Sourcemap Founder/CEO Leonardo Bonanni will be presenting at the upcoming Geo NYC Meetup on "Mapping the Environment". Joining him are Wendy Brawer and Thomas Turnbull from GreenMap.org, Ilya Rosenfeld from OpenGeo, and Aaron Ogle from OpenPlans.
The Meetup is Monday, April 8 at 7pm and is being held at 199 Lafayette St., Suite 3B in New York City (map). Find out more and register here.
Here I am at this year's IDEAS Boston Conference speaking about the role of companies and consumers as citizens of global supply chains.
Thursday I'll be participating in a joint webinar with Recorded Future on helping secure supply chains from social and political disruptions through web intelligence. Register now! More information below:
Web Intelligence for Securing the Supply Chain
Live Webcast: Thursday, March 21 at 1pm ET
Recorded Future and Sourcemap invite you to a free webcast introducing how our technologies reduce risks to supply chains by identifying signals of potential business disruptions.
Our webcast on March 21 features guest speaker Dr. Leonardo Bonanni, Founder and CEO of Sourcemap, discussing the challenges faced by analysts to efficiently assess threats to their supply chains. Recorded Future extracts threat signals from the web while Sourcemap provides an open directory of supply chains to better understand product origins, components, and impact on people and the environment.
Featured in this presentation:
We look forward to meeting you at the webcast on March 21, and please don't hesitate to contact us with questions.
Sincerely,
Recorded Future and Sourcemap
Are you fascinated with how things are made? Then you'll love working at Sourcemap. We're building software that revolutionizes the way we share information about supply chains: where things come from, what they're made of, and their social/environmental impact. And we're delivering it to clients including multinationals, governments, activists and NGO's. Sourcemap is hiring full-time employees to join our team based in Central Square, Cambridge (MA). We are looking for enthusiastic, creative problem-solvers with an eye for detail and design. Contact us if you're interested in:
Email resumes, code samples and portfolios to: jobs@sourcemap.com
It's been a while since we shared what we're up to, and the answer is: a lot! In the first update, I wanted to share a project a long time coming: First Mile Crowd-Mapping. It was our proposal to the first African News Innovation Challenge, and it was selected among the winners! Below is a select description of the project from the application (the answers we omitted are sensitive to the activists involved). We'll be spending a lot more time in West Africa from now on!
1.) What is your project? *Give us your updated and refined ‘elevator pitch’. [25 words max]
A secure platform for journalists, activists, and auditors to report on sensitive supply chains; and for stakeholders to verify, analyze, and share the results.
2.) Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media.
Journalists need a way to securely upload data and video footage describing illegal supply chain practices in the sensitive ‘First Mile’ of logging, cocoa, palm oil, etc… FMC is an editorial resource for on-the-ground footage to be archived, verified, and prepared for integrated reporting to governments, multinationals, and the public.
8.) How will your project mesh with the wider innovation ecosystem?
Anyone can download the FMC app to record footage at sites of extraction or agriculture. Data is encrypted and stored on the phone until it can be synced by wireless/USB/Tor to a secure dropbox and a user dashboard for sharing with regional industry monitoring groups (i.e. Liberian lumber, Ivorian cocoa). Group administrators (NGO’s, journalists, and government/multinational representatives) receive alerts when data is uploaded, verify and analyze the results through a GIS-based visualization and moderation dashboard, prepare the data for exporting to third-party software (i.e. OpenOffice, Google Earth, Mapbox.com), and embed interactive maps in external websites.
10.) What does success for your project look like? *What metrics will you use to monitor progress and evaluate success on your project? [25 words max]
After 6 Months: 500 app downloads, 10K data points collected, 20 NGO’s and 1 multinational using the platform, 25 press mentions, 5K tweets
c.) Tell us about your implementation plan. *Outline your development plan, so that the jury has some insight into how your project will be built. [100 words max]
FMC will be developed between Boston, Nairobi and Monrovia. The Boston team will design and develop the UI, server-side mobile features, and moderation/storytelling platform. The Nairobi team will handle on-the-ground mobile application development, activist training and support, and use the storytelling platform to produce a documentary film. The Monrovia team will test and actively use the mobile reporting app and the moderation/storytelling platform, and use the resulting data for reporting to international buyers and governments. Once the platform has been successfully used for reporting/moderation/storytelling in Monrovia, it will be made available to NGO’s and companies operating across the African continent.
We're very proud to have been nominated alongside Efficiency Exchange, Walmart and MIT for the VERGE 25 awards in the category of 'Smarter Supply Chains' – vote for us and vote often! http://www.greenbiz.com/slideshow/2012/10/23/verge-25-smarter-supply-chains
Update: we were selected among 25 winners of the VERGE 25, which "honors 25 leaders from business, government, and institutions who are making significant contributions toward the convergence of systems and technologies around energy, buildings, transportation, and information and communications." Thanks for your help!
We're honored to be included in "America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs 2012" by Bloomberg Businessweek and to be surrounded by so many friends. Check out the article and vote for your favorite!
Version 1.2 brings a host of improvements to our social functionality, as well as enhancements to our UI.
As always, we welcome your feedback. We continue to be in very active development, and your feature requests help the team prioritize our efforts.
Stay tuned for more exciting improvements!
Alex Ose
Sourcemap Developer
I'm proud to announce a new round of improvements to Sourcemap.com!
Support Sourcemap! Pro Accounts will give you a custom url and dashboard as well as the ability to create private and password-shared maps. Pro members will have access to our newest features and enhanced access to our API.
Buy a Pro Account for $99/year and help support Sourcemap today!
Another first: you can now map water and energy footprints along with carbon! The revised visualization shows three new buttons at the bottom of the map, while the pop-up shows you how the calculations were carried out, what references were used, and even provide a hyperlink to the source materials!
Ever see a map with too much going on? Now you can filter out the points you want to see by typing into the search field in the header – we'll leave only the points with those words in their title or description, and the rest will be greyed out.
You can now create sourcemaps by uploading a simple spreadsheet – a much faster and more powerful way to make great maps! Learn more about using the using spreadsheets at http://sourcemap.com/info/instructions
We have a new mobile view that is completely redesigned to load faster and put more information at your fingertips! It's still in progress so – as always – contact us with any ideas or opinions.
As always, we welcome your feedback. We continue to be in very active development, and your feature requests help the team prioritize our efforts.
Here's to Sourcemap 1.1 and supply chain transparency for all!
Alex Ose
Sourcemap Developer
What is the value of supply chain transparency in an authoritarian state? That is one question Yeling Tan, a pre-doctoral candidate at the Kennedy School of Government, sought to answer on Thursday's seminar at the Transparency Policy Project. Her paper "Clearing the Air? The Role of NGOs in China's Environmental Transparency Measures" illustrates how China is addressing environmental impact through web-based reporting. A push for transparency has spurred two "Environmental Information Disclosure Measures:" the Pollution Information Transparency Index ranking municipalities on their environmental disclosure, and the China Pollution Map (above) providing information on companies' violations of environmental standards. It's unclear whether this disclosure is empowering local citizens or municipalities to improve environmental standards, but Yeling highlighted some promising trends:
Transparency may be hobbled by a lack of government accountability, but web-based reporting offers an opportunity to transcend national boundaries and involve many other stakeholders in the pursuit of sustainable practices.