Sentinel Bird

Earlier this year I ran a small experiment called the Geospatial Launchpad — six weeks of working closely with a couple of people to help them push their geospatial projects forward. West was one of them.

His project is Sentinel Bird (sentinelbird.com): an archive of every Sentinel-2 visit over the Gaza Strip since 2015, with 10-meter resolution imagery for each district, interactive comparison sliders, change-over-time timelapses, and a downloadable press pack — all free, no accounts, no paywall, licensed for anyone to use for anything.

In this conversation, we get into what Sentinel Bird is, why West built it, and everything he ran into along the way — the marketing, the SEO, the feedback, all the stuff that has nothing to do with the tech but everything to do with whether a project actually goes anywhere.

We talk about:

• How frustration with English-language media coverage after October 7th turned into a geospatial side project
• The foundation models West is training on Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical data for damage detection
• Making the pipeline location-agnostic, and why tiling across orbital passes is harder than it looks
• "The agenda is in the data" — building something opinionated without saying a word
• Why URL structure is the thing you should think hardest about before you hit publish the first time
• Watching a real human use your site, and how humbling that is
• Using AI to audit your own site — what was useful, and what advice to ignore
• The ethics of monetizing a project you'll never put behind a paywall
• What worked and what didn't in the Geospatial Launchpad, and what I'd change next time

West is currently open to work opportunities. If you check out Sentinel Bird and think there's something there, email him at hello @ sentinelbird.com

If you're working on your own project and a bit of structure and accountability sounds appealing, there's a link in the show notes — register your interest, and if enough people are keen, I'll run the Launchpad again.

Sign up for the next Geospatial Launch Pad

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