we are working to make high quality data available in advance of the election, rather than weeks after. We believe that better data can lead to better elections. Tonight, I’ll discuss how election maps can help to track fraud, assist in planning media outreach to female voters, and improve the logistics of setting up 6,969 polling stations.are looking for someone to run Mission Control Development Seed. We are a dynamic group of engineers and designers in DC and Lisbon tackling big global challenges with open data and open technology. Mission Control will run all aspects of our business operations. You will work directly with me to help Development Seed grow, scale and maximize our impact.

In Mission Control you will lead out all of our operational streams. You will manage our DC office, run events, streamline our business processes, and help the team to run faster. Every day will be different. On one day you might coordinate team travel; review a million dollar contract; buy a flock of drones; and help us to launch a new product.

A little bit about you. You run fast and learn quickly. You don’t need to be a technologist, but you must embrace the open technology community and a humane startup culture. You are a great communicator. You instinctively distill commanders intent. You thrive in a flat organization. You take responsibility for your own time and get things done through orchestration rather than authority. You constantly look for ways to make things better. You are good person and you want to make a real difference with other fun, decent humans. 

Federal data drives US commerce, helps us untangle environmental and social issues, and supports decision-making around the world. Development Seed salutes the mappers in the USG and we’d love to buy you a beer.

We are growing. We’re looking for an imagery and remote sensing intern to join the Development Seed team. You’ll join a team that is pushing the bounds of how data and maps can improve disaster preparedness, humanitarian response, environmental protection, global health, urban design and managment, and the promotion of rights and democracy.

