The gates are open, so we’re in the clear to release Burning Man geodata.
Burning Man camps and art in OpenStreetMap
Burning Man Garmin map files choose the latest
There’s a long chain and network of people and processes that got Black Rock City data into a fungible form, and a ton of cool imagery and tracking projects. I can talk about that next week, gotta pack.
We’ve become mappers in the West Bank.
It happened so quickly and easily but it’s not all that surprising — these are sharp young engineers! But even though I preach that OSM is easy and open to everyone, somehow I still think it’s a bit too complicated. So when these guys just start getting it full on, I realize how much the OSM approach rocks. It’s awesome! “Awesome” is one of the words we’ve exchanged with the Palestinians. Other slang: our meaning of “Killer” wasn’t really understood here. I’m not really keeping up my end of the bargain by learning any Arabic.
Such a turn from just a day earlier. Friday was our first day for editing, and the lab of windows boxes started restarted randomly. Turns out Kaspersky Anti-Virus is the most evil software ever, actually shutting down the computer if the license had expired. I about lost it, something so stupid disrupting our mapping. Totally dispiriting. The locals were way more laid back, having to deal with way more serious things then this on a daily basis. Cooler heads prevailed, the evil software was uninstalled, and our facilities looked ok. Things could only go up.
After a much needed beer (Bethlehem has a large Christian population of course, so easier to get a drink then other parts of the Arab world) we traveled to the neighboring town of Beit Sahour. Watched a great jazz band bang out a few tunes (”this one is for all the Palestinian women in Israeli jails”) in a the old part of Beit Sahour recently renovated by a full suite of NGOs and UN agencies, into a lovely intimate gathering place, lined with the lovely white stone adorning all the buildings here.
Then dinner, invited by the mayor of Beit Sahour, in the municipal park, part of the amazing Oush Grab project. Land that had been held by the Israeli military (and prior to 1967 by the Jordanian army) was abandoned and redeveloped by the local munipcality, with areas to barbecue, play sports, and children’s playgrounds. Adjacent to the park is an area planned for a hospital. Wandering around the playground, I was delighted to see grass, swingsets .. and then I realized, I’m walking around totally delighted by a playground! And the fact is, this kind of facility is so crucial to normal life, so taken for granted, but very very exceptional in this place. Military base transformed into a playground, dinner with great company and great food .. totally refreshed and restored my enthusiasm for our work.
If I get a chance before leaving Tuesday, we’re going out there to fly some kites, take pics, and do detailed mapping of that place.
Right now, our first group of mappers are out surveying Bethlehem!
I’m here in the West Bank working with JumpStart International, a NGO that has accomplished amazing things in some of the toughest parts of the world. JumpStart organized programs putting people to work clearing and reconstructing public buildings in Iraq and Gaza. They’ve now started work to create a free and open map of the Palestinian West Bank, training recent engineering grads in the OpenStreetMap way. The founder of JumpStart is Sean O’Sullivan, also a founder of GIS company MapInfo, so the interest in and understanding of the importance of maps, especially in developing countries, is strong. We’re being assisted by Engineers Without Borders - Palestine, and the Engineers Assocation Palestine. Schuyler will be joining us in a few days, and we’re also getting help from Patrick of a great project, KiteGang.
The goal is to complete a map of the entire territory in a few months time, and get these sharp folks connected up with the wider world. It’s completely audacious, crazy, impossible and wonderful .. just like how people viewed OpenStreetMap just last year. (We’re gaining acceptance in some quarters, not that flickr is any less crazy and wonderful.)
JumpStart wants the work they sponsor to be in the public domain. Since core OSM is licensed CC-by-SA, we are running our own copy of the OSM software stack (rails, mapnik, and nightly Garmin maps). For the duration of the project, we’ll make edits for the West Bank on this server. At the conclusion of JumpStart’s involvement here, we’ll release the database into the public domain, and import that into OpenStreetMap. Following from that time, ongoing improvement and maintenance will happen in OpenStreetMap proper.
This effort here faces tremendous challenges. Just getting around the West Bank is difficult, and it’s a sensitive and volatile region. But that’s why it’s so important the we have a free and open community and geodata resource here. It’s also an opportunity for cutting edge work on OSM, especially in localization and disputes. We’re going to collect street addresses. I’m really excited to be a part of this effort, and really look forward to see things develop. And if you have any interest in helping, there is definitely work that can be done from abroad, just get in touch.
