ICTworks by Inveneo

In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, Haitian citizens and the use of technology, particularly mobile and GIS technologies and social media, proved critical to response and recovery efforts. Ushahidi, NOULA, OpenStreetMap, and other volunteer-based efforts gathered data from multiple sources, including Haitian citizens, to produce timely information on the ground and around the world. Beyond the crisis, however, the work done by the open source software community and volunteer technologists has begun filling gaps in Haiti's outdated and incomplete spatial data infrastructure (SDI) - providing some of the most accurate and current information about Haiti's human and physical geography.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, I, Alexandra Morgan, believe that Haiti has tremendous assets that can be leveraged to rebuild the country. Among these are the aforementioned data gathered in the wake of the earthquake as well as an expanding technological infrastructure and technology-based services - personal computing devices, broadband networks, mobile telephony, etc. - and the Haitian people, the nearly 10 million of them who possess knowledge critical to making decisions about how to reconstruct the country. Unfortunately, to date, these resources - particularly the latter - remain largely untapped, underutilized, mismatched, or marginalized in reconstruction efforts.

Without question, reconstructing Haiti, in part, means restoring and improving education - which involves building schools. Yet, a host of unknowns exist that negatively impact the capacity of the Ministry of National Education and Professional Training (MENFP), or any domestic or international entity, to effectively improve the educational infrastructure. Mobile and open source GIS technologies and VGI present new opportunities for data collection and can play a key role in supplying needed data for school construction, renovations, and investments.

MENFP and partners, for example, could customize a standard questionnaire for schools to complete and submit via SMS or other electronic service, and engage the public to crowdsource information about schools in their areas, surrounding resources, and other types of information that cannot be captured through automated means (e.g. GPS or remote sensing) or due to resource constraints. As a starting point, this VGI can be combined and mapped with more credible i.e. verified sources, such as the breadth of data collected to map urban to rural migration as well as data related to the ever-changing Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and spontaneous settlements that have reconfigured urban spaces.

Such an approach can at once begin verifying the credibility of the incoming VGI and help the Ministry visually begin to identify types and locations of various educational infrastructure needs. The Ministry and their partners then can use this information, along with other pertinent data, to determine candidate sites for new schools, and use the government's limited human resources, as well as those of their partners, to conduct more manageably in-depth assessments and analyses of sites to determine optimal locations.

The new data gathered and added to the spatial data infrastructure through this process would yield near- and long-term local and national benefits. In a sense, this approach would embed a sort of feedback loop whereby the existing SDI is used to inform the reconstruction process during which more data is created, collected, and added to the SDI, thus broadening it and making it more useful for further reconstruction.

Two years after the January 2010 earthquake, it's time to move beyond the crisis and towards an asset-based approach to reconstruction. GIS and VGI can be used to help establish a research-based framework that guides domestic and international reconstruction decisions and investment.

As we mentioned in our recent post about testing WiFi antennas across the San Francisco Bay, we at Inveneo rely heavily on Google Earth to better understand the complex wireless network projects we implement in rural and developing regions.

Google Earth is fantastic tool for understanding any project involving geospatial data on a macro as well as a micro level.  Google Earth can also help you better communicate the where component of your project to your coworkers, your partners, and your funders.

If you're working in a remote rural region and have tried to put Google Earth to work on your project, though, chances are you've run into it's one key limitation:  it relies heavily on the Internet.

I recently discovered a free tool I'm excited to try out that looks like it will play a big part in my workflow as I analyze wireless networks for Inveneo.  Google Earth Voyager allows you to automatically fill your Google Earth cache with data for a project region you define. 

You can run Voyager to fill your cache when you have a fast connection to the Internet, and have all the data you need available offline when you're operating on your laptop out in the field.

Google Earth Voyager was developed by an Egyptian software engineer named Tamer Louis.  You'll find the direct link to the program zip file here.  The file is currently called gev6.zip, though it looks like the filename changes with each new version Tamer rolls out.

The guys over at Google Earth Blog are also thinking about this problem, and have provided a great writeup on optimizing your cache settings for offline use.  They also link to an interesting forum discussion on saving multiple versions of your GE cache for different regions.  You'll need to quit GE to swap the caches, basically tricking the program into thinking there's only one cache.

We'd love to hear about any other techniques you have found useful for dealing with Google Earth in offline locations out in the field.