There are more than a few people I need to thank, but let’s go with this list for now:

• Huge props to Dave Ambrose and the rest of The Real Numbers for humoring me. And rocking out, as usual.
• Matt McKenna for making my rough edit pop.
• Cristian Hernandez for engineering the first mix.
• Andy Freeman for delivering the final mix, flawless as always.
• Jake Richmond & Bay Area Tone for the video gear.
• Clark Hatchet for cheering us on and rallying the troops.
• Alia Anderson, Erin Cooke, Andy Russell and Saskia van Gendt for all the extra help.
• Finally, all of the amazing wigglers for coming out and helping us celebrate The Wiggle!

The original impetus for the trip was to attend the wedding of my girlfriend’s Dutch cousin, which provided the perfect opportunity for some solid international travel. So, to start, we spent a gloriously cozy week with her family in Amsterdam, riding bikes, taking in art and architecture, cruising in canal boats, and drinking Heineken. Here are some of the Holland highlights:

Holland is beautiful, green, wet, and grey, so, after the overcast, we decided to hit up the Mediterranean for some much needed sun. Enter Italy, specifically Rome and the Amalfi Coast south of Naples. Incredible food, remarkable history and barely controlled chaos provided a surprisingly relaxing yet most romantic retreat for our second week out. Check out some of the memorable moments:

As I mentioned, the adventure continues at Change.org. I’ll be capturing some of my initial thoughts after my first week on the job, so stay tuned!

It’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting in a coffeeshop in San Francisco waiting for clean laundry, including a new-to-me jacket I bought yesterday. A jacket to dispel the summer cold that has once again descended upon San Francisco. While I wait, I’m finally starting to play around with Google+, with high hopes that it will likewise dispel a similar cold that has fallen across the internet of late…the cold, bleak specter that is Facebook. I will spare you my usual rant here, except to say I am more than concerned that our social fabric is being re-woven by a gaggle of white, privileged, twenty-somethings more preoccupied with profit than the privacy (or security) of their user base. Frankly, this is a political issue that must be addressed, and soon–an argument that Carne Ross so eloquently makes in her recent post on Alternet.org. (Also, please consult Danah Boyd’s required reading on privacy in the age of social media straightaway.)

Of course, as Ross points out, putting all of my hopes in Google is quite naive…believe me, I’m aware of the irony. But still, I can’t escape all of the benefit that Google has delivered in it’s quest to index the world’s information. A noble goal if there ever were one. “Don’t be evil,” remember? For me, Google+ shines as a glimmer of hope for the regained control of online identities we have so diligently created and readily handed off to corporate caretakers. And today, I hold that glimmer of hope in my lap, staring at it intensely, waiting for it to illuminate a new, just path for online identity and the social web.

Alas, I look through a Google+, darkly. As a Google Apps user–I have managed noveltimes.com through Google Apps since 2007–I am a second class Google+ user. You see, Google Profiles are not available to Apps Users, and Google+ is keyed to Profiles. The lack of Profiles support for Apps is an issue well documented in the Google support forums. And Google tells us that Profiles for Apps is coming soon, but “soon” can be an eternity in the era of social media.

Despite this hurdle, I have found my way on to Google+ through the Gmail account associated with my Google Profile. However, since much of the power of Google+ results from building a social experience on top of the wide assortment of Google services employed by the average user (think Gmail, Gcal, Picasa, Blogger, Maps, +1, etc., etc., etc.), this new social network will indeed seem dark. For the time being, I’ll play along at home, gingerly, so as not to invest too much time, effort and content in what may turn out to be a temporary Google+ profile. Here’s my profile if you want to say hello, but don’t get too attached, I may not be around very long. And I guess that’s the whole point. With the present state of social media, you can never guarantee control over your online identity. Let’s hope that Google+ comes a step closer.

The Wiggle as it looked at the beginning of time--1866. Photo courtesy of Joel Pomerantz.

I love The Wiggle. If you ride your bike regularly in San Francisco, chances are you also love The Wiggle. Because to know The Wiggle is to love The Wiggle. If you don’t ride your bike regularly in San Francisco, or if you don’t do anything regularly in San Francisco, you probably want to know what the heck The Wiggle is.

The answer is simple: The Wiggle is San Francisco’s BEST bicycle route. It gets you from East to West with the least amount of elevation. Bicyclists in SF are fanatical about The Wiggle. As am I. So I decided to write a song about it. A jingle, really. I’m pretty proud of it, and people seem to like it. The next logical step, of course, was to film a PSA for The Wiggle, so I’ve assembled a group of friends to do just that.

