The Federal Communications Commission is poised to announce a new 10-year initiative to give the United States “the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.” The goal is to assure that at least 100 million homes have access to broadband networks at speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (20 times faster than today’s average speed).

The Broadband Initiative is funded through the Recovery Act, and details can be found at www.broadband.gov. Among the details coming out about the National Broadband Plan roadmap is the creation of a wireless network for first responders (fire, police, public safety) to communicate and share data and video during major emergencies. The use of broadband for education and access to healthcare records is another priority.

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, asserts that the United States is lagging far behind other countries in broadband adoption and speed, with a third of Americans having no access to high-speed Internet service.

The U.S. Census Bureau is hard at work on the 2010 Census, fighting technological hurdles and an apparent malaise about being counted. In order to highlight the tradition of the these population counts that occur ever 10 years, the agency has put together some highlights for each of the 23 counts that have taken place since 1790.

The “Through the Decades” website contains interesting facts about the population size, the number of census workers, any new types of questions or race categories, and any new technologies deployed to ease this monumental task. There are some fascinating facts here about the changing size and makeup of the population as well as the march of technology.

Here are some of the details about the progression of computers and geospatial tools:

• 1890 is the first year that census workers were given detailed maps to help complete their tasks, and it’s also the same year that an electric tabulating system was utilized for the count
• 1950 was the first time a computer was used to tabulate results, and it was also the first computer designed for civilian use
• 1960 was the first time that census results were digitally recorded (on magnetic tape)
• 1970 was the first time that census data products were made available digitally on magnetic tape.
• 1980 saw the creation of the State Data Center Program for easier access to digital data on computer tapes
• 1990 was the year that the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER), computer-based maps, was introduced. It also was the first year that data was released on CD-ROM
• 2000 was when the Internet became the primary means of distributing Census data
• 2010 won’t include the “long form” because this more detailed collection has been converted to the ongoing American Community Survey

Taken in 10 year chunks, this condensed history provides uncovers some trends about how society has changed, the growing role of technology for administration, and the way that Americans view themselves. The 2010 Census is less of a focal point for geospatial technologists given that the American Community Survey has provided much more detailed and ongoing data for spatial analysis, but it’s still the largest ongoing geographic data collection effort in the world.

Senator Chris Dodd aims to pass the Livable Communities Act prior to his retirement at the end of this session. The Act aims to fund transit-oriented development and other green transportation efforts. The Act would provide $4 Billion in competitive funds for projects, would establish an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities within the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and would establish an independent Interagency Council on Sustainable Communities. The effort builds on the $150 Million of sustainability grants that were part of the 2010 White House budget and formalizes the inter-agency efforts of the Office of Livable Communities.

The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation.

The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives.

Read more about this cutting-edge facility in this feature in The Australian.

The Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has just released an online fatal injury mapping model that allows you to query injury statistics to create custom maps of death rates throughout the United States. There’s a fascinating level of detail to this resource, including the intent of injury, ethnicity, age, and cost of injury. The map can be detailed at several different levels of detail, and there’s the ability to smooth and color code the data for definitions.

After the successful and ongoing largely-volunteer mapping efforts to respond to the Haiti earthquake, it’s heartening to see that there’s momentum for this approach in response to the massive earthquake that struck Chile. There are Crisis Camps this weekend and stretching into the future for both Haiti and Chile that are viewable at this page of the Crisis Commons website. There also appears to be growing cultural awareness and celebration of the concept, with a planned event at the SXSW technology, music and film gathering in Austin, Texas in a few weeks.

With just one crisis response, the advent of the geek relief response squads of Crisis Commons would have just been a fad. Now that there’s ongoing commitment, and increased tool refinement, this idea of Crisis Camps is becoming a movement that has the potential to influence policy direction and to speed thoughtful responses to crisis situations. Crisis Commons adds transparency, social networking, interactive assessments, global outreach and a rich communication medium to what has long been disparate mapping efforts.

We’ve seen growing interest in opportunities to showcase innovation that have largely been competitive affairs such as robot wars, and other contests. What the world needs are more opportunities for geeks to show their stuff in a collective and innovative fashion, and the Crisis Commons points the way. The Crisis Commons has a bright future in aiding the world, and particularly the developing world where technology capacity is lacking, while also providing a platform for technology development and STEM education.

The Ushahidi blog has a nice summary of the first week of activities responding to the earthquake in Chile. Students at Colombia University’s School of International and Public Affairs have been responsible for setting up the Ushahidi-Chile platform, and they’ve mapped more than 800 incidents in the first week of response.

Ongoing research of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States draws a direct connection between housing affordability, auto ownership, auto use and transit ridership. By factoring in the cost of transportation, the index puts an emphasis on location efficiency rather than simply the cost of housing.

