Code, Camera, Action

The National Geographic Society, in addition to making a magazine, TV shows and website, also funds research and exploration. Once a year, they bring their grantees together for anExplorers’ Symposium in Washington, DC. I had a chance to attend some of the sessions.

For the most part, the explorers are scientists from different fields — anthropologists, archaeologists, conservationists, photographers, educators, oceanographers, epidemiologists, paleontologists, geneticists, geographers, linguists, urban planners, and more. One of the goals is connection forming, both between scientists and between editors of the magazine and TV show and these experts. Ideally, editors get ideas for stories, and researchers make connections that can help them take their work in new, cross-disciplinary directions.

Nowhere was this more clear than the with Thomas Culhane and Katey Walter, two of this year’s Emerging Explorers. You can watch their symposium presentations in the video embedded below. Their chance meeting at the symposium may have laid the groundwork for future collaboration.

Thomas Culhane is an urban planner who specializes on how do-it-yourself solar projects and can transform cities. You can read more about his escapades on Solar Cities, his blog. Right now, he is working with the Zabaleen garbage recyclers of Cairo to install solar hot water heaters and also cooking gas generators. These combine organic waste and anaerobic bacteria to produce methane that can be burned for cooking. While this works just fine in summer, Cairo winters are just cold enough to slow the bacteria down. That’s a problem Culhane would like to overcome.

Katey Walter is an aquatic ecologist and biogeochemist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She’s been researching permafrost and what happens when it thaws in Siberia and Alaska. Permafrost is frozen organic material like ancient vegetation and mammoth bones. When it thaws, the land sinks and lakes form in the low places. Beneath the water this organic material begins to decay, and methane gas bubbles up. Walter’s work has been to measure that methane and estimate its impact on climate change. In the course of her work, she’s surveyed many ponds in the arctic. Many of those have methane bubbling out of through soft spots of the ice — even through the winter. That methane is made by bacteria that work at temperatures much colder than a Cairo winter.

So Thomas Culhane just might get some cold weather methane bugs to experiment with in Cairo. Meanwhile, Katey Walter is working with Alaskan and Native American organizations to find a use for the methane closer to those bubbling lakes.

I spent much of the week at the NetSquared N2Y4 conference in Silicon Valley. NetSquared brings together social entrepreneurs, whose tech projects compete for funds. Last year the projects were mashups. This year’s theme was mobile.

To see the sort of work the competition inspired, take a look at the 14 featured projects that made it to the finals, or see my notes about the projects that presented on Wednesday.

Want some cooperation with that competition?

But what best illustrates the spirit of cooperation that underlies the N2Y4 competition involves two projects that, as it happened, did not win big prizes at NetSquared.

• PublicStuff wants to be the craigslist of local government interaction. This is a big job. In part, the project team envisions itself as a replacement for 311 systems (where citizens report litter or building code violations), at least for smaller cities.
• SeeClickFix takes on one part of this: it allows people to report problems in neighborhoods (graffiti or litter, say). It lets folks watch a particular neighborhood, and can provide email notifications when problems are reported there.

PublicStuff is trying to solve a much bigger problem. At this point, they have a working demo. SeeClickFix in contrast, has already released a product, with a widget that enables it to be used elsewhere, and a preliminary API.

Hearing both teams pitch, I wondered about this overlap. It seemed a shame for two startup teams to spend their time building the same thing. So I asked Kam Lasater, SeeClickFix’s tech lead, about the overlaps. Had the teams been in touch?

They had been talking since early in the competition. And PublicStuff was most likely going to use SeeClickFix’s maps.

What if PublicStuff made their money connecting SeeClickFix’s maps with government help desks?

Fine by them, Kam said. “We don’t want to do content management.”

And that, in brief, is why NetSquared is my kind of competition. There were other examples:SMS agricultural and medical projects in different countries left NetSquared intending to collaborate across teams. Multiple projects used the same FrontLineSMS technology.

In the end, social problems are bigger than any one of us. It’s rewarding to support a competition that brings that sort of altruistic thinking out in its participants. I’m a fan of NetSquared.