We’re shooting the video next Sunday, May 22 @ 2pm. We’d love for you to join us. More information can be found here: DoTheWiggle.com. And don’t worry….if you can’t make it, we’ll be posting The Wiggle PSA soon enough.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a two-day training entitled “Mapping Environmental Scenarios & Solutions with Google Technology” hosted by the Google Earth Outreach team. “Pleasure” might be something of an understatement — not only was the training very well executed by the capable and knowledgeable Earth Outreach crew, but the sheer volume of free tools and web services that they dropped on us was mindboggling. In the hopes of sharing the wealth, especially for those of us in the public sector who need all the free resources we can marshall, I’m writing this post to tell you about what I learned, in two parts. In this first post, I’ll cover the basics of the Google Maps & Earth services, as well as introduce you to some brand new tools: Fusion Tables, for managing and visualizing data, and Open Data Kit (ODK), for collecting and aggregating data. In Part II, I’ll show all the power users out there whay they can do with the Maps and Earth APIs, and finish up with some amazing odds and ends tucked away on the Google shelves.

Maps & Earth 

At this point, in April of 2011, I’m assuming most of you reading this are very aware of Google Maps and Google Earth. I won’t spend much time explaining them other than to say that both have revolutionized the geospatial world, in both two and three dimensions.

I, for one, would hard-pressed to imagine life without Google Maps. Yes, there are other mapping services available, but Google Maps has always seemed to me the cleanest and tightest. Or, to borrow a phrase from Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell of SNL, Google Maps is the best, true that, Double True! But what really makes Maps stand out from the crowd is the ease with which new maps can be created and shared. At SF Environment, we use an increasing number of Google Maps to share information with a geo-location component, such as this, this, and this.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: Google has just launched Map Maker that lets users directly edit places in Google Maps, from buildings to businesses.

The general internet public is probably less familiar with Google Earth. With Earth, Google has created their own 3-D model of the globe, complete with rendered satellite imagery and even line models of parcels and buildings. The result is a truly immersive and very powerful tool for storytelling. I still remember being awed by Rebecca Moore’s 2006 “Logging Flyover” of the Santa Cruz Mountains that single-handedly changed public opinion about a dispute over logging rights at the time. Creating custom tours or “fly-overs” with text, links, embedded video and even audio narration does take some time but is remarkably simple. Check out a few great examples here and here.

Fusion Tables & ODK

One of the most exciting tools we covered at the training was Google’s new Fusion Tables which just may herald the dawn of web-based GIS. Born in Google Labs as an experiment in cloud data management, Fusion Tables is an attempt to combine data management and collaboration to enable “merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing.” Pretty cool stuff, and sorely needed.

At first glance, Fusion Tables looks like a beta version of Google Spreadsheets. The service is very new and still a little rough around the edges, but I don’t doubt that it will soon shine as do more mature Google offerings. Data can be entered directly or imported via a text file, but that’s where the similarity with Spreadsheets ends. Once your data is in, simply hit a button and you’ve got a map. Publishing to Maps is super easy, as is collaboration — all you or you collaborators need is a google account and you are good to go. If you have multiple data sources that reference the same entities, you can easily “fuse” those sources through creating “joins” without knowing how to write out SQL queries. Have a question for your collaborators about some of that fused data? Fusion Tables has built-in discussion tools.

Clearly Google is getting into the GIS game. If Fusion Tables wasn’t enough of an indicator, Google has even begun to post Fusion Tables of public data sets upon which you can build your own mapping project. My favorite? State and County boundary tablesobtained from the U.S. Census Bureau and imported by the Fusion Tables team. Sweet! Google is offering an incredible service with Fusion Tables, and it looks like people are already adopting, as evidenced by some State of California data sets being stored as Fusion Tables.

What if  the data you want to visualize needs to be first be collected? Open Data Kitpromises to integrate these geo-location tools directly into the fieldwork so often necessary to generate data. Open Data Kit is actually a project of the University of Washington’s Change Group that is supported by Google and hosted on Google Code. This set of free and open source tools allows developers to build data collection forms for Android mobile devices. You can take the term “developer” lightly here — in one of the breakout sessions during the Earth Outreach training, we built a data collection form in a matter of minutes. Once published, users can download the ODK Collect app, call up your form, and start logging data that is immediately aggregated on a server with ODK Aggregate, ready for extraction.

Pulling all of these tools together, one possible work flow for data collection and presentation could look like this:

collect with ODK Collect >> aggregate with ODK Aggregate >> extract to Fusion Tables >> publish to Google Maps/Earth

We ran a simple exercise cataloging and mapping plants using Android phones and, while there were a few bumps, it was clear that this is an amazing way to empower your team with a full set of geo-location tools, from data collection all the way through to visualization. After the workshop, my mind was reeling with the possibilities for deploying this suite of tools. Now, if I could only find the time…

Which brings us to the end of Part I of this Google love fest. Check back soon for a deeper dive into the possibilities of Google APIs, along with a few other exciting odds and ends.

