Matt Dunbar & Co. did a fantastic job putting together GIS day at Kansas University. My favorite part of the day was judging the student competition. Seven students gave ten minute presentations on unique uses of GIS. They showed everything from a geographic boundary of where grits are consumed (apparently South Carolina is the capital of all that is grits) to a traffic analysis of SW Douglas Country in Kansas. The winner was Lincoln Lewis. He showed how to make GIS data pretty using a suite of software programs. The end result was an .avi file that showed a urban strategy for rebuilding New Orleans.
New Orleans was a hot topic. Several presenters showed data from post-Katrina.
Google Earth was mentioned or used in almost every presentation. It is fantastic how Google is contributing to the geo-geek world.
My talk went well. I talked about Where's Tim and Social Geocoding. I didn't have time to get into Life Management or online shopping lists or location based target advertising, but hopefully they will invite me back next year and I can talk more about potential consumer business models using real time GPS. The audience asked good questions and they were kind enough to laugh at a couple of my jokes! My slide deck is here, and they should have the video of my presentation on their website soon.
Jerome Dobson gave a presentation after mine talking about geoslavery and the potential social implications of real time GPS. His main argument wasn't that GPS was bad, but that there needs to be awareness of the potential abuses. I agree that awareness needs to exist, but more importantly, there needs to be consumer expectations that software developers respect. As software developers writing applications that consume GPS data, we have to allow the person that is sharing their location full control over when their location is shared and to whom it is shared with. If we do that, we can earn consumer trust and write all kinds of great location based applications that save people time and money in their everyday life (and get paid handsomely for doing so).
After his talk, Jerome shared with me that his location is very personal to him and that if somebody asks him to call them when he gets home from a trip, he tells them no. It is important for him to keep his location private and I completely respect that. I hope that someday he finds a niche use for a location based service (hopefully provided by EnGraph) and he trusts that we will use his location only as he intends it to be consumed.
It was a day well spent. I usually go to presentations about .NET and WPF and all that is computer geek. It was cool to see geo-geeks shine in their own limelight. I look forward to next years event!