to remember to pick up milk.

Amber Case and her partner Aaron Parecki are the founders of Geoloqi. Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for secure location data, with features such as Geonotes, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends. Geoloqi has been covered in the Willamette Week and Oregon Business. It has been presented at eComm, Open Source Bridge, Show and Tell PDX and Research Club under the alias Non-Visual Augmented Reality with SMS and GPS. Read CNN’s article on Geoloqi, “What’s Next for ‘Check-in’ Apps“.

What will you learn:

  1. Why developers of apps should look at what users want to do now, as well as what users want to do in their future.
  2. Why social apps should try to mirror real–world relationships
  3. Why sharing should be about who you share with as well as how long you want the information to be available.
  4. Why developers should think about making apps “ambient” and require less user interaction.

Tickets are $15. Register for the event here.

Posted

Sun Aug 22 2010, 11:23pm

By caseorganic

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Geoloqi-Powered ChatterCast Wins Seattle Open Government Hackathon!

This weekend we participated in the Gnomedex10 Open Government 24 hour Hackathon. Tropo sponsored a lounge at the Edgewater hotel with food, coffee, wifi and couches for open data geeks to build apps in. Participants were encouraged to make the best app using the Tropo API and data.seattle.gov (powered by Socrata).

We quickly realized that we could use the Geoloqi API to build a local emergency alerter app that could run on almost any platform. In the span of around 5 hours (plus about 4 hours getting the Geoloqi API ready), we built ChatterCast, a app allowing one to subscribe to XML feeds based on one’s location. We used the Geonote methods of the Geoloqi API to handle delivering the location-specific messages. Geoloqi used Tropo to deliver SMS messages to the phone.

We finished with just enough time to present before we had to catch our train back to Portland. We had to leave before we were able to see many of the other presenters. We caught about half of a great presentation by Portland geohackers and open gov enthusiasts Reid Beels and Max Ogden. Their app notified users the day before events happened in user-specified ‘watch zones’, e.g. road closures on your commute. They won for best use of Tropo, another success for Portland’s open government community!

Note that the app is simply a proof of concept. While it fully works, it requires installing Instamapper on your mobile phone. Instamapper runs on most mobile phones, including some older Motorola models such as the Boost Mobile phone. This means that even some users with older phones can still have access to this data with ChatterCast. If you’re unfamiliar with Instamapper, we wrote a post on it here.

Here’s an example Geonote SMS message from the data.seattle.gov 911 call dataset.

We had a great time building this app! Now we have a framework for digital storytelling and geolocal data. Anyone can use Tropo, Instamapper and the Geoloqi API to build their own app capable of pushing XML data to a user by SMS. We’ll be integrating ChatterCast into the Geoloqi API so that the mashup can be more accessible to developers and end users.

Thanks again to Tropo, Socrata, data.seattle.gov, Gnomedex and all of the great open data hackers at the #tinkerstorm hackathon event!

For more about Geoloqi, and to sign up to beta test, see Geoloqi.com. If you’d like to contribute as a developer, check out the Developer Wiki. To use the rapidly developing API, try the Geoloqi API!