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Checking In: Coronavirus Edition
One of my startup groups suggested doing a check-in last week and one of the things I noticed In everyone’s worries was speculation about how markets might behave and comparisons to earlier periods of economic turmoil. I’ve been through 1987, 9/11 and 2008, so weighed in with my perspective.
The full effect of the 87 crash hit in 1990 right after I graduated from Columbia. Most of the companies I “interviewed” with at the career center admitted they weren’t hiring any time in the future. So, I temped my way to my first job at a small investment bank that went under within six weeks. I temped some more through most of April before landing an entry-level job in Business and Real Estate Valuation at Price Waterhouse. 9/11 pretty much ended my time there.
What I learned from that experience is that changing up your environment and learning how people do things at different companies is a good thing.
I did weird little jobs like stuffing gift boxes of logo socks at Ziff-Davis, cataloging buttons or prepping trunk shows at Chanel and a lot of phone banks and accounting. I learned a lot of software, and got pretty good at them.
I learned about how relationships work in business and solving problems, from the Chanel Boca Raton store dealing with button theft to fulfilling sweepstakes prizes and basic time and expense tracking. Plus if I ever got cold at Chanel I could always “go grab a sweater.”
9/11 was a weird time and very similar to now. Air travel was shut down. Bridges and tunnels were closed to private vehicles. Manhattan at least was pretty much on lockdown for three months. If you lived below 14th Street you had to evacuate.
Stores were open and I don’t remember a lot of hoarding. (I could be misremembering. I had a running drugstore.com diaper order so was probably pretty well-stocked, regularly). I remember hearing figures like $20 billion in losses just in NYC.
We didn’t have social distancing. That would have been devastating. There was a lot of bonding with neighbors and coworkers I hadn’t really known that well.
I was at PwC then, working remotely for the global web team, mostly operations and reporting. Some of my coworkers who worked out of the Jersey City office saw the towers go down. I had been going in for biweekly Tuesday all hands meetings, but that day was the alternate Tuesday, so I was home with my kids, getting my oldest ready to go meet her first preschool teachers.
We could go outside. The weather was beautiful, and so quiet. I remember a conversation in Sheep’s Meadow with a coworker who was losing her faith. I’d like to think I helped her.
In 2001, were already downsizing our department at PwC, so when I learned we were giving sublease space back to Lehman Brothers, I figured correctly I’d get laid off. That happened in January 2002.
By 2008 I had two school age kids and a part time contract at a virtual association. I had freelance design and technology gigs, too. We had just bought an apartment at the top of the market, but had sold our old one at a near 300% gain over ten years. So we felt secure.
But 2008 meant layoffs and job changes for my husband, who was at Citibank, then Ziegler, then BMO. We are pretty frugal but it’s amazing how much you can spend to live in this city. He is now a full time professor at BMCC. I teach two design classes at CityTech and advise a lot of startups and nonprofits. We’ve cut back, but we have two kids in college now, so feeling very uncertain.
I expect we will probably hear a lot of comparisons to previous disasters. It feels like potentially very different this time.
9/11 was shocking. We were in mourning. Thousands of lives. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who died. It’s going to be the same for us, but it’s going to happen over a longer period of time, and we may not be able to predict who it will be or when.
That by itself is going to mean a lot of mental anguish and a lot of business lost. Hospitality may get its bailout, but how long before people are comfortable traveling again? We may all get our “two weeks pay” from the Feds. Then what?
We startup entrepreneurs and business owners need to brace for it. We need to brace for limited funding opportunities. We need to reach out to each other and partner, do in-kind swaps. We need to share info on grants and other opportunities.
We can’t hold hands or hug anyone anymore, but we can stay connected and check in with each other.
Here’s my check-in:
Going Well: Working on transitioning a three day, three track, all volunteer, live conference to virtual and it is actually going well! I also have my kids home from college, and Simone has been baking!
Excited about: The Information Architecture Conference. My grandnephew, born this past Friday. Moving my classes at CityTech online, and, somewhat ironically, how the fact that isolation breeds misinformation makes Mucktracker, the news literacy app I’m working with, much more prescient and needed.
