Summer interns

In order to expedite the proress on the Venice 2.0 information infrastructure, I have advertised summer 2008 internships in Venice for WPI Computer Science majors. Seven students applied, including one PhD candidate and one Masters grad. So, it looks like two WPI CS students will be in Venice from June 15 to August 15 to help get our web presence established. It's going to be a great experience for them and a great benefit to our efforts.

WikiVenice

We now have our very own media-wiki, thanks to the tireless dedication of Kyle Miller (who completed his project in Venice in the fall of 2007). We are migrating our Venice 1.0 wikibook from wikidot to this new site, which resides on the Venice server, so we have more control and fewer limits. Take a look!

MQP 2.0

Thanks to the collaboration of Prof. Gary Pollice, I was able to recruit four WPI Computer Science majors (Craig Blanchette, Tim Cheng, Eric Clayton and Justin Fyles), who will be completing their Major Qualifying Project (MQP) in Venice this fall. Their work will contribute to the 20th anniversary by providing ways for the general public to access our datasets through web services. The project is being coordinated with the ongoing work on LOUIS as part of the GIS 2.0 activities, such as Ploppit and Plukkit. The team will create APIs that will enable the creation of the Web 2.0 applications that in turn will leverage our data repository for the benefit of local Venetians as well as visitors. The team will implement one of those applications in order to test the underlying web-services infrastructure. Prof. Pollice will be the primary advisor of the MQP and we plan to get him to Venice at the end of the term in Venice (by Dec. 13, 2008).

Everyblock Venice

One of the various threads that I am following up on is the possibility of having Everyblock.com take on Venice, after they're done with Chicago, San Francisco and the other 3 cities they are supposed to complete as part of a multimillion dollar grant from the Knight foundation (of Knight Ridder fame). It's not surprising that the Knight foundation, historically associated with journalism, would sponsor everyblock, since this outfit is the brainchild of journalist-turned-mashup-prophet Adrian Holovaty, who became an instant celebrity in the 2.0 world because of his chicagocrime mashup (now replaced by an updated everyblock page). I met Daniel X. O'Neil (I love the X) in Boston, where he was discussing the possibility of bringing Everyblock to Boston with City officials with whom I have been collaborating in my capacity as the WPI Boston Project Center director. Daniel is the "people person" in the Everyblock triumvirate, so we had lunch and discussed how cool it would be to have a "newsfeed for your block" in the city of canals... It would mesh well with the Mashup Camp.