You can fill up on information about SFpark here.

SFpark has also created a developer API.

Maps & Earth 

At this point, in April of 2011, I’m assuming most of you reading this are very aware of Google Maps and Google Earth. I won’t spend much time explaining them other than to say that both have revolutionized the geospatial world, in both two and three dimensions.

I, for one, would hard-pressed to imagine life without Google Maps. Yes, there are other mapping services available, but Google Maps has always seemed to me the cleanest and tightest. Or, to borrow a phrase from Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell of SNL, Google Maps is the best, true that, Double True! But what really makes Maps stand out from the crowd is the ease with which new maps can be created and shared. At SF Environment, we use an increasing number of Google Maps to share information with a geo-location component, such as this, this, and this.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: Google has just launched Map Maker that lets users directly edit places in Google Maps, from buildings to businesses.

The general internet public is probably less familiar with Google Earth. With Earth, Google has created their own 3-D model of the globe, complete with rendered satellite imagery and even line models of parcels and buildings. The result is a truly immersive and very powerful tool for storytelling. I still remember being awed by Rebecca Moore’s 2006 “Logging Flyover” of the Santa Cruz Mountains that single-handedly changed public opinion about a dispute over logging rights at the time. Creating custom tours or “fly-overs” with text, links, embedded video and even audio narration does take some time but is remarkably simple. Check out a few great examples here and here.

Fusion Tables & ODK

One of the most exciting tools we covered at the training was Google’s new Fusion Tables which just may herald the dawn of web-based GIS. Born in Google Labs as an experiment in cloud data management, Fusion Tables is an attempt to combine data management and collaboration to enable “merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing.” Pretty cool stuff, and sorely needed.

At first glance, Fusion Tables looks like a beta version of Google Spreadsheets. The service is very new and still a little rough around the edges, but I don’t doubt that it will soon shine as do more mature Google offerings. Data can be entered directly or imported via a text file, but that’s where the similarity with Spreadsheets ends. Once your data is in, simply hit a button and you’ve got a map. Publishing to Maps is super easy, as is collaboration — all you or you collaborators need is a google account and you are good to go. If you have multiple data sources that reference the same entities, you can easily “fuse” those sources through creating “joins” without knowing how to write out SQL queries. Have a question for your collaborators about some of that fused data? Fusion Tables has built-in discussion tools.

Clearly Google is getting into the GIS game. If Fusion Tables wasn’t enough of an indicator, Google has even begun to post Fusion Tables of public data sets upon which you can build your own mapping project. My favorite? State and County boundary tables obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau and imported by the Fusion Tables team. Sweet! Google is offering an incredible service with Fusion Tables, and it looks like people are already adopting, as evidenced by some State of California data sets being stored as Fusion Tables.

What if  the data you want to visualize needs to be first be collected? Open Data Kit promises to integrate these geo-location tools directly into the fieldwork so often necessary to generate data. Open Data Kit is actually a project of the University of Washington’s Change Group that is supported by Google and hosted on Google Code. This set of free and open source tools allows developers to build data collection forms for Android mobile devices. You can take the term “developer” lightly here — in one of the breakout sessions during the Earth Outreach training, we built a data collection form in a matter of minutes. Once published, users can download the ODK Collect app, call up your form, and start logging data that is immediately aggregated on a server with ODK Aggregate, ready for extraction.

Pulling all of these tools together, one possible work flow for data collection and presentation could look like this:

collect with ODK Collect >> aggregate with ODK Aggregate >> extract to Fusion Tables >> publish to Google Maps/Earth

We ran a simple exercise cataloging and mapping plants using Android phones and, while there were a few bumps, it was clear that this is an amazing way to empower your team with a full set of geo-location tools, from data collection all the way through to visualization. After the workshop, my mind was reeling with the possibilities for deploying this suite of tools. Now, if I could only find the time…

Which brings us to the end of Part I of this Google love fest. Check back soon for a deeper dive into the possibilities of Google APIs, along with a few other exciting odds and ends.

The Let’s Do It SF! initiative is true Gov 2.0 in action – cross-departmental collaboration, utilizing open data principles to bring in free private sector resources, and an agile social media-fueled engagement plan. Open311, an API pioneered by the SF Department of Technology and 311 in cooperation with NY non-profit OpenPlans, enables commercial apps like SeeClickFix (it features free Web widgets and is free to download for smart phone) to integrate directly with the City’s service request ticketing system. Several apps have used Open311 to better serve San Francisco residents, and 311 also uses Facebook to take requests.

The City Attorney’s Office will be kicking off a training program for folks who live and work in San Francisco and want to learn how access 311 services and leverage mobile apps like SeeClickFix to help fight illegal dumping and graffiti vandalism. You can sign up for updates on the training program here.

