"The many debates about geographic information mirror broader debates about information generally, particularly in areas such as ownership of data and invasion of privacy. We...address the question of whether the geographic context is distinct and unique, and focus as far as possible on topics where the answer is at least in part affirmative. The information society is different from traditional societies, and particularly in its geographic organization. The ability to communicate with few geographic, economic, physical, or other resource constraints empowers the individual, facilitates the emergence of new invisible communities of interest, and undermines traditional sources of power...Geographic information has been produced for decades by a combination of the military, other government agencies, and the private sector. With the end of the cold war and the shrinking of government, the traditional roles of producer, distributor, and consumer must change...Increased emphasis on infrastructure, standards, and geographic data sharing in distributed networks is likely.
The use of geographic information technologies is providing to users substantial economic advantages, legal advantages, and political advantages. Possession of geographic information has also contributed to military power and even to U.S. western expansion and the political power of the colonizer. We need to reflect on the potential significance of technological and institutional changes to the widening or lessening of social and economic gaps in society.
...The world of NSDI, in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer, will be very different from the one we are used to, with its linear flow of data from producing agency to consuming public...It raises fundamental questions about how information is described between one person and another, and about the processes by which semantic meaning is communicated...
The ways in which we organize space, and construct communities and geographies, are profoundly influenced by changes in communication technology...Geographic proximity to traditional resources becomes much less of an issue in locating a site or forming a community...Analogies to geographic location must emerge on the net, if only in the minds of its users. How will people conceptualize or spatialize a geography-less net? How significant is the trend to geographically-based Internet addresses (e.g., .us rather than .edu)? What language will emerge to describe virtual location? Will the net provide a unique laboratory for studying human concepts of space removed from geography and traditional distance-based impediments to interaction?
While the amount of digital spatial data collected at the local government level is dramatically increasing, much of it is not entering the public domain...Is diminution of the spatial information ‘commons’ detrimental or advantageous to the long term economic well-being of the nation? Are small innovative businesses harmed or helped in comparison to large businesses by the practice? Is the trend toward imposition of intellectual property rights in government spatial data detrimental or beneficial to the scientific and teaching communities and to what extent? What are the ramifications in lessening of the ‘commons’ for the sharing of scientific and technical information generally? What are the consequences relative to citizen oversight of government decision making?"
2. Non-Varenius events related to Geographies of the Information Society, since October 1995
Several significant events have occurred in the domain of interest of the Panel since the Varenius proposal was written in October 1995.
Specialist meeting of NCGIA Initiative 19, March 1996 (http:www.geo.wvu.edu/i19/)
Of all of the research initiatives undertaken by NCGIA since 1988, Research Initiative 19 bears the strongest similarity to the panel’s strategic area. Commonly referred to as the GIS and Society initiative, its full title is "The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment are Represented in GIS". The Initiative 19 Specialist Meeting, held in Minnesota in early March 1996, identified several key directions for research:
Several research directions have been pursued within this agenda since the specialist meeting. They are described in detail in the I19 section of this report, and are summarized here because of their influence on the discussions of the panel:
Spatial technologies, geographic information and the city
In September 1996 an NCGIA-sponsored research conference on "Spatial Technologies, Geographic Information, and the City" took place in Baltimore, MD. The conference, organized on the model of a specialist meeting, brought together 30 scholars working on different aspects of urban modeling and analysis, geographic information research and applications, and the impact of telecommunication and information technologies on urban society. The conference report is available at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/BALTIMORE/opening.html
Law, Information Policy and Spatial Databases
The closing event for NCGIA’s Initiative 16 was held at GIS/LIS '97 (Cincinnati, November 1997) as a special session with the following papers: "A comparative analysis of information policy approaches among mapping agencies of several nations", Xavier Lopez, UC Berkeley; "A comparative analysis of citizen access and revenue generation approaches pursued by local governments in the U.S.", Jeff Johnson, Stanford University; "A survey of data supplier preferences regarding the application of intellectual property rights in protecting digital spatial data or in allowing a supplier's use of others’ data", Yvette Pluijmers, Delft University of Technology; and "Ethical considerations in the use of geographic information", Harlan Onsrud, University of Maine.
Socio-economic research within the European Science Foundation’s GISDATA program
The GISDATA Final Conference "Geographic Information Research at the Millenium", held in Strasbourg, France, 13–17 September 1997, included a panel on "Socio-economic research and GIS". The panel was chaired by Michael Wegener (Germany) and included Helen Couclelis, Munroe Eagles, Einar Holm, and Sture Oberg (Sweden). The panel addressed some of the ground covered by issues of democracy, equity, privacy, and surveillance; the promise and threat of geodemographics; the emancipatory potential of grass-roots GIS; and the difference between academic and commercial views of GIS.
