Mapping Hacks

SFGate had a nice article on how various mapping services and device manufacturers have reacted to the MacArthur Maze incident.

Brady Forrest, your Where 2.0 program chair, and Jeremy Kreitler, director of product management for Yahoo Maps,  were both quoted.  I love what Jeremy said “‘We want to react to this and put a fix in place,’ Kreitler said, ‘and not do the obvious wrong thing and send users down the wrong roads.’”

It is such a clear statement, while at the same retaining a deep and fundamental geek world view.  “Not do the obvious wrong thing…”

I am only sometimes able to decouple from my enmeshment with ‘my’ culture and notice things like this.  I _think_ a non-geek might say something like ‘We want to do the right thing,” but geeks have trouble making statements like that because they are so darned hard to justify.

What is the ‘Right’ thing, and who decides?  It is much easier to determine what the obvously wrong thing to do would be…keep routing people where they can not go.

It is akin to the Extreme Programming adage, more followed in breach, to do the ‘Simplest Useful Thing.’  That seems simple and direct enough, right?   But somehow it still feels a bit ‘off.’  Jo came up with a statement changed my life (for real but smallish domain specific values of ‘change’  and ‘life’).  She says to do the Simplest Least Useless Thing.  In addition to having a far superior acronym than ‘SUT,’ it comes closer to describing the zen like clarity of mind which aids in creating systems.

Our buddy Mikel Maron’s blog Brain Off was quoted, in this case talking about a bridge destroyed by Katrina which is still on the map: ”

“The issue is with the data providers, Navteq and TeleAtlas, whose business processes insert huge delays between reality and its representation catching up,” Maron wrote. “Yes, there are efforts right now to rebuild the physical bridge, but that doesn’t excuse a huge obvious mistake from persisting for over 1.5 years.”

Note that possibly independent use of the word ‘obvious.’  Some things are just obviously wrong…

Mikel has a post ‘Katrina destroyed that bridge but it’s still in Google Maps’  In which he makes some really important points.

“This is the most basic type of situational awareness that distributed, cooperative mapping can bring to disaster situations. Simply letting everyone know that a bridge doesn’t exist is not without technical challenges in a disaster zone, but we’re also talking about an organizational and social problem. The Global Connection Project which processed NOAA imagery post-Katrina, for Google Earth, is growing into something more substantial to address this.”
Mapping in the news…when you can’t go home (that way) again we get quoted

Postnot: I hardly wish to pile on (liar) but this quote in the sfgate article jumps out “The two main private providers of mapping information, TeleAtlas and Navteq, were not available for comment Tuesday afternoon…”

Posted in events, news, disaster |

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