“Let’s Do It!” began in 2008 in Estonia, where a small, committed group of organizers inspired 50,000 volunteers to clean their entire country in a single day. They are now planning an ambitious worldwide cleanup for 2012 (check out my podcast with Let’s Do It World organizer Irmelin Hiie here). You can sign up to help with that effort here.

City employees discuss logistics for Saturday's Earth Day cleanup in District 6.

At home, the City Attorney’s Office and Let’s Do It SF! volunteers will be participating this Saturday in DPW’s Clean Team event to clean and green District 6. Sign up here to join us.

City workers, local developers and progressive activists were greeted by Frank Hebbert from OpenPlans, who opened the night with a short film by Streetfilms recapping the TransportationCamp unconference held in New York earlier this month. TransportationCamp is in SF this weekend at Public Works.

More photos of March’s Third Thursdays event here.

SFFD Chief Joanne Hayes-White, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, SF Paramedic Assn. CEO Arthur Hsieh, Code for America's Jennifer Pahlka

In a great example of Gov 2.0 collaboration in action, City Attorney Dennis Herrera (I work in the City Attorney’s Office as an investigator) and Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White today announced SFFireApp.org, an effort to increase sudden cardiac arrest survival rates in San Francisco. The initiative seeks to successfully implement innovative mobile technology developed through the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District and released in the SF East Bay for the iPhone in late January.

Visit SFFireApp.org to learn more and get involved.

San Francisco became the first large municipality to publicly commit to implement the “Fire Department” application, which links CPR-trained volunteers, AED maps and smartphone users in an effort to save lives in the first few minutes after cardiac arrest. Last year, only 10 percent of sudden cardiac arrest victims in SF survived to admission in the hospital. The initiative may also save public health dollars by reducing injury to survivors.

“San Ramon has less than 100 sudden cardiac arrests a year, and for this application to have a meaningful impact on society we need to extend it to larger jurisdictions,” said SRVFPD Chief Richard Price. ”We are extremely pleased to be partnering with San Francisco today to extend this life-saving tool to the city as soon as possible.”

City Attorney’s Office press release.

For some years, Bay Area transit systems had been tracking the locations of their trains and buses via onboard GPS. Then someone got the bright idea to post that information in real time. Thus the delightful app Routesy was born. Install it on a smartphone and the app can tell you that your bus is stuck in traffic and will be 10 minutes late — or it can help you realize that you are standing on the wrong street, dummy. It gives consumers a great new way to find out when and where the bus is coming, and all at minimal government expense.

Gov tech pubs have been abuzz with the news.

More at InformationWeek.

On the Code for America blog, Jennifer Pahlka discusses how Vein was instrumental in supporting Civic Commons and CfA. “I’m happy to see Chris and his commitment to change join the other innovators in the White House, all of whom have inspired our work,” Pahlka writes.

The National Association of Communications Officers and Advisors also did a nice write-up on the promotion for its longtime member: “This is an outstanding appointment,” said NATOA Executive Director Steve Traylor. “And it’s an important recognition by the Obama Administration of the importance of local government efforts in technology and broadband innovation.”

Good luck to Chris in his new role!

The paper comes the same week as the NIST released a draft version of its cloud security and privacy guidelines.

According to Kundra, agencies that have the most potential spending on cloud computing include DHS, Treasury, DOD, VA, and DOT. Cloud policies and strategies from the federal government are increasingly important to municipalities such as San Francisco, because federal spending often drives private-sector terms of use, security, and standard service level agreements in ways that benefit other government entities. The new paper cites a GSA “infrastructure as a service” contract that includes 12 vendors cleared to provide cloud storage, virtual machines and web hosting for federal agencies.

For government entities looking at adoption of cloud solutions, the strategy paper includes a valuable breakdown of federal agency roles in cloud standards and responsibilities, as well as an extensive index of resources.

SF Mayor Ed Lee was on KQED’s Forum program this morning, and one of his main topics was the negotations to keep Twitter in San Francisco. Former Mayor Gavin Newsom was a big Twitter booster, and more than 50 City officials and agencies actively use the micro-blogging service. Mayor Lee and two supervisors have sponsored legislation offering tax breaks for the Mid-Market area in an effort to bring in Twitter as an anchor tenant. The company is looking to move from SoMa due to its growth. City supervisors have yet to vote on the tax proposal.

“It was well worth the effort we made to keep these folks here,” Lee told Forum’s Michael Krasny.

Lee hopes that Twitter will become an anchor tenant in the massive SF Mart building between 9th and 10th, pictured above, just a block from City Hall and surrounded by municipal offices. I recently wrote about the Mid-Market’s transformation over the last decade.

The documents include a definition of cloud, which NIST researchers say has five core features: on-demand self-service; broad network access; resource pooling; rapid elasticity; and measured service. NIST classified three types of cloud: infrastructure as a service; platform as a service; and software as a service, and four models: public, private, hybrid and community.

NIST’s guidelines on public cloud security and privacy are meaty and well-researched, presenting many of the challenges of public cloud for government agencies as well as planning mitigations.