Reid Beels

Saturday morning, as the geonerds filtered in to WhereCampPDX (an unconference of assorted geo-geekery that I helped to organize), some of the guys from Metro's Data Resource Center covered the walls with a collection of interesting maps from their archives. The maps provided a great source of conversation in the breaks between sessions, and were a great set-up for photos like this one.

First of all, I'd like to give huge thanks to all of the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees that made the weekend what it was. Stretching multiple events across three days and four different venues is no easy task, and a few volunteers really put in extraordinary effort to make it all fit together. You can take a look at Igal's thank you post to the planning group for a look behind the scenes (and to get an idea about how you might be able to help out next year *hint, hint*).

All of the hard work paid off and we had a great weekend of discussion and discovery. In her write up on the game day, the completely awesome Kate Chapman (who traveled the farthest to attend WhereCampPDX) wrote:

WhereCampPDX was one of the best unconferences I’ve ever attended. It was well organized without being too controlled with a great a mix of people.

This is, of course, a great thing to hear.

Some Highlights

• I lead a session on Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse with Locative Tools. It was a fun mix of exploring technologies for quickly collecting and disseminating information in case of a disaster, ideas about adding fictional overlays to OpenStreetMap, and perusal of several legitimate scientific papers about our chances of surviving once the zombies arrive. (Coexistence is statistically impossible.)
• Audrey talked about post-digital mapping and got me excited about progressively-revealing origami map designs again. (Sadly, the idea didn't occur to me until after the session)
• Igal led a really neat show-and-tell session about strange maps. He then posted very comprehensive session notes because he's awesome like that.
• We discussed implications and implementations of adding more geographic features to Calagator. (A vital step on the road to world domination.)
• At our Saturday evening Hackfest, I teamed up with Kate Chapman, Michael Weisman, and James Fee to start development on Super Mayor, an app built on top of Foursquare that adds up mayorships to grant sovereignty over entire districts of a city.
• We played a round of live-action PacMan on Sunday using iPhones for real-time tracking. The tracking didn't work so well, but we learned some interesting things about how Safari on the iPhone deals with location refreshes and got to run around outside.
• Also on Sunday, I participated in a fun geocaching activity set up by Jim Cser. It was a nicely designed course of targets, all fairly close to our headquarters for the day, Backspace.
• I borrowed a camera (thanks Ben!) and caught a few photos, mostly portraits of our attendees doing mappy things.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in WhereCampPDX. I had fun and learned a lot and I hope you did too.