The Rhiza Feed

White House Photo Credit flickr/HarshLight

Rhiza Labs is proud to announce that our CEO, Josh Knauer, has been appointed to a working group of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). This Federal Advisory Committee is comprised of leading scientists and engineers, appointed by the President to augment the science and technology advice available to him from inside the White House and from cabinet departments and other federal agencies.

Drawing on Josh’s long history of involvement in conservation issues and data management, he will begin his contribution to the Council by helping the Working Group on Biodiversity Preservation and Ecosystem Sustainability (BPES) identify research priorities and best practices in data management, necessary for protecting biodiversity and managing ecosystems.

Josh is also leading an initiative to deliver recommendations for standardizing how open data can be defined, collected and published by federal agencies.  As a pioneer of open data initiatives for non-profit and government clients, Josh has first hand experience helping organizations be more effective in data sharing, analysis and visualization and systems that facilitate collaboration.

Have any recommendations for Josh to consider as part of his work with PCAST working group?  He’s specifically looking for public examples that show off some of the best/cutting edge practices in data sharing and collaboration. Share your comments below, follow him on Twitter and Facebook. You can also read more about Josh’s activities.

Download the full press release.

For the second time this year, Rhiza Labs has graced the pages of Inc Magazine. In the latest article titled, The Art of the Spinoff, writer Leigh Buchanan explores Rhiza’s origins as a spinoff of MAYA, an innovative technology research lab grows by cell division, spinning off new companies as needed.

It’s been a busy media week for Rhiza Labs, as our client’s FracTracker.org project has been covered in USA Today, National Public Radio and lots of local media throughout NY, PA and WV.

Here at Rhiza Labs, we’re really excited to have a whole bunch of new public projects launching with our clients. These clients are pioneers who are exploring new ways to encourage communities of interest to aggregate data and share it publicly, while also providing these communities with incredibly powerful data analysis and visualization tools. One of the latest projects to launch, FracTracker.org, involves many dozens of community organizations that want to tract the impacts of Marcellus Shale gas wells in their communities.

I wanted to see how widespread this type of gas well drilling practice was, so I took the Marcellus Shale gas well permit data from the PA Dept of Environmental Protection and created a quick snapshot of the data, and then just clicked on the Action button in the upper right corner of the snapshot page and chose the options “Download as –> KML” to bring it into Google Earth. I then just hit “play” on the time slider within Google Earth.

The geo animation I created is captured below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Concerned Groups Launch FracTracker.org to Assess Impacts of Marcellus Shale Drilling

Cutting-edge technology allows for real-time data-sharing throughout PA, WV & NY

PITTSBURGH, PA (June 29, 2010) – Today, one of the most diverse meetings ever assembled to address Marcellus Shale gas extraction concerns is being convened by the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities (CHEC) of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds. The goals of this meeting are to openly discuss the impacts related to Marcellus Shale development, form a data-sharing network, and announce the launch of FracTracker.org, a new web-based tool for tracking and visualizing data related to gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region. FracTracker, hosted by the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds and managed by CHEC, was funded by The Heinz Endowments and designed by Pittsburgh-based Rhiza Labs.

The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation underlying significant portions of PA, NY and WV, smaller areas in KY, MA, OH, TN and VA, and across Lake Erie into Southern Ontario; it is believed to hold trillions of cubic feet of methane gas, as well as other explosive gases and vapors. Serious economic, environmental and public health concerns surround the gas extraction process, including road infrastructure degradation, explosions and blowouts, agriculture and hunting and fishing impacts, water contamination from the disposal of waste fluids into surface waters, and human exposure to volatile organic compounds that off-gas from production facilities. FracTracker will enable people to better assess documented and predicted impacts and correlate them with the geographic location of wells drilled and accompanying production facilities. For the first time ever, people across many disciplines will be able to collaborate directly with communities and citizens in the collection and analysis of data that track these impacts across the Marcellus Shale play. FracTracker also has the potential to significantly influence future research and policy formulation.

“This assembly will provide a forum where various groups can discuss drilling issues and use data as a basis to collaborate and advocate for the health of communities in the Marcellus Shale region,” stated the Foundation for PA Watersheds’ Executive Director, John Dawes.

“FracTracker gives researchers the unique ability to directly engage citizens in the collection of data to effectively demonstrate the impacts of Marcellus Shale gas extraction,” commented Dr. Conrad Dan Volz, Director of CHEC.
Four additional meetings of a similar nature will be held in NY, Western PA, Eastern PA, and WV during July and August of 2010. Contact CHEC for more information.

FracTracker.org Contacts

The Center for Healthy Environments and Communities of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health exists to help individuals and communities identify the most important environmental problems facing them.
www.chec.pitt.edu Contact: Samantha Malone, 412-624-9379

The Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds is a grant-making foundation that invests in efforts to protect healthy, natural streams around the state – and also to clean up pollution and repair damaged wildlife habitat. www.pennsylvaniawatersheds.org Contact: John Dawes, 814-669-4244

Rhiza Labs is a Pittsburgh-based software company that builds web-based tools that help organizations collect, analyze, visualize and share data. www.rhizalabs.com Contact: Josh Knauer, 412-488-0600

Imagine easy online access to everything you wanted to know about live jazz performances in America. What was the top tune played last year?  How many people attended live jazz shows? How did the set lists differ for the same artist on different nights?  What did it sound like when two artists played together for the first time?