The Housing+Transportation Affordability Index has been an ongoing project by the Center for Neighborhood Technology along with the Center for Transit Oriented Development with support from the Brookings Institute. The recently expanded website  includes analysis of more than 330 metro areas in the United States that account for more than 80% of the population, thanks to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

“Compact neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services have high location efficiency. They require less time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel requirements. The savings add up for households and communities. Transportation costs can range from 15% of household income in location efficient neighborhoods to over 28% in inefficient locations. Greenhouse gas emissions fluctuate too, depending on household reliance on costly, carbon-intensive automobile travel.”

Be sure to check out this application to see how your neighborhood rates.

There has been much in the news about the abandoned and empty housing stock in Detroit now that there are far fewer jobs to support workers in that city. The city just completed a new survey to precisely map their parcels, and to determine the quantity, location and impacts of vacated housing stock.

The survey by the Detroit Data Collaborative found 91,000 vacant residential lots and 31,000 vacant structures. In the process, the survey also worked to map the neighborhoods that are in the best condition and that might warrant more attention for redevelopment. The city’s mayor, David Bing, is advocating the creation of a smaller city and a focus on making the city more livable.

The data collection effort is part of a push by City Connect Detroit Inc., which is funded by foundations, to create an in-depth regional data system to promote economic prosperity. The system takes a “data-driven approach to decision making with asset-based analysis” in order to inform and monitor planning decisions.

Read an overview of the study, including maps of the area, in this article from the Detroit Free Press.

The incoming chairman of the Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) has just sent out a press release that declares the country the world leader in spatial technology. The audacious claim tones down a bit in the body of the release, and more simply states that there is the intent for the country to be great at spatial technology.

Certainly Australia can lay claim to some geospatial greatness. I’m aware of the good software development work there that spawned ER Mapper and much of Intergraph’s location-based services offerings. I’m sure there are other world-class companies and research institutions in Australia that have contributed to the development of the technology, and I’m sure there are also passionate users of the technology.

Canada can lay claim to being the birthplace of GIS and other policy-driven systems of geospatial monitoring and analysis. I’ve had good exposure to the research and development work that takes place in that nation. There are software companies from Canada that offer products of great utility to the spatial community, including Safe Software and various open source GIS developers that are world leaders in the development of that toolset. The geospatial software development for Autodesk was headquartered in Calgary for years, and I understand there’s still a good contingent there. Bentley also houses their geospatial software development team in Quebec City.

The United Kingdom has a number of geospatial companies and operations. I know of Cadcorp on the software development side, and there’s the influential Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London on the research side. There’s also the Ordnance Survey with their amazing map data accuracy and collection processes. I’m sure there are other worthy companies and efforts of note there.

The rest of the European Union has a rich history in spatial technology development, but I’m far less in tune with any other countries in Europe as that’s the domain to my partner Jeff Thurston in Berlin.

The United States is the home to the largest geospatial software company in ESRI, and there are a number of other large software development companies and research efforts. Just in the state of California there is the headquarters of Autodesk and the research facilities of Mike Goodchild and team at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There are also U.S.-based associations that have been around since the inception of GIS in both URISA and GITA that have helped shape the development of the technology by supporting both users and vendors. There are other top-notch geospatial research and development efforts such as the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas, and the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, among others.

This issue of world dominance is a spatial problem that encapsulates not just company headquarters or institutions, but also the nationalities of all the key spatial thinkers and application specialists. I’ve known quite a diverse group of technologists that hail from far and wide, and often travel far and wide. Mike Goodchild for one is a native of the United Kingdom that spent years teaching in Canada before settling in the United States.

I’m wondering if the Olympics helped to spur Australia’s announcement of world dominance with this release that promotes nationalist pride. It’s Australia’s summer right now, and perhaps they’re feeling left out given the winter focus of these games. Who do you think can lay claim to “#geoglobaldomination”?

The field of geospatial technology is full of people on a mission. It’s not just the achievement of a paycheck that motivates workers, it’s predominantly about doing good work that makes a difference.

I recently interviewed Paul Ramsey with OpenGeo about open source software and his company’s recently released OpenGeo stack of software. Here’s Ramsey on the motivations that drive his organization:

“We’ve formed ourselves as a social enterprise, meaning a business, but a business where the variable of maximization is not value of capital. In your traditional startup you dump some capital into it and you hope to make that pile of capital as big as possible. Our goal as a social enterprise is to take that starting capital and use it to grow as much social good as possible.

Our synthesis of how to do that best is to take our startup capital and work to be financially self sustaining. We’re working to build a business around open source tools that allow people to more democratically do mapping, but building a business with an aim to self sustain the development of that software so that we’re not tied to the vagaries of funding at the end of this process.”

Read the full interview for more insight into the status and prospects for open source geospatial tools here.