This is an example of urban decoration which changes the way we perceives things …

Every time I pass by this view I am astonished of so much beauty…

founder of locative media site headmap www.headmap.org

and former head of strategy and communications at Mathengine [real time game physics]

Apparentely he is connected with the projects:
headmap.org
locative.org
p2pmap.org
gpster

Pros,
1. Humans are spatial beings. Even with the world spanning Internet there is still a need for real world data about real world issues. The net has provided a focus on how to enter the computer, but in fact we don’t want to enter ‘cyberspace’ – we want the computer to come out into our world and be forced to deal with us as we are. Peer based knowledge systems allow better knowledge about the real space.
2. Simply a new kind of GIS layer – the ‘community dialogue’ layer. To add to existing GIS technology.
3. Focus is on colliqual knowledge; recognizing inability to compete in traditional GIS areas. See thirdvoice.com for example.
4. Apathy is equivilant to disenfranchisement. Suddenly we have a public, unbiased, non-partisan, straight-forward way of participating in civic affairs – one which actively educates its members and which is community based and focused. This will be an inclusive democracy versus an exclusive one such as current Western Democracies and should lessen the frustration of its members.
5. Today we live in a system of such complexity that our unaugumented faculties cannot resolve it. A system like this can act as a better community vision for modern times. Hopefully it will permit larger structures such as cities and provincial government to act like small towns in that the vast inferential and non-computational power of many human minds can be brought fruitfully to bear on problems rather than acting as an obscuring cloud of too many voices.
6. Access to ‘life-information’ is a human right in that the quality of human life is dramatically affected by knowledge of the world around us. Knowing about our world may make us more healthy and able to thrive in that world. It is a right, regardless of being good or bad.
7. A sublime educational toy, the capacity for predictive analysis will allow the exploration of ideas that otherwise would never be engaged upon, and by people who traditionally are unable to clearly express their opinions, such as the poor and the new immigrants.
8. Finally creates a common standard language for the dialogue of conflict resolution.
9. Reintroduces a physical locality and dialogue to our increasingly virtualized world. Many of us living in the larger western cities do not know any of our physical neighbours. It is arguable that there is some benefit in choosing to associate with neighbours as well as distant souls.
10. The standard of living we enjoy is not equivalant to the quality of life we expect. We may find ourselves forming intentional communities where cars, television, and five day a week labour are minimized and other factors are consciously selected for.
11. Ammenable to local systems, and the idea of binding work energy to a community by barter and other less liquid work exchange systems.
12. Puts individuals on par with organizations in some respects. An organization has a mandate to benefit its own net worth, and will aggressively seek to find geospatial predictions that benefit itself. However if other clear options exist, they should be able to show a better bottom line than the Corporate one. Gross miscarriages of Corporate and Government action should become less possible.
13. Geographical displays are of a much higher bandwidth as compared to text, and being a direct metaphor for our geospatial world, are much more salient. Information phrased geographically can be communicated more easily and with more persuasion.
14. A system like this could grow up in parallel with old style politics, and in a sense, recolonize Western Democracy, effecting a structural change for the betterment of all humankind. Traditional Government may continue to move into a purely moral posture, much in the way the Catholic Church has, vilified by many, cherished by many, but ultimately not allowed to be a part of important decision making.

Cons
1. When humans are aware of a thing they often seek to exploit it. A Government may seek to micro-manage a forest, attempting to preserve what they perceive as its basic essence, yet still perform some selective logging on it. The human condition is not to leave any territory purely alone, despite the fact that any understanding is always incomplete.
2. People who promote any system of politics or government often have some kind of personal benefit as well. What is the benefit to this author? And what is the benefit to other people who would support the scheme?
3. Being a technological device, this system may not be accessible to the poor, disenfranchised and imprisoned who do make up our society. By failing to represent these people, the system has a warped view of the community.
4. Should it become readily accessible to those traditionally without power, it may be used as a weapon. For example the prison population may be able to demonstrate and ratify the need to eliminate anti-drug laws, and to punish those people who promoted them.
5. The highly open nature of the system may create conflict, again this is a human problem in our lack of tolerance for systems and people alien to ourselves. Usenet already has a problem like this, and that is in a purely virtual space. Suddenly differences of ethic and behaviour may become much more incindiary when they are seen to be geospatially next door to each other.
6. A system like this is in some ways just another weapon, designed to create compliance. It’s merely a new type of club to hit the dissenters over the head with. As humans we also need to learn to stop being so focused on domination, to allow a place for the other. Domination is a symptom of fear, perhaps we can move from an authoritarian and domination oriented culture to one that faces fear resolutely, without encysting ourselve within law and structure.
7. Our society tends towards the machinelike. We are asked to perform harder each year. This system can be perceived as a restructuring of the inefficient society of the past, into one which is more able to produce, and to maximize work time and effort.
8. We live in the jaws of a machine which seems to be digesting the fabric of society for energy. First it breaks down the extended family and then the nuclear family. Is a system like this merely another step in that progression? Certainly the individual human living alone is the most energy expending entity, having to purchase in duplicate those things that are normally shared.
9. The system is a representation of reality, not reality.
10. Destabilizes the noise-dampening measures our society has built into it. Instead of only reasonable placating voices may be a barrage of angry, uninformed masses, twisting every argument towards their own benefit, regardless of the general course of society.
11. The spirit and theme of this system will undoubtably be mutated before it is realized. Perhaps some of the mutations may be quite dangerous.
12. Lack of an outside. A system like this should allow for experiment, always leave room for a culture outside of its influence, and if none exists, then create free-zones where its rules do not apply. Even within itself, geography is not everything, and many other kinds of decisions must still be resolved by other means.