Nervous about: The conference. My parents. How long this social distancing will last, wifi bandwidth, my IRA, running out of TP.
So that’s my check-in. How are you doing? I have been working from home since 1997, so can offer tips to anyone finding themselves out of the office or incubator spaces for the duration. Feel free to post your check-in and questions in the comments.
Disaster Planning at Woodstock – 50 Years in Review
Article updated on the event’s 50th Anniversary with images from Woodstock then and in 2011 when this piece was first published.
August 30, 2011
This past weekend, while Irene was threatening the East Coast, my husband and I were in the Catskills for visiting day at our daughters’ summer camp. We decided to extend our stay through Monday to avoid the surge and inevitable traffic delays following the storm’s projected landfall in New York City on Sunday.
Rather than avoid trouble, we found ourselves in the middle of it, as the Catskills experienced some of the worst storm-surge damage in the country: downed trees, road blocks, raging forest streams. If fact, a large white pine at the inn where we were staying fell inches from our unit’s porch, bringing several smaller trees down with it.
When it was safe to venture out, a trip to the Bethel Woods Museum at Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center, site of the 1969 Woodstock festival, interestingly, provided some perspective on disaster planning in the area.
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was held from August 15-18, 1969 at Max Yasgur‘s dairy farm in the hamlet of White Lake, Town of Bethel, Sullivan County, NY. We passed Yasgur’s farm several times while exploring the area’s restaurants and outdoor recreation facilities.
The area is marked by rolling pastures and clear lakes reflecting big white clouds in deep blue skies. Aside from a very visible lawn signs either declaring “No Fracking!” or “Friends of Natural Gas,” it seems little has changed in forty some years.
Museum artifacts on the planning of the Woodstock festival showcased the local debate regarding the chosen site of the concert. With over 200,000 tickets pre-sold, planning for traffic and security was a huge concern, as was local opinion on exactly what the festival was to be.
The festival organizers had mere days to move from Wallkill, NY where local opposition succeeded in preventing it from being held there to White Lake, where the Bethel Town Supervisor approved the plan despite some local protest. Newspaper articles and advertisements documented the debate.
Also on view were documents from the local Sheriff’s department outlining traffic and security plans and telegrams to other county departments requesting additional coverage. Handwritten notes and official telegrams from Allegheny County and other Sheriff departments indicated a shortage of officers. All stated that they could not spare any men.
Traffic was beginning to get backed up days before the concert started so that it became impossible to get close to the festival site. People were leaving their cars on the highway and walking the rest of the way to the concert. Performers were flown in and out again by helicopter.
An estimated 400,000 people were in attendance at the concert’s peak.
Then there came the rain. Though not hurricane force, the rains that fell on the Woodstock festival and in the week leading into it created saturated conditions, muddy roads and an already difficult traffic situation.
Officials had called in 150 state troopers, and deputies from adjacent counties ultimately did pitch in to direct traffic away from the area. The Evening News of Newburgh, NY reported that by the last day of the festival, mainly due to a lack of food and unsanitary conditions, the crowd had dispersed to only 10,000 and no traffic jams were reported.
This weekend’s storm called for similar measures, but on a much smaller scale. As we left the area, we noted state troopers and national guardsmen directing traffic near the interchanges of Route 17, I-87 and Route 6. Southbound traffic on I-87 was closed above the Tappan Zee Bridge and it was an hour drive between Route 17 and our usual favorite route, the Palisades Parkway.
At the Route 6 traffic circle near Bear Mountain, the Sloatsburg exit was entirely washed away.
Could the traffic situation have been prevented? In 1969, the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department was working with an estimate of 50,000 concertgoers, a figure provided by the promoters that was 150,000 short of pre-sales figures.
From what I’ve seen from this weekend’s rains, emergency services would already have been taxed from heavy rains and flooding in the region. Had they known that attendance would approach half a million people, it is likely that the concert would have been called off. That said, I doubt it would have stopped the hundreds of thousands of people from coming.
