Unterbahn

Here are some quick updates from Alice Gray at Bustan Qaraaqa. First, news of Abed’s farm at Um Salamoneh (I’d written about it earlier under the name Umm Salamuna where we did kite mapping):

We also organized tree-planting days at Bustan Qaraaqa, at Abed’s farm in Al Wallaja and in Um Salamoneh, on land threatened with confiscation to make way for an Israeli cemetery. Abed’s situation has improved quite significantly since our last newsletter, as his lawyer has managed to secure him a blue Jerusalem ID. This means that he is now legally entitled to be present on his land, although there is still a serious threat from Israeli real-estate developers, who continue to push for his expulsion to make way for settlement expansion. This season we were able to raise enough money to install a rainwater harvesting system at Abed’s, donating 2 water tanks (thanks Imo!), and are still working on a project to create a greenhouse outside the cave.

(Above, a photo of Abed and Jared)

Unfortunate news, however, about friends Jared and Faith, who were such good hosts when Josh and I visited:

The latest move in what seems to be a sinister trend aimed at silencing dissent and removing ‘witnesses’ to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has been the denial of entry to international NGO workers and journalists based in the West Bank. Many such people had been out of the country over Christmas and were refused entry at Ben Gurion airport when they attempted to return to their homes and jobs. Among the ‘casualties’ of this policy were our dear friends Jared Malsin (chief editor of the Maan News English Desk) and Faith Rowold (Public Relations officer of Dar Annadwa) who had been on holiday in Prague. Faith was immediately deported to Prague, whereas Jared spent a week in detention attempting to contest his case on grounds of ‘freedom of the press’ before he too was put on a plane and flown out (read story here).

Jared and Faith, like many internationals, were living and working in the Palestinian Territories on Israeli tourist visas, being unable to obtain work permits from Israeli authorities. They were deported for ‘refusing to cooperate’ during their interrogation at Ben Gurion airport; yet they were placed in this position by Israeli authorities themselves who would not give them the necessary visas to pursue their legitimate work and have a long history of refusing entry to people admitting to connections with Palestinian organisations or individuals. Recently, Israel has stopped issuing work permits to all West Bank based NGOs including Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and Handicap International, forcing all foreign employees to rely on tourist visas (see story here) and placing them in a very precarious position.

That sucks. You can also read about it at the Washington Post. Good luck, Jared and Faith!

Caroline of OurGoods.org has organized a “Trade School” where you can come to learn or teach among peers!

Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.

Come to Trade School for thirty days of classes, co-working and bartering at GrandOpening’s Lower East Side storefront from January 25 to February 28, 2010.

I remember seeing this in a documentary when I was a child – French field biologists created a giant inflatable netted raft which sits above the rainforest canopy, and from which they can rappel down into the trees to take samples and do observations. The researchers lived on the raft for an extended period in tents. What an enchanting idea! They’ve apparently done expeditions since the 80s.

Read more

The day after working with landowners and activists in Umm Salamuna in the West Bank, we stopped by to visit Alice Gray, who organized the protest. She runs a permaculture farm project in Bethlehem called Bustan Qaraaqa, and was interested in mapping the farm periodically to monitor growth and erosion. She was quite excited about the kite concept so we thought we’d give it a try.

The attempt was somewhat frustrating – while the day before we had over 30mph winds, at the farm we had the opposite problem: very little wind. BQ is located in a sharp valley where it’s hard to get a view from above (see picture) but we finally managed to loft a small parafoil kite (thanks Nadya!) with an iPod nano attached. We let it out about 500 feet, but the kite flew at a very low angle, and in the wrong direction. In the end we got a reasonable image of the other side of the valley, which we’ll try to rectify as a proof of concept.

We’re using VLC to review frames manually, saving the clearest ones as PNG images. Then we use hugin with the SIFT algorithm to auto-stitch the video frames together. This is a bit involved and if we continue using video we may want to make a web interface to do this automatically. As in: point it at a YouTube video and it generates a panorama as well as it can and opens it in Map Warper. As it turned out, the hilly terrain proved too much to successfully warp this capture into a usable map; see the final product. What we need is a much higher point of view, if there are going to be any hills. Luckily some of the kites I bought in San Juan last week are ideal for this – and they fly much more vertically so we won’t have to worry about being as far upwind of the target site.

