[OAM-talk] The once and future OpenAerialMap

[Marc Pfister]

A conference call the morning of November 12th would work well, since that evening the Random Hacks of Kindness conference starts and it looks like some OAMers and many other geohackers will be attending. OAM is on the list of project definitions for the event. We could hopefully reach a verbal agreement of where to start, and then the attendees could try to generate some prototypes and proof-of-concepts.

http://randomhacksofkindness.eventbrite.com/

*
Marc Pfister
Technology Manager
ENPLAN
mpfister at enplan.com
(530)221-0440 x108
(530)221-6963 Fax

From: talk-bounces at openaerialmap.org [mailto:talk-bounces at openaerialmap.org] On Behalf Of John Crowley
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 3:22 PM
To: talk at openaerialmap.org
Subject: Re: [OAM-talk] The once and future OpenAerialMap

I am new to the list, but have been following in the background. I organize a set of humanitarian field experiments at Camp Roberts, under the aegis of the Naval Postgraduate School and the National Defense University.

Mikel Maron and David Bitner joined us in August, and our conversations there made us realize how critical a shared imagery archive has become to the development of the field of crisis mapping. We realized that the humanitarian community needs a place where civilian and military organizations can share and exchange pre- and post-crisis imagery, as well as subsquent analyses (our holy grail would be to identify visual patterns that are precursors to violence, mass migrations, and mass atrocities, including genocide). Based on those discussions, the Naval Postgraduate School subsequently offered to help catalyze the reanimation of the OAM project.

To that end, I would like to introduce NPS professor Don Brutzman. He is willing to offer  computing resources to help us bootstrap OAM, including bandwidth, storage, and (if needed) supercomputer processing power. I'll let him fill in the details. He's an open source developer himself (see his work on creating X3D, and he is on the W3C committee for HTML5). He has been using OAM for his team's research and therefore has a longstanding interest in reviving the project.

We also would like to offer a conference line to help speed these conversations. Next week, he and I will be at Camp Roberts with several other technologists and geographers. We'll be continuing the work from August, including building an open-source tool to automatically mosaic UAV still imagery. We are willing to host an OAM conference call on Thursday 12 Nov, hopefully at a time that allows our European colleagues to participate (we'll be on PST, so would early morning our time work?). Could we get a rough show of hands about who would like to participate on the call? What agenda items should we be covering? And what is the best way to ensure that the call gets back into this list? (for instance, we could record the call, if everyone agrees, and publish the audio feed, or designate someone to live-blog the call).

Taking up Charlie's point about separating conversations about technology from those about governance/organization, should we host two calls?

Looking forward to contributing to a great project,

- John Crowley





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