Startup Business Development
Columbia Venture Community: Project Two.Eight
In 2022, I facilitated a workshop on Deriving Insights for Customer Development through effective user experience research for the inaugural cohort of Project Two.Eight, a startup incubator for female founders at Columbia University. I also serve as a design mentor on a continuing basis. Two.Eight, or 2.8%, is the share of venture capital funding that female founders receive relative to their male counterparts. At launch, that number had declined. We are working to change this.
Technology Transfer Days: Creating Cultures of Innovation
I have served as an advisor for the Technology Transfer Days since 2014. The program has been hosted by Microsoft and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and serves to connect local technology startups to members of the U.S. Army USCENTCOM and NORTHCOM Innovation Office, NASA, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, National Defense University, and Navy Postgraduate School. We match companies to S&I officers for private, facilitated meetings and plan and promote a public program including presentations by U.S. Veteran Entrepreneurs and the Department of Defense’s National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTA). Several organizations who participated in the November Geodata CEO Breakfast described below have received funding through TTD.
Other partners of the Technology Transfer Days program include the Brooklyn Small Business Development Center, NYC ACRE @ Urban Future Lab, Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP), Brooklyn CityTech, OWASP Brooklyn and GISMO.
Impact Hub NYC, 2018-2021
I have a long relationship with Impact Hub NYC, facilitating workshops for their various cohorts, including a service design workshop for Millennial financial wellness as part of their 100 Days of Impact program in 2017 and another financial wellness workshop in 2018 when Decision Fish was part of their United Nations SDG-themed 30for30 cohort. Most recently, I facilitated a customer development workshop for Impact Hub NYC’s Blueprint 2021 Impact Fellowship focusing on customer development and user experience design.
GISMO: Geographic Information Systems Mapping Organization
I have served on the board of GISMO, a NYC based geographic information systems community, since 2013 and have been an active member since 1992 when I was a real estate researcher at Price Waterhouse. GISMO has been the NYC chapter of the New York State GIS Association since 2013 but has existed as an open user group since 1990.
I have developed programs with GISMO and New York Geospatial Catalysts (NYGeoCATS) on a series of public and private meetings to introduce companies and individuals involved in the geodata community in New York City. These meetings are being facilitated with a goal to promote open access and availability of geospatial data from providers to users. Highlights include the GISMO 25th Anniversary gala, a CEO breakfast with the former U.S. National Geo-Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo and facilitated meetings with Department of Defense innovation offices. We also curated a weekend map showcase at the Queens Museum.
We are currently working on a redesigned website that reflects more of the collaborative and advocacy work at GISMO. For more information about the work I am doing with GISMO and its GIS startup events, visit http://www.gismonyc.org/events/past-events/. Visit my GISMO portfolio page to read about these significant events where I co-led, co-curated or otherwise participated in committee leadership.
The Occasional Mentor: On Minimal and Natural UI, Mid-Career Change and Hailing Taxis in NYC
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly(ish) column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May. This one has a fun one at the end.
Why are more and more companies moving towards making their UI white?
I trace the emergence of white background, minimalist design to the popularity of flat design and the explosion of sites offering crowd-generated content or media from disparate sources, like Medium and iTunes.
Flat design became popular for two reasons. The first, related to mobile frameworks like Material Design, is that people were becoming used to how buttons and links work and the raised, skeuomorphic styles were beginning to look old. Button colors that contrast starkly with the (usually) white background and colors with significant meaning (think red outlines for field errors) were enough to generate meaning. The second reason is the rise of mobile, which required sites to load faster in order to use less data. It’s become less of an issue as free WiFi becomes more and more available. This, along with a need for our mobile launch buttons to stand out, is why we are starting to see things like gradients and shadows making a return.
Minimalist design arose for utilitarian reasons. Having a busy, colorful layout too often competes with the images used by third party sources, so a clean, white (or black) layout makes sense on sites that aggregate a lot of content. There is also a recognition that certain background styles or fonts become dated very quickly. If you avoid using the style du jour, your products are less likely to seem old sooner.
