On Friday I had the good fortune of giving a green tour of the campus to some students in a third year environmental-history class. I typically give tours that last between 2 and 3 hours but we were able to condense this one into an hour and 15 minutes. I guess I can talk faster than I thought. Just to giving you a little insight, during these campus green tours I talk a lot about the physical campus, the recycling, energy distribution, and urban planing infrastructure that makes the University of Ottawa a green campus. We visit recycling centres, the vermi composter, the power plant, and even the shuttle bus stop. Anyways, it was on this tour last week that professor Darcy Ingram asked me if all this green infrastructure was listed somewhere. I said that it was available on our green map but I don't think that is what he was looking for. What he really wanted to know about was the narrative. Is the story of our green tour available anywhere? Yes you can go on our awe...

Unfortunately the day has come and we have retired our Foursquare account. Things were good while they lasted but now we have to go. The Office of Campus Sustainability will no longer be using Foursquare as a geo-location tool. There are couple of reasons why we are leaving the service (none of which have anything to do with the service provided by Foursquare... they are pretty awesome) but we will still be Green Maps as a tool to map sustainability on campus. Thank you to all the folks out there that contributed to our Foursquare account and who shared our tips. We really do appreciate your interest and we hope to see you again in another social media life. In the meantime, we will be transferring our sustainability 'check-in' tips and lists to the University of Ottawa's main Foursquare account. So don't worry, none of the information will be lost. The Office has had a Green Map account for many years and we hope to soon be launching new features and m...

Photo credit:  http://www.newspapergrl.com Someday I will be reclined in a psychologist’s lounge chair rhyming off coordinates and datums because I will have finally gone crazy from all the mapping projects I get myself into. Sigh, until then I have found myself a new task for maps on campus. Foursquare: a tool that allows users to explore their surroundings and discover new places. If you use Facebook , you may have noticed that you have a few friends that are constantly “checking-in” to random spots including restaurants, clubs, school buildings, etc. Personally, my phone is not legit enough to handle such applications but I can appreciate the GPS technology used by the program and apparently still get assigned the task of taking advantage of the sustainable capabilities of the service. You may recall me ranting this summer about mapping sustainable transportation on campus and my upcoming accessibility mapping projects- this is a continuation of green mapping and invo...

Photo credit: Merissa Mueller Summer is drawing to a close and as the hours on my banking excel sheet dwindle, it seems like a good idea to summarize the projects I have worked on this summer. After all, for all you know I have been sitting at this desk watching The Mentalist and Lie to Me, twiddling my thumbs (which I did do, for a week actually- more on that later). I began my summer with data crunching. I sat in front of my computer staring at piles of data that was gathered by Eric Crighton’s first year Global Environmental Challenges class and compiling it into more useful information with the aid of pivot tables. The finished product was produced by Jon because of his talent with infographics. I also spent some of my time reviewing last year’s surveys and fixing them up to be more geographically correct (thank you, methods courses) for Crighton’s next year class. On campus we have a board entitled the “ SUDCOM ” or Sustainable Development Committee that oversees various...

Photo credit: http://etap.com/gis-map/gis-map.htm Recently our department had a progress meeting to get an idea of how our summer projects are coming along. It was great to share with my coworkers all the things I have been doing, since sometimes we’re very discrete and have no clue what the person next to us has been assigned. I was happy to report that most of my projects were nearing to an end, waiting for translation or for various responses from different people on campus. However, I realized that a massive chunk (I doubt you could even call it a “chunk” because it is so huge) of what I have done this summer was not even asked of me back in May. Yes, I am talking about mapping. If you don’t recall from way back in January when I started working here, I am in Geography and Environmental Studies here at the University of Ottawa. This Geography stuff includes the use of Geographic Information Systems software such as ArcMap 10. In plain English, I map things digitally because answer...

Photo Credit: ARGear.com That’s right, I am talking to you anonymous blog viewer. I am assuming that you go to the University of Ottawa because it makes what I am about to write more relevant. Fortunately for Jon (my boss, Sustainability Manager for the campus), I am a Geography/ Environmental Studies student. This means I was forced to take a Geographic Information Systems course which basically involved digitally mapping lots of geospatial data in a program that caused me much frustration and sleepless nights. Cut to Jon asking as he walked by my desk, “Hey, you worked with GIS, right?” I absentmindedly answered “yes” and the next week I went on holidays. I returned to a good twenty emails were sitting patiently in my inbox that basically involved Jon lending me out to do various mapping projects, including some on campus. We have decided to do a Sustainable Transportation map of campus. In the past, we have done green maps on a google-like application. But now, we are getting legit....

A couple of months ago I blogged about something called Open Green Maps, or if I didn’t I meant to. I am not sure if you are familiar with the Open Map concept but it is really quite simple. Take your standard map of anything and Open Maps allows you to personalize the content on the map. So you can add a picture or a description of a location to the map. Now enter the Open ‘Green’ Map. The first time I ever heard about a Green Map was at a sustainable campuses conference in Vancouver. It turns out that some geography students of Royal Roads College had collected a bunch of coordinates for some of the green characteristics of their campus and then laid those coordinates over top of a campus map. And voila; instant Green Map. But things have gotten a lot easier since those days of collecting individual GPS points and feeding them into a GIS program. We can all thank Google Maps for that. Although Google didn’t invent the concept of an Open Green Map, they certainly have helped bring out...