Ryan (left) and I on the mapping boat last April. Credit: Kevin Morley/Times-Dispatch

If you followed RichmondOutside.com this past summer, you probably saw posts about our project with the James River Association to create a surface-level image map of the 343-mile James River — the first such map ever created of an entire river. That map is live at our sister site Terrain360.com as well as the JRA’s site TheJamesRiver.org.

It was a challenging undertaking, logistically, technically and in a lot of other ways for myself and Ryan Abrahamsen, the other half of RichmondOutside.com and Terrain360.com. We hope to announce soon a new, even larger-scale water mapping project for this summer. In the meantime, we’ve got some other news that we think is pretty big.

Today TEDxRVA announced its (partial) lineup of speakers for the April 10 event at the Carpenter Theater at CenterStage, and Ryan is one of them. He’ll be using our experience on the James and with Terrain360.com to explore the intersection of technology and the outdoors, how the former, long seen as a barrier to getting people outside, can actually be a gateway to the latter. There’s more to it, of course, all of which will be explored in under 18 minutes on April 10 at TEDxRVA.