AAG 2016 session "Disrupt Geo: new ideas from the front lines of maps, mobile, and big data"

[Alan McConchie]

Dear Bay Area Public Lab people, or anyone traveling to the Bay Area for the AAG, 

Renee Sieber and I are organizing a special session of lightning talks and panel discussions at the upcoming Association of American Geographers conference (in San Francisco in March/April 2016). We want reach out beyond the usual suspects of academic geographers who normally attend the conference, and bring in some of the fascinating people doing interesting geospatial work with new and innovative technologies. We would especially love to have one or more people from this community give a presentation about the Public Lab's unique and radical approach to citizen science and grassroots mapmaking.

The registration for the AAG is not that cheap, and unfortunately we can't provide any subsidy or payment for our speakers. A one day pass to the conference is $225, or a full pass for students is $155. (see: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/register). If this fee is too much of a burden for you or for anyone else you'd like to recommend for this session, let us know and maybe there is some way we can get you into the event informally. 

Note that the exact day of the event has not been set, but we know it will be sometime during the main AAG conference, in the range of March 29 through April 2.

Full announcement follows (also available at http://mappingmashups.net/aag-2016-call-for-lightning-talks/)

Let us know if you have any questions!

Thanks,
Alan and Renee


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Disrupt Geo: new ideas from the front lines of maps, mobile, and big data
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Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
March 29 – April 2, 2016
San Francisco, California

Organizers:
Renee Sieber, McGill University
Alan McConchie, University of British Columbia / Stamen Design

Having the AAG in San Francisco—the epicenter of geoweb innovation and disruption—offers a unique opportunity for dialog between academic geographers and geoweb practitioners. In this special AAG session, we invite academics, industry professionals, non-academic researchers, and activists, basically anyone doing really interesting geo-things who wants to show them off. Our goal is to create a lively interaction between different perspectives, with a low barrier to entry: no elaborate prepared presentations required!

The format will be a mixture of short lightning talks, Q&A sessions, and open discussion. Most of the lightning talk speakers will be selected in advance, but we will also set aside a healthy amount of time for unconference-style presentations, selected on the day of the event by the attendees of the sessions.

We’d like to invite you to sign up for a lightning talk now! Lightning talks will be approximately 5 minutes each (maximum 10 minutes). Examples of possible topics for lightning talks:

• New uses of remote sensing data
• Innovations in web mapping, tiles, and rendering
• Balloon mapping and kite mapping
• Advances in geocoding
• Active and passive sensing of the environment
• Quantified self applications and self-experiments
• Novel uses of drones
• Sharing/gig/on-demand economy apps that rely on geospatial/locational data handling
• Hyperlocal social apps
• Alternate learning/educational approaches (e.g., Maptime)
• OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G
• GeoDataViz
• Big Data and Data Science with geographic/locational data
• Geoweb ethics
• Critical GIS/geoweb

If you are interested in presenting a lightning talk please contact Renee (renee....@mcgill.ca) and Alan (al...@stamen.com) ASAP. Ideally we would like to hear expressions of interest before the AAG Session Organization Deadline ends on November 18th, 2015. However, there will be some room for expressions of interest after that date. You will not have to submit an abstract, but we do want to know roughly what you plan to talk about! You will need to register for the AAG conference at AAG.org.