Azavea looks to expand PhillyTreeMap software, used in Sacramento, San Francisco, elsewhere

It turns out that people all across the country are getting into tree mapping and Azavea, the Callowhill-based GIS mapping firm, hopes to make their open source software, OpenTreeMap, the standard framework for documenting urban tree inventory, Azavea president Robert Cheetham told Technically Philly.

At last year’s Philly Tech Week, Azavea launched PhillyTreeMap, an app that brought crowdsourced tree mapping to Philadelphia, as Technically Philly reported. With successful implementations in Sacramento and San Francisco, as well, Azavea now has a similar tree mapping pilot program running in Washington D.C. and just signed an implementation in Grand Rapids, MI, Cheetham told Technically Philly.

Over the weekend, Cheetham (@rcheetham) tweeted about a “New #OpenTreeMap implementation in San Diego j.mp/x3tDPn,” however Cheetham told Technically Philly the program was launched by a partner organization called Urban Ecos, an ecological consulting firm, that was using the OpenTreeMap code.

Azavea developed and maintains OpenTreeMap, though anyone can use the open source tool. All of the tree mapping initiatives use this free code. Cheetham told Technically Philly that he’d been told Code for America fellows based in New Orleans are implementing a similar tree mapping effort there, as well.

As more urban citizens learn to track the trees they share their city streets with, Azavea’s software could help create a continental map of urban forestation.

Bestions: beta Q&A site determines the BEST of everything

When you’re a reporter for a local tech new site presented with Bestions, a new Q&A website dedicated to determining, quantitatively, the BEST of any single thing, the first question that pops into your mind is:

What’s the best local tech news site?

But who needs numbers to tell us the answer to that? For every other BEST determination, however, Daniel Erlbaum, who describes himself as CEO and unpaid intern, recently launched Bestions in beta so that anyone could sign up and ask or argue what is the BEST of absolutely anything.

Erlbaum got the inspiration for Bestions after getting into an argument — in this case, it was over who was the best athlete to play in any major sport, Erlbaum told Technically Philly.

“He argued for Wayne Gretsky and I argued for Michael Jordan,” said Erlbaum, a Philadelphia-area native who grew up in Merion and Haverford. “We were equally amazed that the other didn’t see the truth in our best so I walked away from that lunch thinking, hmm, what if there was a definite place to reference and debate and decide the best of anything.”

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City of Philadelphia, Code for America publicly launch Change by Us web tool to crowdsource civic action [VIDEO]

The Philadelphia iteration of Change by Us, a web tool to crowdsource civic action to improve communities, was unveiled publicly this afternoon.

The project, launched locally by the Code for America fellows, was launched in beta in October, as Technically Philly reported.

Visit the site to suggest ways to improve your neighborhood and find partners here.

At public launch, the project has more than 150 users, 23 active projects and 145 ideas, says Jeff Friedman, the Manager of Civic Innovation & Participation in the Mayor’s office.

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Change by Us: Philly version of web tool to crowdsource civic action projects launches beta

The Philadelphia version of Change by Us, the “online marketplace for volunteer initiatives” built by a firm from the 67th ward, has launched in beta.

VISIT IT HERE.

The web tool asks users to submit project ideas for their neighborhoods or the city — think ‘plant more trees in Brewerytown’ or ‘convert a portion of the Reading Vidauct to an elevated park’– and to connect and collaborate on suggestions from others. The concept is that city officials and other decision makers would monitor the site to garner insight about what projects have community buy-in. Short of official support, residents can organize and act on their own.

The local version is being developed by the Code for America fellows. See more features listed on the CFA Google Group here.

What ideas will you submit? How can this project be improved in future versions? Do you think any real action will come out of this?

Azavea releases source code for PhillyTreeMap.org, collaborative forest inventory tool

Every municipality is a little bit closer now to having a broader inventory of trees in its boundaries.

Less than two months after going open source with city data catalog OpenDataPhilly.org, Callowhill-based GIS shop Azavea has now released the source code for PhillyTreeMap.org, the collaborative urban forest inventory tool first unveiled during Philly Tech Week in April.

The project is asking people like you to, using the site, help categorize what types of trees, where and in what shape they all are, to get a more accurate sense of what is here, should be here and could be here in the future. Partnering agencies also hope to raise awareness for a campaign to increase the city’s overall tree canopy average.

Dubbed OpenTreeMap, Azavea has shared the framework of its project with the City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation Department, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. That allows other cities and towns to save time and money on development and head straight to awareness: trying to get volunteers to help identify and label trees.

Find the code on Github here.

The official press release is here [PDF].

Does crowdfunding work for early stage growth companies?

This is a guest post by Christopher McDemus of MCD Law Partners a law firm specializing in startups and technology businesses, as part of our Guest Contributor Week. Want to have an op-ed or feature you’ve written to appear on TP, now or in the future? Drop us a line.

Disclosure: MCD Law Partners is a sponsor of Switch.

I guess crowdsourced funding or “crowdfunding” – as it seems to be known – has reached mainstream now that The Wall Street Journal (article), Knowledge@Wharton (article), TechCrunch (article) and The Economist (article) have all written articles on the topic.  The earliest article I found regarding crowdfunding was a Times article from 2008, so the concept is still relatively new.

By now, most people understand the concept of crowdsourcing and if you combine that concept with trying to raise money for something then you’ve got crowdfunding.  It’s a collaborative way to fund a project.  Given that the average amount crowdfunded appears to be somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000, I’d suggest that crowdfunding slides into the financing continuum somewhere around the “friends and family” level – generally the financing stage during which you are looking for smaller amounts of capital for market research or proof of concept.  Although $2,000 to $10,000 would still be small even by friend and family round standards.

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