Past April 27 to 29 in Cartagena, Colombia the Data Fest kicked off with tons of policy makers, technicall officers, data scientists and NGO reps from all around the world, more or less 46 states. As part of the geo data community, we were invited to organize a side event inviting global and local geo hacking communities (crisis mappers, open street map , [GeoCensos (www.geocensos.com), mapbox among others) together with National Statistics Offices (NSO) to share experiences and portray recent geo big data trends. This was a needed dialogue for us, especially after Con Mapas past October in México and because geographic departments at NSO - and other public organizations – seem to demand catching up on so many neo geography developments, including online participative geo tools, all innovations-already in fashion due to increasingly available geo open data sources.

We were a bit sceptic too: a recent opinion poll run by GeoCensos .com among 20 geo hackers communities, including OSM latam, in hispanic america claimed that regional NSOs only open very few geodata, among other considerable cries. Unexpectectly, a great diversity of applications based on big georeferenced data came to the Data Fest. This might show the growing momentum such tools have in today’s decision taking life and the potential impact they might have on supporting decision makers in designing strategies for poverty, hunger alleviation and climate change in a sustainable way.

As GeoCensos Foundation director, I welcomed everyone and introduced registered projects and ideas, framing them on what geo big data means and promises. Jeffrey Villaveces, Head of the Information Management Unit of UN OCHA Colombia, presented the methodology that office has uses in calculating healthcare service areas to respond to Explosive Remnants of War (ERW a.k.a. “landmines”) accidents, particularly among civilians. Colombia suffers from the highest number of landmine accidents in the world, being also an extensive country with limited health infrastructure. The proposed methodology claims to be more effective for intervention design. What do you think?.

Louis Reymondin, an impressive Swiss data scientist from CIAT, introduced Terra-i a geo big data project that detects changes of the resulting soil cover due to human activities. The project produces updates every 16 days. Observations are updated throughout whole Latin America and soon it will cover the worldwide tropic.Olga Henker , leader of from Geocensos geo programmers Community, showcased about how geo hacking communities develop and share geo big data trends in massive collaboration events such as map parties and geo hackathons.

Taissa Sousa, a dataviz specialist illustrated about how the brazilian NSO IBGE have innovated, displaying new spatial aggregation forms coming from their last Demographic Census and its applications in Geo Big Data. Kind of interesting, uh?

And time rushed by. We selectively grouped geo hackers and officers in smaller “islands” to speed geo geek people and offer a chance to share spontaneous ideas in the making. Some developers like Ricardo Lopez Valverde (observatorio de la opinion pública) explained his developing idea for a neighbourhood crowdsourced security alarm system in Cochabamba, Bolivia . Ariel Nuñez , an openstreetmapper too, explained a World Bank project to open geodata to ensure resilience for natural disasters in developing countries. Javier Teran, chief statistician of the Humanitarian Data Exchange initiative from UNOCHA, briefly showed how the geo data humanitarian repository of HDX works for crisis and humanitarian mappers, already present at the innovation fair stand in the event (even Groundtruth guys were there!).

The added value of all this is that we finally managed to gather 80 attendants belonging to NSO and international organizations and merging with around 30 geo hackers. It was a good moment for sharing ideas and examples of geo big data that can drive lessons for us all. Many showed interested in future massive collaboration opportunities, leveraging network chances to unleash the potential of massive collaboration for a bright geo big data future. How can we push a little more the wagon together with Open Street Map ( SOTMUS , for instance?) on this?…The floor is Yours!