Some interesting thoughts from their philosophy:

Consider the space immediately around yourself: It is likely that there is an elderly person within a hundred meters who could use help or even just company. Within two hundred meters there must be twelve opportunities to reap a cash reward for some work, or even just a good feeling from volunteering. There must be a hundred lawnmowers one could borrow in that same distance, twenty cars going somewhere useful, at least ten potential business partners to start new ventures with and surely one person of nearly identical interests.  Why can’t we share that knowledge within our communities more easily?

The person to person map helps people share transient and volatile ‘life information’ with each other in a structured, secure and persistent way. It is designed to help communities regrow that shared ‘knowledge commons’ that was once a familiar part of small town life.  The project is a frustrated response to the kind of super-urbanization and super-commercialization of all of the human social spaces.  It is designed to help encourage ‘dialogue’ in an age of ‘broadcast’ – to encourage ‘one-to-one voice’ as opposed to ‘one-to-many voice’.  It is a collection of tools and is a philosophy.

One key feature of the project is the map view which shows a top down view of a community (such as a small town).  Users can highlight or add their own features at will and can see each others input with filtering.  This effectively lets users hang ‘post-it’ notes in space [ Ben Russell 1999 –  headmap.com ].  For example one can post a note saying “This restarant is great!” or “I lost my kitten here” or “Anybody want to go out and play?” or “The parking bylaw at this corner is misleading” or “Watch out for the police radar gun here today” or “Apartment for rent in this area” or “There’s a hotspring up here” to any of the other thousands upon thousands of snippets of grass roots knowledge that typically cannot be represented or persisted on the Internet as it exists today but that can often make a significant difference between a good experience and a bad experience when visiting an old or new place.

Above and beyond the mapping feature there are many other tools for sharing and organizing knowledge.  There is a tool to help describe situations with animated 3d maquettes suitable for everything from re-constructing a car accident for a judicial hearing or for letting children tell and share their own stories while remaining competitive with TV.  There is an ongoing goal to provide technology to perform powerful social, economic and environmental ‘simulation services’ so that communities can actually simulate and predict the impact of policy decisions before they happen.  There are tools to help people schedule dependencies and coordinate work-flow and there are strong privacy and filtering tools to keep the system from being bogged down by noise.

With tools like this communities may begin to see a higher quality of life experience for their members as they pool awareness and knowledge much more deeply.  It is our hope that this system and other systems like it will play a part in re-capturing a sense of community for an increasingly mechanized world, and that we begin to rewrite the rules by which our society operates; to move everyday decisions we all make from being heavily codified, brittle, inadequate and often just plain wrong to being local, immediate, alive and ultimately more human. When we know what is right next door, and when we’re allowed to say it to each other, then a lot of our decisions can be quite different.

The goal of this project was to improve the quality of life by allowing user to share transient and volatile ‘life-information’ about their everyday world. From their internet site:

… One aspiration is to find easier ways to share information in a communities knowledge commons.  For example it is likely that there is an elderly person within a hundred meters who could use help or even just company. Within two hundred meters there must be twelve opportunities to make some money, or do some volunteering. There must be at least one found lost kitten and ten lawnmowers one could borrow in that same distance, twenty cars going somewhere useful, many potential business partners to start new ventures with and surely one person of complementary interests to share a life with. …

Although of great interest their internet site seems to be abandoned since 2002. In addition, it is not clear what they meant by “transient and volatile” life information.

One of the core concept of this document is that “place is space with meanings” (like per Erickson definition 1993), meanings that place affords kind of activity.

This reflect on my idea that people superimpose meanings to space, creating a net of values of the places they inhabit. Most of the processed by which this happen are unconscious, hidden in the psychology of the person. Other process are proper of his/her social interaction. In fact, we found ourselves often giving a meaning of a certain place because of the relation that that place has with another person. So finally, the meaning attached to a certain place is a the centre of a “triads” which is constituted by us, our peers and the space we came in contact with.

What are the cognitive processes by which this happens in details? Also, how these processes connected with the “spatial assumption” we usually do?

The author, Nico, resumes the state of the art in terms of projects which develops around this concept of “spatial awareness”. As far as he knows, it seems that there is a lack of attention of these collaborative process of opinion forming and development.

An old picture I had in my camera … My last holiday I went to Cervinia, it was great …