These two days definitely show the ‘worst case scenario’ for this kind of mapping… super high and low winds, steep valleys and ridges, low-res video and time limitations. Anyways the best part of the day was when two Palestinian kids and their dad came out to see who the idiots were who couldn’t fly a kite… and helped us get one in the air:

Coming soon – our last day of mapping in the middle east was at the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan, where we captured some absolutely fantastic images under some of the best conditions we’ve seen so far.

The Children’s Environments Research Group at CUNY developed a curriculum with UNICEF on the topic of participatory environmental exploration by children as a part of the urban planning process.

Josh Levinger and I met up with some activists who were planting trees in Umm Salamuna (view in Google Maps) on a hillside which is scheduled to be annexed by a nearby Israeli settlement, and converted into a graveyard. The planting was organized by Alice Gray of Bustan Qaraaqa, so that if the land is taken over, the trees would have to be uprooted or chopped down before the land can be used.. As I understand it, one of the means by which settlements claim land is by using an Israeli law which opens land to new settlement if it has lain fallow for more than three years — so planting the hillside may defend it from such a claim.

The wind was so strong that our first kite, carefully made that morning from dowels and Tyvek, shattered immediately. Instead, we launched a small soft kite with an iPod nano attached to it. Here’s a stitched image of the video footage we captured:

See all the pictures on Flickr.

The iPod has an SD camera which can capture many hours of video – and it’s so super light that we can fly it on a pocket kite. Many of the frames are blurred and the resolution is pretty poor (we’d thought of using a Flip camera but they’re more expensive and heavier) but when you go through the footage frame by frame you can find lots of good images. We then stitched these together with Calico and got the above image. It helped a lot to put a small ’sail’ on the back of the iPod so it didn’t spin as much.

Everyone was cold but once we started flying the kites we all got really excited. The owner of the land was there with his kids and they helped assemble the rig and fly the kite:

The mapping was a big success – everyone ‘got’ why we were doing it, that documenting the tree planting and how they’re changing the landscape is a form of testimony. We’re still working to rectify the imagery, and I’d like to ask folks if they have any ideas – the stitching software we’re using assumes images were taken from a single viewpoint, but the kite and camera were moving all over the place. As you can see above, the stitching distorts things and we lose a lot of detail – how can we reconstruct a high-res image that assumes multiple perspectives? I’m looking at this tutorial to start with. We’re also thinking about an algorithm to dump the clear, undistorted and unblurred frames from a movie file. Ideas?

Update: We’ll be adding this material to the Grassroots Mapping wiki, where we’re putting together a comprehensive guide on low-cost participatory mapping techniques. Our hope is that we can offer a Grassroots Mapping Kit which people can use to reproduce these techniques to explore and document their own geographies no matter where they are.

Cross-posted with the Center for Future Civic Media blog

I’ve been at the MobileActive/Unicef workshop in Amman, Jordan since yesterday, and got to present some of my work on low cost mapping with kites and balloons. One thing people have been asking about is if people in informail communities would object to being photographed from above. While I completely understand this question, it does strike me as odd – they’re photographed from space all the time by Navteq and TeleAtlas, without being asked permission.

First, though, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not interested in developing tools for people like myself to unilaterally image a community – the whole idea is to make tools *for* a community to map themselves — as a form of expression, as a tool for community planning, and as an exploratory process. My hope is that the community I’m hoping to work with in Lima will want to publish and distribute their maps, but that is of course their decision to make.

At the same time, it’s also clear that there is a practical and psychological difference between flying a kite/balloon with a camera on it while you are actually in a community, and flying a satellite which they cannot see, having never visited the community you’re imaging. But I’m hoping that the former can form the basis of a more participatory way of mapping contested geographies. In any case, this is a great ongoing discussion, and I’m eager to see how it plays out on the ground in Lima.

Maybe they could use some magic. Read NYTimes.com article

MobileActive covered a project called Wikimapa by Rede Jovem, where teenagers use Nokia N95 phones to map unmapped areas of Rio de Janiero.

The project cost $87,310. The evaluation section of the article was interesting:

The most challenging part of the project was developing the mobile application. The organization is still working to develop versions for other operating systems. Having a long-term, sustainable budget is also challenging. The project was unsuccessful in getting grants from Nokia — they bought the phones themselves — and currently doesn’t have any money to sustain the project beyond December. Because the project doesn’t actually make money, they are dependent on grants and its unlikely to be scalable or sustainable. — MobileActive.org

I’m going to contact the organizers and see if they’d like to use some of the techniques we’re prototyping now.

Rede Jovem (via MobileActive.org)