Location! The Importance of Geo-Data: Mark and Monica at SXSW

For any of our fans who might be in Austin this weekend for SXSW, be sure to check out the panel that Mark and Monica organized this Tuesday. You can check out more info about their panel (along with some visual evidence that they're having fun) below...

What: Location! The Importance of Geo-Data
Where: Sheraton Austin, Capitol ABCD
When: Tuesday, March 12, 11am-noon
Who: Mark and Monica will be joined by Catherine D'Ignazio of MIT and Devin Gaffney of the Oxford Internet Institute. 

The proliferation of location-aware devices and geo-tagged data raises important questions: what will happen as more and more of the content we create online is automatically tagged with locational data? What can we learn from this profusion of geographic information? With this data we can find restaurants, friends and sex partners (a la Grindr.com), visualize inequalities in media attention, develop epidemiological models to predict the spread of diseases, find dissident safe houses in times of political upheaval and coordinate crisis response. But who is contributing data and who is not on the map? How are our social relationships being transformed? What about privacy? What about civic participation? Serious questions are mounting - this panel aims to raise several of them, and explore the transformative power this shift may bring.