We’re looking for someone to help us to push the bounds of how satellite imagery and sensor data can be processed, analyzed, and presented to inform the work of governments, NGOs, and development organizations. You’ll work on really interesting problems like satellite tasking and image aquisition, automated satellite image processing, strategies for sensor and drone deployment, wrangling and integrating sensor data, and visualizing complex data.
You’ll be joining a tight and growing team that gets things done. From strategists to designers and developers, we’re a team that pushes the boundaries of how to make data make a difference. You will work with tools like GDAL and TileMill, while gaining experience with scripting and leveraging an open source toolbox to process imagery. You work closely with our team on strategic advising, rapid prototyping, and development of impactful web tools.
Qualities we’re looking for:
Knowledge of remote sensing. Whether you’ve taken remote sensing courses or worked professionally doing imagery analysis, you bring specialized knowledge that contribute to the diversity of the team.
Ready to code. Processing will take work and it will take some significant code. Scripting in Python, Bash, and whatever else you need will be your tools.
Strong analytical ability You see the order in the chaos. You turn complex data into meaningful knowledge.
Strong communication skills. Github, email, and blogging are our tools we use to communicate and we’re looking for someone who can contribute to both our internal and external communication strategies.
Self-taught learner. Many of the questions we will ask you haven’t been answered. You’ll figure it out. Along the way you will build the skills you need to get there.
Last week we launched Afghanistan Open Data Project, opening data to improve the quality and transparency of elections in Afghanistan. We hope to build a tradition and community around using data to improve the quality of all future elections in Afghanistan.
Data is the infrastructure on which we build better elections
During Afghanistan’s 2009 and 2010 elections, Development Seed and NDI worked together to open up data in order to understand and describe those elections. That work was important in that it showed the extent and character of electoral fraud. We will continue this important work with NDI during 2014 elections.
Afghanistan Open Data Project is different. It is an effort to use data in advance of elections in order to improve them. We laid the first tracks, opening and visualizing data to show how it might be used in election planning and protection. Can this data make the election more inclusive? More efficient? More fair? Can better data lead to to a better distribution of polling stations? Can it power more targeted and effective efforts to improve participation by women? Can it provide political parties with data about vote patterns that rewards parties willing to actually go out and engage with voters?
We believe so.
Some donors and implementers still fundamentally misunderstand “open”
As we described the project to colleagues, most responded with support and enthusiasm. But we also received skepticism. One comment was that some other group was already “doing open” for these elections, as if someone had cornered the market of opening up information around elections, rendering our efforts duplicative.
That’s not how Open works. It takes a community of organizations and individuals - each with unique motivations and contributions - to begin to reap many of the benefits of Open. This is just as true of open data as it is of open source software. We need more Open, not monopolies of Open.
This project is open. All the data is open for reuse and the project as a whole is open for contributions. If you are working in Afghanistan and have data, need data, or know how to work with data, please contribute to the effort. Tunisia’s 2011 elections were the first free and accountable elections in the country. Today, data from the 2011 election is now available on tunisiaelectiondata.org. As the country prepares for general elections later this year NGOs, political parties, and the election commission will use this data to plan better elections. is possible because Tunisian open government hacktivistsscraped the website of the Tunisian election commission (ISIE) shortly after the 2011 election and published the raw data. This valuable resource was largely untapped until Democracy International provided the glue connecting Tunisian civic hackers with Tunisian election oversight organizations, like Mourakiboun. With strategy and technology help from Democracy International and Development Seed, Mourakiboun built and manages Tunisianelectiondata.org. Today, the site provides important infrastructure for accountable elections.
The website code and all of the data is open. You can fork it on Github.
The IEC launched its own results website for this election, where it published results on a rolling basis as they were certified. This is a laudable effort that is a huge improvement over results reporting in previous years. However the IEC did not make its the data easily available in an open and machine-readable format. Our friends on the NDI ICT team pulled regular scrapes of the IEC’s partial results and we extracted the final results from the PDF. Working with the manipulatable versions of this data, we gained insights that would not have been obvious from the IEC’s presentation of the data. We just updated 200 KM of data across Brazil, helping Modulo assist the government in managing logistics around the World Cup. Modulo is a Brazilian technology company providing data and management tools to logistics and safety efforts around the World Cup. Working with Modulo, we identified and processed the latest available satellite imagery of all 12 World Cup stadiums. We did this in partnership with our friends at Mapbox and have now handed over the data to Modulo for use in their platforms. Importantly, this data is provided in a way that offers tremendous social benefit to Brazil and better data for Modulo. Mapbox acquired the imagery in a manner that allowed them to include this data in their global base map so that others could access the recent imagery. More importantly, they acquired the imagery under a license that makes it available for tracking in OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap users can trace this imagery to identify buildings, roads, parking lots, hospitals, and other points of interest around the stadiums. This data will be available for everyone, from the World Cup organizers, to the app developers trying to help you navigate game day traffic, to the spectator looking for a good bar near the stadium. Over the next few years, governments and development agencies will spend millions acquiring satellite imagery and the capability to extract data from that imagery. USAID recently solicited proposals for a $170 million contract to provide independent monitoring of USAID projects in Afghanistan. Imagery analysis was one of six “minimum monitoring tools” required for this contract. We expect satellite imagery to be an important part of government procurement and development projects. The imagery used in these projects has tremendous social and economic value. It should be open. Governments and development agencies must consider this now, at the procurement stage. It is much harder to get the licensing right after the contract is signed.
In the meantime, take advantage of the new stadium imagery to start contributing to OpenStreetMap in Brazil. All images are available and ready for tracing.