How can I make the UX/UI design of a product feel more natural?
There were a lot of good answers to this question. I thought I’d add a couple resources that might be useful in understanding the fundamentals of natural, usable design.
First is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which discusses affordances like door handles and light switches and how people understand that a thing is something one can interact with.
Then read Indi Young’s Mental Models and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. These will get you good information about how to approach design in a way that is natural to the user.
I also like Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey, which pulls back to the whole experience of how a user finds and solves a problem and what their emotions and struggles are along the way. It goes well with the Empathy Map that some people described in previous answers.
Is it too late for me to take an UX design boot camp and get hired into an UX job? I have no design experience. I am 32 years old?
In an earlier post, I discussed the kinds of soft skills that are essential for an older, but new UX designer to highlight in a resume and portfolio and ways to bring up one’s design skills, in addition to boot camps, which I should say I have taught and recommend as a way to get the basics of UX along with some collaborative experience.
The list of tools that I mentioned should be updated, as I predicted. We see shiny, new tools every year, but a few seem to get mention in job posting more than others. We did use Sketch and InVision in our course. There are other tools you might consider working with including Figma, Adobe XD (which is now free), UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer, Proto.io and collaborative design tools like Mural, Miro (formerly Real Time Board), etc. you can find a lot of these if you search “Best UX Tools”.
Don’t try to learn them all and don’t worry about having an expert level at any of these, as you will likely be introduced to new ones on the job. If you have a positive attitude toward learning new tools, it helps a lot. Pick a few to create some mock designs, and then see if you can find a pro bono project to work on. You can also do a mock project for your current company, which would be ideal since you probably know a lot about your customers/users and would stand out in your portfolio. (Ask your boss first).
I know a lot of people who transitioned to UX at a later age from other careers, including similar roles in graphic design and communications, and as distant as restaurant management. Some were over 50 when they made the transition. 32 is still very young, so you won’t have to struggle against age-related bias nearly as much.
Do I have to whistle really loud to hail a taxi in NYC?
I love this question. Lol, no. Though it does call attention. I know a few doormen who have a pretty strong whistle.
If you can’t whistle, what you should do is cautiously step out a little off the curb, especially if you are on a block with parked cars, so the driver can see you. Corners are also good places to wait since you can direct a taxi heading the opposite way or on a perpendicular street to turn your way.
If you are too shy or too short to be seen, NYC Taxis also respond to Curb | The Taxi App.
NYC Charter Revisions and GIS Oversight
Since well before 9/11, GISMO, the NYC region’s oldest GIS interest group, has been working on advocacy initiatives to improve the way New York City collects, stores, shares and manages Geospatial Data and the processes and strategies around the City’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related functions. Beginning in 1996, the City’s first GIS Director, GISMO member Alan Leidner, held this role until his retirement from civic service in 2004. During his tenure, Leidner oversaw NYC’s emergency mapping program in one of the country’s most complicated rescue and recovery operations, the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
Just two years prior to 9/11, the City had launched a common base map for all agencies to use in GIS applications. Prior to the 1999 base map, there was little coordination between agencies on the underlying coordinates of various features on maps. As a result, data such as street center lines (which were available from the US Census though not always accurate) and building footprints would not match up with the level of accuracy needed for an effective response in an emergency situation. As City agencies created their own maps and datasets, using proprietary systems and software whose license agreements precluded data sharing, it was becoming increasingly difficult to form a common operating picture. This created difficulties for routine maintenance projects like coordinating access, excavation and repair of street corners and threatened larger operations. After the World Trade Center attacks, when visible landmarks were no longer available, the new base map saved time, money and lives.
But things have changed since 2004. When Leidner retired, a new GIS Director was appointed, but he was not given the same level of responsibility and did not get the assistant commissioner title the post had carried previously. Laws providing the public open access to a multitude of agency datasets created a market for public information and tools created taking advantage of them. Mayor Bloomberg wrote an executive order that created the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, but the mandate did not cover the kind of sensitive data that would be required to handle multi-department programs and, crucially, emergencies. As a result response to events like Hurricane Sandy was fractured, affecting the ability of emergency services, DEP, MTA, ConEd and other entities to coordinate their activities.