Mapufacture has joined FortiusOne!
No need to repeat why this makes so much sense. Andrew and Sean share the great news. More officially, there’s the press release and Mapufacture blog.
Personally, my new role at FortiusOne gives me latitude for explorations and tangential efforts, which I’ll be writing about in the coming time.
From my perspective, we’ve all been pursuing this vision of maps, tools and data, in order to better understand and communicate about our world. At the conclusion of researching Weaver House, I wrote..
there’s one simple system which they all could easily hook into .. geography. I simply want to be able to search, and ask for all the information about a small half kilometer square area. That is why I’m pushing for GeoRSS, open geo data, and open source geo software .. not just for the Web 2.0 holy grail of a good restaurant review .. but to provide the simplest and easiest way to organize information about the world, and put everyone on equal footing when it comes to deciding our future.
It’s incredible to experience and witness all the different forms of organization and endeavor that pursuit of such a simple thing conjures. From hackers, open source, and NGOs, to start ups, big multinationals, and the United Nations, we’ve worked in so many capacities. As Andrew and I have worked through Mapufacture, pushed through and spun out the simple ideas into the new alphabets soups of the GeoWeb, all paths were open to us. And we’ve been fortunate to have the support of so many great folks. When FortiusOne made the offer to join forces, it was a completely natural idea. Complementary focus, similar technologies and approach, and a shared vision of what all this code can do. I’m confident great things are happening. Rockin!
Weaver House is still standing, my friends still live there, amid a transformmed landscape. The new East London Line emerges from the back yard, and eyes level view of the formerly tranquil corner is summed up in the picture above. Amazing and what a shame.
A little while ago, I received the message below from Hamstall Ridware, resident of Weaver House back in the 80s, when rent went for the exorbitant £11/week. This was the Golden Age of Weaver House, a forgotten corner of pre-gentrified dreaming East London.
I used to live there in the 1980s when it was by and large used as a hall of residence for the nearby London College of Furniture. Originally a “council” house, it was by that time owned by a housing association based in Bethnal Green. Some couple of years before I lived there, a few of the residents were offered the chance to buy their flats under Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” scheme. The price of each flat was around £9,000. Nobody to my knowledge took up this offer (I bet a few have now though!) since rents were exceptionally low at around £8 per week, so the association embarked on a slow programme of refurbishment. By 1985 when I lived in flat 8, the rent had increased to £11, although this was the new increased price for a refurbished flat. You would be staggered at how many people thought this was extortion, but for this you received a newly fitted kitchen, modern but utilitarian bathroom with enamelled steel bath, heavy duty grey curtains and a rudimentary gas fire. Residents of non-refurbed flats hated the uniformity of it all, preferring their non-fitted kitchens, ’30s style bathrooms and Belfast sinks. Some flats were charming, some arty, some squalid, but all were cherished.
A fair proportion of residents were students at the London College of Furniture (LCF) which also had a musical instrument department. (The college is now part of the London Metropolitan University I think) A bigger proportion were ex-students who refused to leave. I could bet money that the violin maker is a hanger-on from those days. When I took up residence in Flat 8, I was asked to promise to leave after I finished college, although I don’t recall ever signing anything to confirm that I would. Since the LCF also had an interior design department, a certain artiness always existed at Weaver. Some flats were the epitome of shabby chic before anyone had ever thought of the idea, and outside were always a few interesting motors: the odd Citroen GS, a tatty VW Karmann Ghia, the obligatory Morris Minor Traveller and a couple of old BSA Bantam motorbikes chained to the railings.
The signal box on legs at Fleet Street Hill (the Hut of Baba Yaga!) was already by that time empty, and there was a yard beside it containing Pedley Street Autos, a genuine bomb-site car repairers. If you exited Weaver and looked to your left, there was a superb bit of graffiti reading “Try living here Jones”. AFAI recall, all the brickwork of this wall and all surrounding railway property was high quality grey/blue engineering brick. The reclamation yards must be making a fortune. The archway of the bridge at Fleet St Hill was home to many tramps and vagrants, most of whom got to know the bohemian residents of Weaver and knew they could call on them in times of dire emergency, otherwise they kept themselves to themselves. One such person was a scrawny woman of indeterminate age called “Skinny Jean”. Last time I looked on the webby, the signal box on legs had gone.
