[OHM] Quick notes about the hack day!

[Jeff Meyer]

Hi all -

We had a good turnout today for the hack day and had some great
conversations, got some dev work done, met a new content contributor
(Roop!), had guest appearances for tech support (Sajjad, Geohacker), and
hung out with the NYPL Labs crew. All in all, it was a great day.

Presentations:

- Building Inspector back-end
  -- Mauricio Giraldo gave a great presentation of how the NYPL Building
Inspector back-end works. This would be a great start for anyone attempting
to import old (i.e. copyright-free) Sanborn insurance maps

Tech updates:

- Server updates
 -- Sanjay worked on getting the OHM codebase upgraded to the latest OSM
(routing & data inspector) and getting security updates for the server

- Tileserving performance
 -- Sajjad & Tim worked on updating the tile refresh interval - let us know
if you see any differences! (I think I have already - I'm not just saying
that, either, Tim!)

- Overpass interval
 -- Richard improved the refresh & updating interval of the Overpass api

- Pointing iD at wms servers
 -- Not really an update, but I'm not sure if we've talked about it much...
you can point iD at warped old maps and start going to town in OHM using iD
- how sweet is that? Christian is busy mapping 1825 Paris now

Conversations:

- Time standards
  -- Burrito Justice, Dave Riordan, Matt Knutzen and a few others had a
good session on the limitations of the ISO 8601 time format for both older
and vague time identification, along with questions of how to cite times
relative to a source (e.g. a map of 1750 France drawn in 1800).

- Copyright
  -- an OdbL license may be a barrier to having institutions like NYPL use
OHM as a primary data repository. I'll start gathering thoughts on that -
if you have any, let's start a separate thread.

- Vector Tile Server
  -- There's an emerging consensus that using a vector tile server and some
updating browser code might be the fastest way to having usable time-based
filters for OHM. Burrito and Tim talked briefly about using Mapzen's Vector
Tile Server and the Tangram vector tile renderer set up. Later, Sajjad and
Tim talked about some alternate approaches that might involve Mapnik 3.0 or
modifications to our existing stack.

General Organizational Topics:

- Formalizing a nonprofit entity for OHM
  -- This deserves its own thread and conversation, but it's clear to me
that we need to do this in order to be taken seriously as an organization
and it's pretty much a necessary but not sufficient requirement for getting
funding. My clarity is based on feedback from others who've pursued grant
funding as well as from providers of potential grants. I'll be sending out
some notes on this separately. If you have any thoughts or suggestions
prior to that, please feel free to send them to the alias or to me directly.

- Project tracking tools
  -- I'd like to set up a better project tracking system than the Wiki -
I've set up an example on Trello, which doesn't have to be the final
answer, but I know Susanna has used it for Wikidata. Any objections to
using this? I've sent out some invites, but let me know if you'd like to be
added (or removed!).

Attendees (in no particular order):
- Richard Welty (nfgautoparts), Anandaroop Roy (freelance historical map
designer (I'm not kidding!), Tim Waters (chippy), Sanjay Bhangar, Matt
Knutzen (NYPL Maps), David Riordan (NYPL Labs), Ben Vershbow (NYPL Labs),
Jeff Meyer, John Oram (aka Burrito Justice, Mapzen), Sajjad Anwar
(geohacker, Mapbox), Christian Quest (OSM France!), Satoshi IIda, Mauricio
Giraldo (NYPL Labs)

I'm sure there's tons I've missed, but that's all I can recollect for now.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks,
Jeff


-- 
Jeff Meyer
Global World History Atlas
www.gwhat.org
jeff at gwhat.org
206-676-2347

OpenStreetMap: Mapping with a Human Touch
osm: Open Historical Map (OHM)
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map> / my OSM user page
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jeffmeyer>
t: @GWHAThistory <https://twitter.com/GWHAThistory> / @OpenHistMap
f: GWHAThistory <https://www.facebook.com/GWHAThistory>
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