GISMO recently published Guiding Principles and Policies for New York City’s Geospatial Architecture outlining its position on the role of geospatial technology and governance in NYC government. It presented the Principals and Policies work at a public forum at Hunter College in April 2018. GISMO further pursued its position that NYC must have a GIS Director and coordinating committee made up of GIS leads at all city agencies and is recommending a Charter amendment or legislation to make this happen.
GISMO posted its introductory statement, video and written testimonies regarding the proposed amendments to the New York City Charter at http://www.gismonyc.org/events/amend_nyc_charter/. These testimonies were delivered to the New York City Council Charter Committee on April 30, May 2, May 7 and May 9, where several GISMO members, including myself, testified at the public hearings.
Through this Charter initiative we have advanced the cause of GIS in NYC by bringing our demands for better governance into the public forum. GIS saves lives, protects infrastructure, supports planning, improves City services, increases tax collections, and enhances economic development. We estimate that GIS at least doubles the analytic powers of traditional IT. We call on City government to recognize these facts and act accordingly.
You can find my testimony (gismonyc.org) and video (YouTube), starting at 02:25:15 but to get the full context, it’s best to review the statements in order. To explore how lives are saved by faster 911 response visit NYS GIS Association’s GISCalc tool created by Decision Fish, Results that Matter Team, and funded by the Fund for the City of New York.
If you are interested in learning more about GIS governance in New York City, contact GISMO at info@gismonyc.org or contact your New York City Council representative.
Pervasive Information Architecture in Emergency Management
The floor plan of the NYC Emergency Operations Center is a great example of pervasive information architecture, where the structure of the physical space mimics the structure/hierarchy of the people and systems in the space. It shows what each watch commander monitors, how reporting agencies and government community services like Department of Homeless Services and the Red Cross are grouped. It is a space that is designed to get optimal information flow from person to person, which supplements data flow from machine to machine.
For more, see my presentations on the Semiotics of Emergency Management.
Exploring a 9/11 Geographic Archive
Oral history as a primary source is being revived through initiatives like Story Corps and World Pulse and through improved storage capacity to archive and exhibit personal stories, making it less expensive for even the smallest and least funded groups. We are moving toward an environment where alternative narratives can be both manipulative (alternative facts, post truth) and expositive, as more and more under-represented groups get access to telling their story. So the ways that we share and interpret of stories in the future will be pretty interesting.
The story of the creation of the maps for first responders and emergency managers is sweeping and personal. I am currently exploring the creation of a 9/11 geographic archive. The archive will serve as a repository of artifacts and a history of participation by geographers, programers and spatial data technologists during the response to the World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001. Funding for the project was provided by the Fund for the City of New York as part of a grant to develop a Center for Geospatial Innovation.
More information and thoughts to come!
Dreams, Resilience and Making a Difference
Noreen Whysel’s address to the 2017 Initiate Class of the Beta Phi Mu Theta honor society at Pratt Institute School of Information given on May 17, 2017. Slides are available at Google Slides.
Thanks to Dean Tula Giannini, Vinette Thomas, Beta Phi Mu initiates, graduates and guests. And especially to Karen Erani for inviting me to speak today. This is an honor.
Today I am going to talk about Dreams, Resilience and Making a Difference. Our goal as we embark on this journey is to make a difference. Whether we leave Pratt to become a school librarian, a legal or medical librarian, a UX designer, an archivist, we do so to serve the information needs of some group of people.
We came with our dreams of what that life will be like. We study, we make sense of all the messes. (I think I see every class I took here in this picture)… and we deliver a neatly organized and usable semblance of information our users and patrons need.
