[Talk-us] US Online Mapping Parties

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Mon Jul 13 02:45:43 BST 2009


On 9 Jul 2009, at 02:30, Nicholas Vetrovec wrote:

> >I'm not sure what an online mapping party would look like. I'm  
> picturing a concerted effort to knock off a map feature where mappers
> >could share their expertise and work on the same feature in  
> multiple places.
> >Barry Parr
> >Were you thinking of doing this via irc?  Or did you have some other
> >ideas for how to collaborate?
> >Dave
>
> IRC of voice chat would be good for comunication during  the party.
> We would pick a city, town, area to work on as one mostly using the  
> arial imagery to map out features and realign roads ect.. but as a  
> larger group, we can knock out large areas at once.
> I wanted to start out by discussing things we can work on as a  
> group, areas that need a lot of fixing up, stuff that can be easily  
> worked on in an olnile environment. Maybe we should start a wiki for  
> organizing and planning the online party.

A virtual mapping party could be as simple as agreeing to focus effort  
on a particular area over a period of time, create a wiki with a task  
list and a 'cake' and a way for people to claim tasks and then  
advertise it on talk-us and also on talk.

For a while I would do work on water features in the area of a US  
mapping party in the week before the event because I had been  
frustrated and mystified about how to get water, islands and rivers to  
work in other places for over a year on both osmarender and mapnik.  
When I cracked it I decided to take that role more generally. I did  
work on water in Portland, Pittsburgh, Washington and Tampa for  
example. I also did stuff around New Orleans and Houston.

So... one could for example create a 'cake' for an area on the wiki  
and then people could claim sections for the cake for tiger fix-up and  
water etc. No necessity for IRC or conference calls, just the sense of  
community created by working together for a bigger goal. There could  
be a mentoring focus as well, but it should allow people in many time- 
zones to participate - and do remember to Europe based arm-chair  
mappers who have completed their home areas! One could be pretty  
ambitious, such as covering all interstate tiger fixup for a state and  
also major rivers.

The idea of use these mapping parties in conjunction with work on the  
ground seems very powerful and I would suggest that you always create  
arm-chair and time-zone independent tasks in association with physical  
mapping parties to help build a wider community around the place.

Possibly we could have a 'twinning' program where towns in different  
countries 'twin' to share effort and swapping tagging techniques.  
Twinning would be a great way of stopping tagging diverging around the  
world and learning from other places.



Regards,


Peter Miller (PeterIto)

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