During the last eighteen months, this effort under I19 has introduced an innovative phrase and concept around which to gather many ongoing efforts both in the study of public process and institution building and institutional change, and in the realm of technological developments related to collaborative spatial decision making and on-line group work. Having a core concept has made it possible to share ideas. Most interesting is potential for international cooperation, and in parallel developments such as the conference "Public participation in local decision making: evaluating the potential of virtual decision making environments" at the University of Leeds. There is also intent to explore regional meetings in the US bringing academic researchers, commercial systems developers, public agency participants, and grass-roots leaders to explore issues related to implementation of GIS and related technologies in public domains.
A workshop on PPGIS was held in July 1996 at the University of Maine. A workshop home page (ncgia.spatial.maine.edu/ppgis/ppgishom.htm) and report (www.geo.wvu.edu/i19/report/public.html) are available, along with a report on proposed design criteria (ncgia.spatial.maine.edu/ppgis/criteria.html).
UCGIS Summer Retreat 1997
Several papers on themes in the panel’s domain were presented at this conference, and can be found at www.spatial.maine.edu/ucgis/testproc/: Ryznar and Marans, "The Greening of Detroit"; Murphy and Sader, "Training in Remote Sensing and GIS"; Coleman, "Applied and Academic Geomatics"; Nebert, "Supporting Search for Spatial Data"; Schmitt, "Community organizations and GIS Implementation"; Schroeder, "GIS in Public Participation Settings"; Bassett, "Modeling Biodiversity for Policy Makers"; Baxmann, "Online Consensus-Building through Web-Based GIS"; Patterson, "GIS and (Dis)empowerment Issues"; Sieber, "GIS in the Grassroots, Role for Universities". Sarah Ellwood, "The Minneapolis Community GIS Project: A Report on the Challenges and Opportunities of Community-Based GIS Education" is not linked on-line.
A special session on public participation GIS included the following presentations: Nancy Obermeyer, "HUD's Community Connection for Local Empowerment"; Michael Barndt, "Public Participation GIS Within an Urban Neighborhood"; Michael Shiffer, "Using Spatial Multimedia to Characterize Communities".
The first 1998 issue of Cartography and GIS will be devoted to the PPGIS theme (special editor Nancy Obermeyer); final review of papers is now underway.
Sessions are being planned at URISA (July, 1998, Charlotte NC), and the panel will sponsor U.S. participation in an international workshop on "Groupware for Urban Planning" (Lyon, February 1998).
PPGIS-SCOPE is a very active list devoted to many aspects of public participation GIS, sponsored jointly by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Specialized teleCenters of Professional Education; details can be found at www.projectscope.org.
Meeting of experts, March 1997
The cooperative agreement with NSF stipulated convening an expert panel to help specify the research themes to be pursued under this Varenius theme, prior to selection and convening of a Varenius panel. Approximately 30 experts were brought together for this purpose in Santa Barbara February 28–March 1. Ideas were exchanged on a wide variety of possible themes over the two-day period, before synthesizing and reducing them to the following eight topics (in ranked order):
Subsequent to this meeting, Michael Goodchild asked Eric Sheppard to chair this panel. Four other panel members were approached, all of whom agreed to serve: Helen Couclelis (Geography and NCGIA, UC Santa Barbara); John Goddard (Geography, Univ. of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, unable to attend meeting); J.W. Harrington (Geography, Univ. of Washington); and Harlan Onsrud (Spatial Information Science and Engineering and NCGIA, Univ. of Maine). John Goddard resigned in November, and a replacement has been proposed to NSF.
Considerable discussion was devoted to the scope of activities that should be addressed by this panel. The given name suggests that all aspects of the geography of the information society are pertinent, but panel members wished to narrow this in order to focus on areas where NCGIA could most effectively stimulate new research. Appropriate topics for research initiatives (RIs) should meet at least the following criteria: Novelty and originality (i.e., little work is already underway, so an RI can stimulate new activities); feasibility (i.e., the topic is sufficiently timely and well-defined that an RI has reasonable promise of making a difference); relevance to the mission of NCGIA (i.e., the topic draws on the GI Science-related expertise of the NCGIA community of scholars); and overlap with the other two corners of the ‘Varenius triangle’ (i.e., the topic contributing to the coherence of the Varenius project as a whole).
For example, it was agreed that the important topic of how the evolution of an information society is affecting the spatial organization of society is not appropriate for an RI. This already is a broad-ranging and active area of empirical and theoretical research, on which the limited resources of an RI could make little impact. Instead, it was agreed that appropriate RIs should focus on well-defined but fundamental conceptual problems posed by the evolution of an information society which have not yet received adequate attention, and which might benefit substantially from research in the spirit of Geographic Information Science. There was also discussion about renaming the panel, given its decision to exclude certain topics, but after much deliberation it was decided to retain the name.