But between our dreams and our goal of making a difference is resilience. Resilience is a quality that allows us to cope with whatever the world throws at us. And because we stand between the deluge of Information and the people we serve sometimes it can feel like this [photo of lone house after a flood]. We hope to be strong like this house built to survive the floodwaters of Hurricane Ike in July 2008. We don’t expect to face this exact scenario of course….
Usually, it’s a smaller disaster, a mess that you wish was neater…Even this [photo of moldy files] is probably more than most of us will ever deal with, but we studied to learn the frameworks for sorting through whatever is thrown at us, and we persevere.
So let’s unpack this. Resilience. It’s the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. In materials science, it’s elasticity or the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape. We call this “bouncing back” for a reason.
So, when I told Karen that I wanted to talk about resilience, I didn’t know that was also going to be the subject of Adam Grant’s address to the graduating class at Utah State University last weekend. I guess it’s a common theme.
You may know that Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and that he recently published a book, Option B, with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on the topic of resilience. Grant’s speech reviewed typical topics for commencement addresses and boiled them down to three virtues: generosity, authenticity, and grit, for which resilience is the key component.
- Being generous on the days when you lose faith in humanity
- Staying true to yourself on the days when others lose faith in you
- Persevering on the days when you lose faith in yourself
In Grant’s words, too much of any of these three qualities diminishes your ability to bounce back from adversities. We may think that grit resembles resilience the most. Toughness and an ability to persevere can get you through trouble, but go too far and you are no longer able to help others or align your actions with the dreams that make you who you are. If you are too tough you can’t bounce back. If you are too generous, you may lose yourself.
I had trouble with the idea of being too authentic, but maybe it has to do with holding to tightly onto ways that have worked in the past that may not be helpful in the current situation. We’ll get back to this. But enough of Adam. Back to my talk.
Resilience is the quality that lets you follow your dreams so you can make a difference. It’s more than grit (and this is where my presentation departs a bit from Adam Grant’s). To practice resilience, you need to have an action plan for when things don’t go your way and another plan for mitigating the bad things that do inevitably happen [See NYC’s Ready New York Guides]. This is essential practice in emergency management, which is an area I have studied for many years, predating my time at Pratt.
If you are safe, whether that means financially or physically secure, you are in a better place to help others. If you are mindful, you can understand where your needs and capabilities fit into a given situation, and where you don’t, or where you may need to ask for help. And with a solid plan, you have a framework for doing your best even if it is something you haven’t done before or aren’t sure you are up to.
Security and planning are the same in institutional resilience. There are elements to mindfulness in institutional resilience but it manifests itself as a kind of transparency and situational awareness that is common throughout the team and the partners dealing with an incident. Emergency responders call this a COP: Common Operating Plan (or Picture). It’s a playbook that everyone knows by heart and can be augmented by information technologies.
I came to Pratt for guidance on the frameworks that help to sort information, particularly about the resilience of Cities, because I, along with many other GIS people who had volunteered at the 9/11 rescue and recovery, had a dream to ensure that the work of those who mapped the disaster would be preserved and understood as a component of our city’s core resilience.
9/11 was a difficult experience to go through—I don’t know how many of you were in NY at the time—But while it was unique in its own way, disasters of its magnitude are not uncommon here in the US and worldwide. Whether man-made disasters like 9/11/2001 or natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on the Gulf Coast in 2005; or a combination, as in the Tohoku Tsunami that led to a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan in 2013. Preparation for an emergency event begins with gathering resources, mapping them, and ensuring that the action plan is delivered to the right people.
What happened next was a kind of mass, volunteer mobilization that could never have happened by the book. I was a part of a GIS user group called GISMO, who had been working slowly and not particularly successfully to get city agencies to exchange maps and underlying data. Unfortunately, we weren’t really prepared for this magnitude of devastation. But we had some hope and some really smart people, who were already figuring these things out.
The first meetings in response to the WTC attacks took place at the Department of Environmental Protection, who had responsibility for water, sewer and air quality systems throughout the city, which were particularly vulnerable. It soon became clear that a larger space would be needed to produce the maps and information required by emergency response teams. The Emergency Mapping and Data Center, or EMDC, was established on Pier 92 on the Hudson River and served as a headquarters for the rescue, recovery and mitigation efforts of city, federal and military teams.
