For those who are unfamiliar with it, TED, or Technology Entertainment Design, is a non-profit organization that spreads good ideas through conferences, their video site and the annual TED prize, given to individuals with “One Wish to Change the World.” The TED talks, featured on the site, are given by individuals ranging from entertainers to artists to scientists to professionals and to anybody else with a creative idea.

Two talks with very different approaches have stuck out in my mind: Bill Davenhall’s Your Health Depends on Where You Live and Ze Frank’s Nerdcore Comedy. Davenhall, the head of health & human services marketing at ESRI, talks about the novel field of ‘geomedicine’ and its nonexistence in health care services. Using GIS to map heart attack rates and toxic release sites in the United States, Davenhall’s map allows users to track their place history (places they have lived) in the United States to get a grip on the effect their environment has had on them. You can look at it as a grim picture, or as a move toward a more comprehensive health care approach that takes ‘geomedicine’ into account.

The second talk, given by internet personality, entertainer and public speaker Ze Frank, is a light-hearted talk about tech joys and the numerous ‘web toys’ Frank has created to increase the amount of social capital on the web. His creations have inspired people to come together and create (anything) themselves and in collaboration with other each otherAs such he’s been featured in numerous media and is currently working with Time Magazine.

At Timeraiser, we’ve been talking a lot about open data/architecture and how to harness and display it using web-based interactive mapping. I think these two talks hold a lot of lessons for this type of work. Davenhall’s US health example puts the power of interactive web mapping on display. Simply type in one or more locations and investigate your past and present local environments. Frank’s talk highlights the benefits interactivity has for creative and innovative thought, and for increasing a community’s – a civic environment’s – social capital.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been mapping various non-profit organizations using open data. This week I’ll be sitting down with Emily to discuss how we can bring these into the public sphere in an interactive and creative way. Hopefully we can maximize the amount of information available in a user’s environment while providing a platform for the creation of capital.