Gone! But not forgotten.
Jesse has posted our talk at Where 2.0 on Disaster Technology. Such a privilege to have the stage to get this message out.
That was fun. Andrew Steve and I imparted some wisdom and foolishness. And yea, the beanbags on the stage were borrowed from Google’s session next door, a conference mashup.
The slides from my session, Illuminated Hacks.
Some of my favorite hacks
for the pleasure of your hacking sensibility
with the hopeful outcome of illuminating
best practices of putting your website on the geoweb
and hinting at the means
to get exactly what you need.
cause I likes the hacks.
hacks are rad
Yuri’s Night was really really really rad. It happened over 3 weeks ago. Really overdue for a write up of our exhibit then.
Yuri’s Night access at NASA Ames was limited to the expanse of undifferentiated tarmac outside one of the hangers. A quite impressive expanse, but nothing really substantial to map. We were nicely situated outside with a view of everything, fortunate since I hardly saw anything else in detail, busy with the exhibit from 8:30am to 2:30am. During mapping parties, people love party render, animating our GPS trails all together. Even I, GPS curmudgeon, still get excited about seeing the party render. So give Yuri’s Night some form of party render. We only had two GPS units lined up, and not everyone would have be out mapping at the same moment, challenges to the party render model. The OSM exhibit would also be set among some of the most technically advanced technhology, creative, engaging performances, fire, materials, music ever brought together in one place, like Burning Man with reliable power and no dust and slightly more nerds.
We went through a lot of ideas on how to adapt party render to an actual party. The key thing I wanted to get was some sense of interaction among GPS traces. So the animation would synchronize all the traces to the same time. First idea was to draw out a large clock face pattern on the ground, and quantize the traces to attract to each point on the dial, and tween in between. This became apparently impossible when shown the map of the grounds a few weeks before, there would be no space large enough to spare. So just draw out the traces but give some kind of gravity or resistance between traces .. so perhaps the most recent actual trace could knock the other traces out of their path. We played around with the foam actionscript physics engine, but found it just too intensive for this app. Resorted to doing some offline post-processing of the GPS traces, to determine proximities, and then visualized that with growing orbs of attraction — this was in the performance version but honestly no one understood what it was, even after explanation.
Shawn adeptly banged out most of the application in a few hours, I think he’s done this a few times before. Visually enticing stuff, it looked great on Jess’s huge TV. Going retro 8-bit was a good choice .. reducing the amount of information actually helps our limited human brains get to grips on the situation. It suggests a game, a game board. LocoMatrix have figured that out as well with their gaming platform.
Jess and I primed the field by drawing out each letter of YURISNIGHT. This was immediately picked up on, one of the first runs was an energetic rendition of “F**K YOU”, run directly through exhibits and over tables .. nothing would stop this young man from writing out his impressive profanity. Later a woman drew her name in near perfect cursive! Some just wandered around. One couple wandered, then stopped for 15 minutes and had a close chat, then repeated .. very sweet but not very exciting traces. More designs, writings, wanderings. People had fun and the GPS units were out most of the time.
Most everyone thought we were tracking people in real time. Nope it was much more simple, but having a sophisticated looking display made up for it. Maybe we’ll get the real time tracking together for next year, via GPS-radio, or some other location sensing method. Towards the end of the night, when explaining the exhibit started getting repetitious and the atmosphere getting stranger, Jess started saying that every ticket had an embedded tracking device; a couple hours later the rumor found it’s way back, a random passerby informing us of this fact!
I really want to see something like interaction between tracks. GPS Tron light cycles would be awesome. Maybe we’ll try Processing next time.
If you’re interested, the yuri’s night gps code is here. It’s messy, and probably won’t just build from this package, but feel free to use and extend for other party render exhibits.
Tim Waters is in Japan and throwing OpenStreetMap mapping parties. Travelogue, cultural discovery, mapping new territories, and new territories of mapping. Great geogeek reading. More mappers should globetrot, spreading the gospel.
btw, we’re thinking about doing it again ourselves, this time in Africa. Very early stages, get in touch if you’re interest in any way.