These initial efforts and the partnerships that arose out of the EMDC formed what would become policies, toolsets and a “common operating picture” that would prepare the City for future incidents requiring collaboration among many different agencies and partners.
Innovations in response processes, tools and equipment have been documented and were presented at a ten-year retrospective held at the Technology in Government conference in 2011, called the NYC GeoSymposium 2001-2011-2021.
This is a poster I created for the symposium outlining ten years of incidents reported by the Office of Emergency Management:
Here is a detail from my ArcGIS Explorer presentation:
Some of the tools and artifacts that were created include updates to the very first citywide basemap, to be called NYCMAP. This map, first shot in 1999, combined aerial photography with street and building data to give a bird’s eye view of the City and its surface infrastructure. NYCMAP has developed into many versions of publicly accessible maps that are now available on the City Planning department’s website. For example, the Hurricane Evacuation Zone Finder was created in 2006 in response to Hurricane Katrina. During Hurricane Irene in 2011, WNYC.org and The NY Times created their own versions of maps that users could update with their own conditions reports.
After the WTC attack, a new Office of Emergency Management was built in Brooklyn, away from City Offices but with quick access to downtown Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. It was originally created as an office of the Mayor but has since become a fully fledged Emergency Management department. Here is the floor plan of New York City’s Emergency Operations Center, located in Brooklyn near Cadman Plaza north of the courthouses.
It gives a sense of how various response partners are organized on site. It’s sort of a physical information architecture. During a large-scale event, including weather events, multiple agencies are on hand to inform and take guidance from Emergency Management. Agencies are grouped by type of service with GIS at the “prow” and Admin/Logistics in back, with public (left) and infrastructure groups (right) flanking the Command Station. This space is used during active incidents. The Watch Command Center is Operational at all times.
Here are some photographs of what these facilities look like:
This is what a command center looks like at individual departments like FDNY:
One of the results of allowing a large-scale volunteer collaboration like we had at Pier 92 (perhaps also due to the huge economic hit 9/11 had on our City) and a convergence of new technology and crowd-sourcing solutions was an increase in transparency of data and citizen participation.
This included open data initiatives from Federal to local levels, nationwide, app contests, hackathons and growing participation from citizen mappers and data scientists. This Year’s BigApps Contest will present its Finalist Expo and Awards Ceremony at Civic Hall on May 23. Go to Bigapps.nyc for tickets. They will run out quickly.
Notify NYC was another effort to inform citizens of localized incidents, via phone, web, email and SMS. Staffed by OEM Watch Commanders, Notify NYC is also available via Twitter & RSS. Multichannel public communications, including social media, allow citizens to connect with government agencies, report nuisances like rats and electric outages and access emergency preparedness resources.
So back to the dream my colleagues at GISMO and I had about creating a center of geospatial information. It’s becoming a reality.
The Center for Geospatial Innovation has been created with funding from the Fund for the City of New York. Alan Leidner, former GIS Director and Assistant Commissioner of the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications is the director. A 9/11 Geospatial Archive is a key project along with the Coalition of Geospatial Information Technology Organizations, or COGITO, which I am coordinating with additional funding from FCNY. We have collected over 650 digital and physical items including videos, maps and electronic geospatial data, as well as all of the presentations from the 2011 NYC GeoSymposium and other events.
Here are examples of some of the materials we have collected.
- Maps of Restriction zones and affected facilities prepared by the FDNY and geographers at the Emergency Mapping Center at Pier 92.
- Aerial photos.
- LIDAR images showing the extent of damage. (These were created at the Emergency Mapping and Data Center on September 17).
- We also have heat maps showing the extent of the fires burning beneath the rubble.
- Maps showing the Structural Status of buildings in the vicinity of the attack. (These were created on September 21, 2001 by Urban Data Solutions, a commercial partner).
- Maps of recovered personal objects and human remains.