Next month, MCG Jazz will launch a new Rhiza Folio website about jazz, marking the beginning of an ambitious project to organize and publish details about historical and upcoming jazz performances across the country.

The vision for this project originates with MCG Jazz, one of the top jazz presenters in the world, located right here in Pittsburgh, PA.  MCG’s Executive Producer, Marty Ashby hopes the website will be able to answer the question “What is the State of the Union of Jazz in America”, whether he’s looking at last year’s season or summary data for ten performance seasons.

The website will provide statistics and details about audiences, artists, venues and tunes, along with rich archive material like photos, video and audio clips as well as historical documents, like hand written set lists.  The site will not only help the public access our nation’s jazz archives, it will also help jazz presenters gain valuable business insight into factors that drive ticket sales and sponsorship agreements.

Major jazz organizations across the country have expressed interest in joining the project, including Jazz at Lincoln Center, the The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Association for Performing Arts Presenters, Monterey Jazz Festival, San Jose Jazz, Smithsonian Institution, All About Jazz, Stanford Jazz Workshop, SFJazz and more.

Stay tuned to hear more about this project in July.

The GeoWeb Conference, hosted by the Geospatial Information & Technology Association, just announced that Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza Labs, has accepted an invitation to speak at the conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Josh’s talk will be titled, “People Powered Data”. If you’d like to meet with Josh while he’s in Vancouver, please contact us early to schedule some time.

Here’s a short description of Josh’s talk:
Just in the past months, durable mobile devices, open-source data-collection tools, and innovative distributed databases have arrived. These new tools take the mystique out of collecting, aggregating, visualizing, and broadcasting geodata. Regardless of training, anyone can now create high-quality structured data. Stakeholders can then collaboratively visualize this data in real time using a host of technology platforms. The resulting insights inform decision-makers using information from the most reliable sources: first-hand witnesses. This lets leaders base their decisions on better information. The result is that the community is not simply engaged in the decision-making process, but is in fact driving it — to everyone’s benefit. Drawing on their experience and knowledge of the field, Knauer will illustrate successes and best practices through real stories from the rain forests of Brazil to the streets of Pittsburgh to epidemiology laboratories in D.C. Using these case studies, he will describe the design techniques and workflows that have simplified user interfaces to increase participation and usability. Speaking to the best practices in implementing these systems, he will detail real successes in decentralized data collection. You’ll leave with roadmap for deploying people-powered data to make better decisions in your organization, regardless of what technology you use.

John Dawes, Executive Director, the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds

The Heinz Endowments has posted on their blog a great interview with John Dawes, the Executive Director of the Foundation for PA Watersheds. In the interview, John talks about how working with Rhiza Labs has helped his foundation.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Q: What new initiatives has your organization started?

A: In addition to working to renew Growing Greener, we have embarked upon a program with Rhiza Labs, located in Pittsburgh, to put our entire grant-making history online. This will house project profiles, contact information for our grantees, photos of site specific restoration projects, a project location map and outcomes based upon progress reports turned into our foundation.
The wonderful thing about Rhiza Labs is that it aggregates outcomes to compile the amount of money that we have granted. Then the funding can be broken down by program area, year, county or legislative district. It also aggregates the total project cost, which includes the amount of money that we have leveraged. Currently, Rhiza’s findings show that we have more than $90 million in project cost, while we have awarded about $7.5 million. So it’s a wonderful way to tell a story.

We love working with visionary clients like John who are bringing transparency, accountability and data driven decision making to the foundation world! Read the full interview.

Interested in learning more about online mapping?

Join us for our latest webinar – Getting Started with Online Mapping.   This 40 minute webinar will present an overview of the latest advances in online mapping with Rhiza Insight and Google Maps.

We have two sessions scheduled this week.  Tuesday, June 8th at 12pm ET and Thursday June 10th, at 3pm ET.

Sign up today and become your organization’s online mapping expert!

Rhiza Labs’ parent company, MAYA was given a Winning Workplaces Award 2010 by Inc Magazine. The highly competitive award is given to companies that have the most innovative workplaces, and ours was tops in the Small Company category.

Read a bit about what makes us tick and why we choose to conduct business in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. You can also get a quick tour of our award winning workspace. Let us know what you think about our company and products by giving us some feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

A compilation of photos of the Rhiza/MAYA offices

Tim Berners-Lee gave a great talk at the recent Gov 2.0 Expo in which he describes the criteria for creating open and linked government data. In the beginning of his talk he describes a star-based rating system for putting data up in machine readable format, open formats, as a CSV file, etc. As with many things that Tim does, he almost completely had me until he started describing what “linked data format” is in his mind. His notion of linked data is that the values of attributes in a data table would be URLs to some web page somewhere that points to the “definitive” source of data about that thing. There are several reasons why this is incredibly short-sighted and wrong: Read more »