On Saturday, satellites will be collecting high-resolution imagery while millions of Afghan citizens will go to the polls to select their next president. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) and observer groups have undertaken extensive efforts to ensure that this election reflects the will of the people. We have been experimenting with using satellite imagery as another tool to catch certain types of voter fraud.
When over 7 million Afghan voters went to the polls on April 5th, satellites captured images of even the most rural polling stations. We collected satellite imagery from election day of locations with polling stations. Here is imagery of two remote polling stations in Maiwand District at 11:09 AM on the April 5 election.
When blatant ballot box stuffing occurs it often happens in rural areas that are farther from oversight and have a surplus of ballots. A polling station that processes that maximum number of voters would have a steady flow of voters through the day. Examining imagery of that polling location a few hours after polls open could help to distinguish between polling stations with a high number of voters and those with stuffed ballot boxes. With higher resolution imagery now available, we can get an extremely accurate count of people waiting in line and others in the vicinity. International development is getting harder. Climate change, population strains, and conflict over resources threaten to undo many of the gains made toward the Millenium Development goals. Doing development right means looking outside of country and sector silos and looking to the bigger picture. Today Secretary Kerry announced the launch of the Global Resilience Partnership, a new partnership to address climate and population change through more coordinated and smarter action. Achieving the vision of the Global Resilience Partnership will require fluid, fast, and open information that supports coordination and decsionmaking. We are proud to be working with the Global Resilience Partnership on building a data and technology infrastructure to support new ways of addressing global stresses and shocks. Whether it is building tools that connect food security workers with conflict mitigation experts, analyzing and opening satellite imagery after a flood, or helping municipal governments analyze complex data sets, Development Seed is excited to be part of a powerful approach to solving global challenges, forged on openess and collaboration.
The first part this effort will be a global collaborative design challenge. Check out the site for more information on the Global Resilience Challenge. If you prefer viewing the source, you can find all the code on GitHub.
The Mexican Government is investing heavily in open data to directly make government more effective and the country more productive. Today, kicking off theregonal open data gathering in Latin America - ConDatos, the Government of Mexico presented datos.gob.mx a massive data portal with open public data from across the Government. Data must be accessible to be useful in driving innovation and participation. Datos.gob.mx addresses accesibility in two ways. First, all data is machine-readable and searchable, and so is the metadata about those datasets. A CKAN data portalprovides data in bulk download and via an API. Second, Datos.gob.mx put a heavy emphasis on stories and tools that turn raw data into insight. Storytelling tools make the data immediately accessible and understandable to both citizens and policymakers. We worked with the Office of the President of Mexico to build a mapping tool that integrates directly with datos.gob.mx to provide rich storytelling ability. The President’s Office worked with the Civil Protection Service to map all 2013 funds for disaster response and reconstruction. The map plots thousands of reconstruction projects across 45 natural disasters, including Hurricane Manual and Ingrid which affected two-thirds of Mexico, killing 192 people and causing $75 billion pesos in damage. The mapping tool allows ministries to quickly stand up a rich interactive map off of any dataset on datos.gob.mx through a single page of markdown. The map generation tool anticipates many of the way in which ministires will want to aggregate and display information, while also making it easy for advanced users to develop more sophisticated visualizations.
We leaned on Jekyll for the map templating ability and mapbox for base layers. Datasets are pulled in over the CKAN API and rendered in real time. All the code for the map generation tool is open source, on github, and available to other governments interested in mapping open data.
We’d love to see more satellite providers compete on ease of integrating their data. We’ll be helping Astro Digital to review their API to make it developer friendly and we will build open source tools on top Astro Digital’s API. These tools will serve as open templates for integrating Astro Digital with tools like Mapbox to quickly build powerful, data-rich sites. This is really positive move for the industry and for users. Our team grows by a continent today in beautiful Portugal where we will continue to build data tools and solve complex development challenges. Establishing an office in Europe puts us closer to our partners in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. It will also allow us to better connect to the talented open data hacker movement in the region. Amazon Web Services just opened Landsat on AWS, a publicly available archive of Landsat 8 imagery hosted on their reliable and accessible infrastructure. This investment by the AWS open data team has a big impact on our work to make satellite imagery more accessible.
Libra is an open source Landsat imagery browser that we built with Astro Digital. Libra now has options on some scenes to download individual bands related to specific types of imagery analysis like NDVI, or Urban False Color. The most recent Landsat–8 images are now available for download up to two days sooner. Last week we rolled out a new version of landsat-util, our open source utility for processing Landsat imagery. The new version is much faster and allows you to build false color composites on the fly. These improvements to Libra and landsat-util are possible because we started using Landsat on AWS, which is a publicly available archive of Landsat 8 imagery hosted on Amazon S3 that is publicly available today.
Our newest releases of Libra and landsat-util utilize Landsat on AWS for 2015 imagery. Landsat on AWS provides 2015 imagery as unzipped individual bands. AWS makes this imagery available extremely quickly, often within hours of capture. We can pull only the data that we need and to work with it immediately.
Landsat 8 imagery is an incredibly powerful resource. It is some of the most valuable open data produced by the US Government. Our partners rely on Landsat data for everything from evaluating droughts to tracking conflict. However, until now, individual bands of Landsat imagery has never been available via predictable download endpoints that we can integrate into our tools.
Libra and landsat-util now allow our partners to get imagery sooner and process it faster. Speed and ease are critical to our partners who use this data to respond to natural disasters, prevent hunger, and monitor elections.
This is a critical meeting for OSM and for open data. OpenStreetMap is becoming too big to fail. It is now critical infrastructure for everything from urban planning to disaster response. We’ll join 1000 open mappers from dozens of countries at a truly international venue to discuss new opportunities and responsibilities for OSM.