- We also have a large number of photographs of activity at the Emergency Mapping and Data Center at Pier 92. [Alan Leidner is in the white shirt and beard over here on the left].
We have been able to collect names of geographers who participated in rescue and recovery from sign-in sheets, meeting notes and other documentation. LinkedIn has been a great way to find out where people who participated then are now, so we can interview them to discover additional artifacts that may be hidden in personal or official collections. We also have video interviews from the week following 9/11 identifying participants.
An interesting document outlined the chronology of activities from September 11 to October 12. This document contains information about participants and lessons learned in the weeks following the attack. This is resilience in action, since it was deliberately created at a time of crisis but forms policies and planning for future events. The chronology also lists participant agencies, vendors and volunteers.
In addition to the archive, the Center for Geospatial Innovation is developing outreach to GIS and Geospatial oriented groups to advise on research and development activities. COGITO: the NYC Coalition of Geospatial Information and Technology Organizations is comprised of leaders of several NYC-area and regional GIS groups. It serves as the center of an organized geospatial ecosystem in NYC and is developing activities to keep its constituent members informed of GIS opportunities, education and resources in the region.
COGITO participants include local and national GIS associations, Meetup and affinity groups, as well as university spatial data and visualization labs, including Pratt SAVI, Hunter College, CUNY Graduate School, Columbia and others. We also work with GIS offices throughout New York State to report on tools and processes that can build resilience in other local areas.
The vision for the Center for Geospatial Innovation is a City that has the ability to bounce back, Resilience, through collaboration, communication and transparency, to meet challenges like climate change, “bad actors”, or anything else that comes our way. And to recognize the historical importance and value of those who participated in creating the systems that make our City resilient. We welcome you to participate and learn about the geospatial tools that support our City’s ability to return from adversities, stronger and better prepared.
Thanks again for the opportunity to present and congratulations graduates!
If you would like to learn more about COGITO, the 9/11 Geographic Archive or if you have materials or stories that may be of interest to our future researchers and partners, please feel free to contact me.
Correction: The Center for Geospatial Innovation was referenced as the NYC Geospatial Technology Center in the original talk. Center for Geospatial Innovation is the correct name of the institution.
Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World
Amy Jeu and I curated a weekend exhibit, Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, on October 29-30, 2016 at the Queens Museum celebrating the map-making community. The event featured talks and demonstrations as well as a hall dedicated to paper and digital maps submitted from the private collections of members of the GISMO community. These maps represent a wide range of themes including the diverse Queens neighborhood and demographics, urban planning, environmental studies, election analysis and more.
My Submissions
For my contribution to the exhibit, I created a cutout map of the 1964 World’s Fairgrounds to teach children how map layers work in GIS. This series of maps, printed on acrylic transparency sheeting can be stacked to show through various layers: Base Map, Parks, Buildings, Streets/Paths. We also provided additional paper and colored pencils for children to use. This activity helped younger visitors to understand the concept of map layers in GIS.
Because the event was held over Halloween weekend, I also contributed a set of themed maps with Halloween parade routes and a “Crime of the Century” story map retelling the activities from the 1934 Ice House Heist in Brooklyn and Upper West Side Manhattan. The piece included reproductions of aerial photographs from the time period.
Documentation
Each item in the exhibition included a placard indicating the name of the mapmaker, the materials used and a brief description of the subject. We used icons to indicate whether an interactive version was available at the computer stations or that the mapmaker is also a speaker in our forum.
Interactive Map
Speaker
Amy Jeu created the flyer and copy for the exhibit which was published on the Queens Museum website and the signage used for the exhibit and presentations. I created the placards and the online exhibit catalog.
Archive
The Map Mosaic event was privately curated. Queens Museum published an announcement and the exhibit catalog and list of interactive maps are available at GISMO’s Website. The acrylic manipulative work is located in the GISMO archive. All maps produced by the NYC Office of Emergency Management were donated to the Queens Museum and all other, individual artwork was returned to the artists.
Queens Museum Website Announcement
Exhibit Catalog
Interactive Maps