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.

What will be the impact of Philly Tech Week 2012?

“To make a better Philadelphia through technology.” That’s our call to action and the motto of Philly Tech Week 2012, now only six months away.

Today, we’ve launched the Philly Tech Week media kit, which you can flip through by clicking the embed above to active full-screen mode, or by clicking this link.

Using data and information we collected from attendees, this publication will help you understand the value of the inaugural Philly Tech Week, held in April, which brought together 4,000 people at 65 events and had city-wide impact.

The big takeaways are in the 2011 numbers:

• 65 events across broad range of technology industries
• More than 4,000 people attended events throughout the region
• Featured in more than 50 stories in newspapers, radio, television and blogs
• 35 participating sponsors signed on for inaugural year
• 30,000 unique visits to PhillyTechWeek.com and TechnicallyPhilly.com during month of event as well as 1,000 social media mentions

We hope this media kit shows why we need your help to make a success out of Philly Tech Week 2012, to be held April 22 through April 28, 2012. Check out the media kit here. Sign-up for email updates and look for a Fall launch of the 2012 website here.

If you’re already interested in getting involved, learn how to organize an event or how to sponsor Philly Tech Week.

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].

PhillyTreeMap.org: crowdsourced census of Philadelphia’s tree canopy

Map rendering of some 180,000 cataloged trees in Philadelphia, via PhillyTreeMap.org.

Philadelphia is crowdsourcing a census of its trees, and, yes, would you mind helping?

Unveiled on Arbor Day during Philly Tech Week, PhillyTreeMap.org is a wiki-inspired web application that allows users who register free to collaborate with the project partners — City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission – to map,  inventory and preserve the Philadelphia urban forest. The project was built by local mapping company Azavea.

Nearly 180,000 are already cataloged, though the species and other core details are missing.With guidance from the site, users can ascertain species type, estimate trunk diameter and height and fill in other specifics that will help the coalition of groups to better ascertain what is lacking and what is working in Philadelphia foliage.

PhillyTreeMap is meant to help Parks & Rec with its 30 percent tree canopy goal outlined in Greenworks Philadelphia by engaging residents around tree planting and stewardship, Azavea Project Manager Deb Boyer said during the Green Tech Showcase unveiling. Currently Philadelphia has an average of roughly 20 percent canopy across the city, though some parts have fuller coverage and other parts have far less.

Funding has not yet supported a mobile interface, which would allow users to more easily update entries while at the tree, Boyer said, but the browser experience is a user friendly one. Team members will offer some project oversight in case of false information, but the hope is for Philadelphians to help with this cause, she added.

According to a press release [PDF]: “Azavea built PhillyTreeMap using open source code contributed by the Urban Forest Map project in San Francisco and plans to collaborate with the group on future urban forestry projects.  The development of PhillyTreeMap was supported by a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.”

Collaborations for the future of Philadelphia

Some of the more than 150 attendees at the Philly Tech Week signature event

When we began receiving the first additions to the calendar for Philly Tech Week, we noticed a trend: groups were working together to take advantage of venue space together, to reach a wider audience, and to help one another plan great programming.

It’s why we moved on making the week about collaboration, and the ways in which already existing collaborations are strengthening Philadelphia’s technology community.

That much was true when we asked leaders in the community to talk about the relationships they’d already forged and ones they hoped to see happen. During the photo shoot for the inaugural week’s Program & Magazine [PDF], a print publication we distributed at each event and at more than 60 retail locations around the city with the help of Philadelphia Media Network (publishers of the Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com), we asked those leaders to talk collaboration. See the video of that shoot below.

During our closing Philly Tech Week signature event, we brought the week’s theme to an actionable conclusion. We asked the 150 attendees to draft partnerships they thought would be interesting, fun or powerful, and could make Philadelphia a better place to live.

On a sheet of paper, we laid out a Mad Lib-style format that we thought might encourage some bold ideas: “I think that PARTNER ORGANIZATION should work with PARTNER ORGANIZATION to PROJECT TO MAKE PHILADELPHIA BETTER.

The 10 best of those drafts, submitted anonymously, are below the jump in no particular order. We hope it can become a list that is real.

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Girl Geek Dinner: Philadelphia chapter kicks off during Philly Tech Week

Girl Geek Dinner Philadelphia chapter kickoff during Philly Tech Week.

More than 30 self-proclaimed “geek” women met up at Triumph Brewing Company in Old City on Tuesday, April 26 to kick off Philadelphia’s Girl Geek Dinner chapter during the first ever Philly Tech Week.

The event started at 6:30 p.m. with the opportunity for attendees to network and enjoy drinks from the cash bar. At 7, chapter organizer Tristin Hightower welcomed the group and gave a brief introduction to the overarching organization, explaining why she started the chapter and her goals for it.

