POLC: The Visual Frontier

Keynote sessions with panelists from an entirely different profession than conference attendees are always hard to pull off.  This one was interesting in pieces, though disconnected, and it had one great story.

When Samuel Yates first set out to photograph every property in Palo Alto for his project The Color of Palo Alto, he didn't have a use for his photographs beyond the end of the project.  So he decided to offer them to the city.  He went through several offices asking if they'd have a use for the photos, and was told no repeatedly.  Finally he found someone who said, "I don't know, but you should talk to my colleague."  Turned out the colleague (aside from being an art history major who was happy to talk to an artist) worked on Palo Alto's geographic information system, and she was delighted to hook his photos into it.  The photos could then be used by anyone in city government, and resulted for instance in a photo-assisted 911 response system.

So for the new age of user-generated content and connections, three principles.  (1) Data makes it possible to build things, (2) it takes a while to find someone who can build on your data, and (3) you never know what they're going to build.

Thanks to panelists Samuel Yates, Josh Klein, and Elizabeth Windram (sorry I've given short shrift to most of your content), and especially to moderator Tanya Tarr, also the director of this year's Politics Online conference.