I was interviewed about this project by Anna Bloom, one of the first round of Fellows at the newly minted Code For America. This article was actually posted on Civic Commons in December right before I left for Ecuador, so here it is, better late than never.

Here’s an excerpt to whet your whistle:

Lawrence Grodeska, Internet Communications Coordinator at San Francisco Department of the Environment, is steering a diverse group of local agencies to create something greater than the sum of their parts: a centralized database for residents to find businesses that offer recycling, reuse and hazardous waste disposal services in the Bay Area. Enter your location and your waste item — a soda can, batteries or unused medication — and the proposed application will deliver your options for local hazardous waste disposal businesses and other resources — a depot for creative reuse for artists, perhaps, or a residential pickup program.

Special thanks to Anna for all of her time and effort learning about this project, and for her patience while waiting for me to answer her questions!

Working in the public sector can be challenging, especially during those times when the strict hierarchy of government dictates priorities, timelines and tasks. Unfortunately, without rejiggering the machinations of government, this top down approach will not change anytime soon. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all of us in the Government 2.0 movement from hoping and dreaming that we can begin to change the lumbering institutions at the local level all the way up to the federal. As this blog can attest, that change has begun, but incrementally. So maybe we do need to think beyond web technologies and open data to question the social structures which make change in government so difficult.

Look no further than BetterMeans, a radical open enterprise governance model masquerading as a slick new project management tool.

Now that’s change we can believe in.

The software itself is a neat mix of project management and social capital platform that opens up the doors to the decision-making process for a given project or set of projects. Users contribute ideas to the projects which hold their interest in an open and transparent way. Users themselves are ranked by others that have worked with them on previous projects so that everyone is kept accountable. This collaborative approach then helps the group rank options for how to proceed based on the experience and insight of the entire group instead of relying solely on direction from management. Definitely check out the video above, you’ll see how well thought out this platform really is.

So, getting back to government. What is our tolerance for really incorporating the ideas of every member of a team? What would happen if our departments were more democratic in sourcing ideas and setting priorities? Or what if our elected officials were required to balance their agendas alongside those of rank and file public employees, or the general public at large? It might be pie in the sky, but I’m guessing that we’d garner more than a few great ideas, while engaging and inspiring a whole swath of disinterested civil servants. Just a thought.

a Marine Iguana’s perspective, originally uploaded by noveltimes.

It’s taken me a lot longer than I had hoped to post this, but I’m back from Ecuador and have plenty of thoughts and photos to share. Saskia and I returned on New Year’s Eve, but we were both sick with a stomach bug, and then I caught a nasty head cold that knocked me out for most of the next week. Well, I’m happy to report that I now have a clean bill of health and, more importantly, the trip to Ecuador, with the exception of the return home, was incredible. I’m planning on posting a run down of my trip, but in the meantime, here are some photos to whet your whistle. Enjoy!

Come mid-December, I will be on a plane bound for Quito, Ecuador, to meet my girlfriend and two other friends who will be finishing up a delegation into Ecuador’s Oriente region and a few of the indigenous tribes therein. From there, we’ll head to the Galapagos for a boat tour of the islands Darwin visited over 150 years ago, in the process fomenting his ideas about evolution through natural selection. It looks like we might be doing this tour:

Our itinerary is still up in the air, but suffice to say there will be birds, cloud forests, long, winding bus rides, and a lot of fumbling around en Espanol. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Latin America, and I’m really looking forward to going back. Ecuador seems like an incredible country, brimming with beauty and life. Of course, Ecuadorians have had plenty of struggles against the forces of globalization over the past few decades, so it will be interesting to see that side, too. All told, I’m really excited and very ready for some time off from work with some good friends experiencing another culture and ecology. You know what this means — be prepared for the travel blogging that will ensue!

Seriously, this is a huge achievement. Aside from the long hours spent in the studio. Beyond all the hand-wringing over the album design. Certainly more than the money spent. This is a huge achievement because four guys spent a lot of time together crafting some good songs and then turned their sights on the studio and didn’t let go or give up until they sounded even better. I want to thank those guys because this album would not be possible with out them. Evan, for getting me going. Dave for keeping me going and writing some kick ass tunes (and making my tunes even better). Andy for just being a monster talent whatever booth he’s in. And extra special props to Andy’s company Bay Area Tone.

Most of all, though, this feels like such a huge achievement to me because so much of me is in this album. More than any other project in which I’ve participated over the course of my musical “career,” this music is my music, and this album is a testament to me embracing the musician inside. It marks my growth as a guitar player and my birth as a songwriter. And it reminds me that you can’t run from the creative impulse.

So take a listen. Maybe even buy a copy. Most importantly, enjoy!

As a special bonus, check out the album art below. I love it. Mad props to my friend Wendy MacNaughton for the artwork, and special thanks to David Marr for putting the whole thing together.