Maggie Avener of the Prometheus Radio Project spoke about demystifying technical topics to make them accessible to less geeky audiences, emphasizing techniques borrowed from popular education. She covered tips on audience-appropriate advertising for beginner technical trainings, assessing and acknowledging what participants already know, designing trainings that reach people with varying learning styles and pushing people beyond their comfort zones while maintaining a feeling of safety. Click to see slides from Maggie’s presentation here [PDF].

Hightower closed out the speaking portion of the evening by thanking everyone for attending and answering questions about where the group could go from there. Attendees ate dinner and mingled until about 9pm.

Pictures from the event can be found on Flickr and Facebook.

Up next for Girl Geek Dinners Philadelphia will be a May Happy Hour welcoming to all. To stay connected with upcoming events or activities, follow @GGDPHL on Twitter, like them on Facebook or join the GGD PHL
announcement mailing list. Visit www.ggdphl.com for more information.

New $20 million Drexel University endowment to build businesses around biomedical research

Portion of less invasive breast cancer screening technology that is similar to what has been developed in part because of an existing Drexel University-Coulter Foundation partnership. A new $20 million endowment between the two is meant to bolster businesses around biomedical research.

Another announcement that came during Philly Tech Week featured funding for an initiative that would better integrate business plans and biomedical research.

Drexel University was awarded $10 million by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program. The University matched the Coulter Foundation’s grant creating a $20 million endowment to bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization… The new endowment will help Drexel enable the Philadelphia region to become a national hotbed of medical device development and build a global network of collaboration between academia and business.

This endowment is an extension of an existing Coulter-Drexel relationship, featuring projects that “have produced more than 40 full patent applications, three issued patents and one copyright registration,” including a wound monitor and a breast cancer screening device.

At the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal addressed the obstacle this program is meant to combat.

“Across the country we’ve seen a disruption in the innovation pipeline post-World War II,” she said. “We’ve gone from a time when there was a close connect between the technology and those who would develop it for market to now when innovation has moved back to the universities, without much of a market function, and we’ve seen big companies reduce their R&D.”

During the event, Coulter Project Director followed by Davood Tashayyod highlighted his work:

“This is an opportunity to create jobs and innovation that can go around the world but start here in Philadelphia,” he said.

A recap of Standards.Next at Philly Tech Week

During Philly Tech Week, the folks at Comcast Interactive Media held the Standards.Next 2011 conference, featuring sessions from Opera’s Molly Holzschlag, CIM’s standards expert Kimberly Blessing and Happy Cog’s Jenn Lukas.

With the rate of change that we are experiencing in the industry, these are indeed exciting times for web developers – as well as challenging times for those on the front lines, advocating the need for standards across the web. Standards.Next gives these individuals a shared voice and provides them with a forum in which to pose difficult, forward-thinking questions to an audience of peers who truly understand the value in doing so.

Read the full write-up over at CIM’s Labs blog.

Open Government Philadelphia: an initiative and policy paper from Councilman Bill Green

Councilman Bill Green publicly unveils his Open Government Initiative, during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network on Wednesday, April 27. He is flanked by RoseAnn Rosenthal and Greg Osberg. Photo by Yusuf Muhammad/Phrequency.com

After a failed bid for a paperless government initiative last year, Councilman Bill Green has redoubled the proposal into a broader 10-point Open Government policy paper, largely calling on technology and the community here.

Green’s announcement of the proposal came during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, though he has continued hitting the talking point recently, a week before the City Council Democratic primary.

“We could become the first paperless and most open city government in the country,” Green said at the event. “We have the opportunity to leapfrog everyone else in five years if we start now.”

In the 17-page document, Green makes 10 recommendations, most of which he proposes to move forward himself with related legislation, though the local technology community is heavily sourced and credited. Download the full paper here [PDF].

Green says between $150-$200 million can be saved in the paperless government move alone, something Sacramento was most recently trumpeting.

Below, find his 10 recommendations and what they could mean for the future of Philadelphia governance, in addition to a related presentation his office shared.

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IGDA connects gamers and developers during Philly Tech Week

Gamers play Jamestown at the IGDA Showcase | Photo credit: IGDA's Flickr Page

This wrap up of the IGDA Philly Game Showcase was written by IGDA Chapter Secretary, Allison Berman. The showcase was part of Philly Tech Week.

The IGDA Philly Game Showcase 2011 brought together designers and programmers from across every major media platform: from mobile video games to game consoles to mobile apps for smartpads and smartphones, to computer games.  One adventurous presenter even created a unique motion-sensitive joystick to go with his game.

While the event was organized by the IGDA Philadelphia Chapter, it was open to any local game makers, regardless of affiliation or membership. Some studios have been very involved with the chapter over the last few years, offering help to up-and-coming students and first time developers.

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