The Meaningful Location project was begun at the University of California Berkeley School of Information as the final project for five master's students. We believe that existing location-based services don't recognize the complex personal relationships we have to place and want to improve the way computers communicate with us about locations.

• Read our report explaining the theory, process and implementation of our master's thesis.
• View our presentation to the public, May 15, 2010.

The team

When not working on MeLo...

• Nick Doty researches the privacy of location-based services at the iSchool and teaches the Information Organization Lab class.
• Mohit Gupta used to work with Microsoft Research on map-based storytelling and now works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on terms-of-service tracking.
• Karen Nomorosa thinks fondly of the Philippines while doing service design research with Bob Glushko and putting her degree to meaningful use at Rearden Commerce.

Alumni

• Ryan Greenberg worked extensively on MeLo's awesome UI and slick API before moving to Twitter to be a user interface developer.
• Steph Pakrul is largely responsible for MeLo's visual design; now she works full-time on Drupal theming at TopNotchThemes.

Advisor

• Deirdre Mulligan is a law professor at the School of Information and an expert in privacy and other policy issues.

Our "offices"

The MeLo team doesn't really work too well in traditional dedicated office spaces. According to a statistical analysis of our personal location histories and SVN logs, MeLo is built 32% at UC Berkeley, 21% at Bay Area coffeeshops and 47% at our respective homes.

Sound like fun?

If you're excited about the MeLo project, like this style of working and are interested in joining us or collaborating with us, let us know.