I learned about Vizzuality while I was working as a freelance in rainy Amsterdam. What attracted me to Javier de la Torre and Sergio Álvarez’s seven people company was the radically different projects they were releasing.
In the same week that I interviewed with them over Skype, they had published a project that allowed people to become citizen scientists and help astronomers discover exoplanets. They were also building tools to transcribe mid-19th century ship’s logs to extract weather observations. Those projects were well crafted, beautifully designed, and empowering for the world.
Some of my favorite projects I worked on during my time at Vizzuality were:
- An experimental UI for NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) to identify and annotate seafloor biodiversity.
- Several citizen science projects like the previously mentioned Planet Hunters (to find exoplanets) and Old Weather (to transcribe ship’s logs) for The Citizen Science Alliance.
- The first version of Global Forest Watch, an open-source tool for the visualization and analysis of deforestation for the World Resources Institute that was launched in 2014 and used satellite technology, open data, and crowdsourcing to provide near-real-time information about the world’s forests.
- The first version of the Endangered Languages Project for Google.org and The Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, which aimed to preserve and promote linguistic diversity worldwide.