Beginning with the list of suggestions from with the expert meeting, the panel sought through discussion to identify fundamental themes underlying these, according to the principles summarized above. Two topics, focusing on some of the fundamental and long-standing geographical ordering principles of human society which are now being challenged as those societies become networked, were proposed: "Measuring and representing accessibility in the information age" and "Remapping community and place in the information age". Each of these topics is represented in at least three of the themes suggested at the March workshop.
A third topic was not definitively decided on at this time, although the Panel considered four candidates for this slot: "Public Participation in GIS", "[Public] Access to Spatial Data", "Moving Beyond Map as Metaphor", and "Modeling and Simulating Geographies in a Digital World". In the closure meeting with the other two panels, the different initiative topics of the three groups were reviewed relative to one another, and complementarities and overlaps were identified in each case. In this discussion, there seemed to be a clearer sense of the relevance of the theme of public participation supported by GIS than the other three of these potential topics. Also the other three potential topics are partly covered in the initiatives selected.
Formulation of proposed initiatives, and presentation to Advisory Board (8/97)
The following two initiatives were presented to the Advisory Board:
MEASURING AND REPRESENTING ACCESSIBILITY IN THE INFORMATION AGE
LEADERS:
Spatial accessibility is the geographic definition of opportunity. In addition to issues of accessibility within communications networks, the information age has raised vital issues about access to communications networks. The information age has not made the information society ubiquitous. At issue is not merely the restructuring of geographical space, but the institutional and other contingencies that influence who has access to whom, when, and where, via physical and especially via virtual contact. Differential hardware and software availability, inadequacies of education and training, cultural factors and the relevance of the Internet to everyday life all contribute to the exclusion of selected places and social groups from contemporary communications networks (thereby perpetuating ‘information poverty’). Since humans communicate continually as a part of knowledge building, communication and social interaction, gaining access to a computer is equivalent to changing one’s accessibility within the broader flux of society. Issues of inequality in access to geographic information in particular remain relatively unexplored.
This initiative will examine how geographic information science can assist research into the geographies of the information age by helping reconceptualize and provide appropriate representations of accessibility and inequality within expanded models of space (and time) that encompass both the physical and the virtual.
Key questions include:
LEADERS:
Placeless communities are far from new, but the immediacy of interaction promised by the Internet makes such communities more ‘real’, and facilitates their growth. Political scientists and technology theorists are concerned that the Internet is accelerating the detachment of individuals from the places within which social networks and senses of belonging to society are formed, undermining community and democracy. At the same time, the Internet gives individuals the opportunity to escape the exclusionary aspects of community, turning to interact with self-defined communities electronically in response to exclusion from local communities. As people transfer more of their time and loyalty from actual to virtual communities, so the balance between place-based and non-place based communities is shifting, with potentially wide-ranging implications both for places and communities, and for the influence of place on human identities and behaviors. There are also shifts in the geographic scale at which individual practices are regulated. The regulatory power and relevance of local legal standards and norms may be undermined by the proliferation of long distance and/or globalized standards and practices, but spatial and non-spatial localities may also be the places to escape from such influences.
Place is a basic and enduring geographical concept, and the prospect that it needs to be rethought because of these changes poses a basic research challenge. Key questions include:
The following steps have been completed or are underway:
The theme of PPGIS has been chosen as the third area for catalyzing research into Geographies of the Information Society within Varenius, in part because of interest within the Varenius panels but also because a community of researchers has identified itself to Varenius as interested in collaborating on research within the rubric of PPGIS. In the judgment of the panel, this is a high priority area for future research, and one where progress will require the kind of catalysis that Varenius can provide, but a more limited level of commitment is necessary. A small organizational meeting occurred in June 1996, so it does not seem appropriate to begin this initiative with a specialist meeting. Instead, it is proposed that Varenius facilitate a follow-up workshop, after URISA 1998, to bring together as broad a group of researchers as possible with the goal of refining the research agenda in this area into a proposal for external funding. In addition, Varenius will facilitate the participation of PPGIS researchers at international meetings such as the Groupware meeting to be held in Lyons, France.
A large international meeting titled "Geographic Information and Society" is proposed, to be held in Minneapolis in Spring 1999, as the first of what is anticipated to be a biennial inter-disciplinary international meeting which will report on research within the area of this panel. This meeting will bring together prominent international researchers with students in order to involve new generations of scholars in this topic.
4. Assessment of research progress within and outside Varenius pertinent to Geographies of the Information Society, relative to the research agenda as set out in the NCGIA NSF proposal of October 1995
Between now and February, members of the Geographies of the Information Society panel will be assessing our progress according to the following criteria: