Mapping Hacks

I have been perhaps a bit remiss in not mentioning this here sooner, but Mikel Maron and I are currently engaged in facilitating a series of mapping workshops all across India, informally known as Free Map India 2008. So far we have met with Indictrans in Pune, and organized two-day workshops focused on seeding OpenStreetMap communities in Mumbai and Trivandrum. Tomorrow, we leave for Bangalore for another workshop, and then, in rapid succession, we’ll be visiting Ludhiana, Delhi, and Calcutta before the end of February.

The idea for the workshops came about when Mikel casually mentioned to me at the GeoNetwork workshop at WHO in Rome back in November that he was hoping to visit India early this year. Since this seemed like a golden opportunity to introduce him to the embryonic Free Mapping community there, we agreed to offer to host a series of workshops and see what happened. The timing seemed particularly good, as OpenStreetMap has come into its own in a big way in the last year or so, but the project has yet to really take off in India.

Aside from a massive (and, being apparently mostly VMap0-derived, woefully inaccurate) data contribution from AND, very little of India has been mapped in OSM. Yet there is no intrinsic reason why it shouldn’t be: India has a growing and very capable pool of technical expertise, and more than ample access to the requisite technology - i.e. GPS receivers and decent ‘Net access. Arguably, with government data access policy in India being muddled at best, and with the growing pains that have attended her race to industrialize, the need for Free and Open map data in India is even greater than in Europe or in the UK, two places where the OSM data set really shines.

My experience with this has been limited to the Mumbai Free Map, a dataset that I helped organize and publish in collaboration with Shekhar Krishnan of CRIT in Mumbai, and which I made reference to in my Where 2.0 talk last year. The problem with the Mumbai Free Map has always been that the loop was never closed: We were able to make it possible for people to visualize this rich data set about the city of Mumbai, but we never had the time or the resources to make it possible for non-technical individuals to actually update or maintain the data set, or really to do anything useful with the data. Meanwhile, the OpenStreetMap community has gone ahead and done just that with the OSM database.

So it’s been particularly gratifying to me to have been able to leverage, with Shekhar’s inestimable assistance, the network of collaborators from last year’s Free Map workshop in Mumbai. Local organizers at each stop have stepped forward and provided venues and travel assistance, making the whole thing possible - meaning that Mikel and I will be visiting and facilitating meetings or workshops in seven cities across India in a little under a month.

The response we’ve received so far has been pretty amazing. Our fervent hope is that these workshops will help inspire and enable key individuals in each locale to start organizing regular mapping parties; indeed, rumor has it that some are already being planned in our wake in Bombay. Hopefully, with Indictrans’s help, and the support of CRIT, we will soon be getting all of the Mumbai Free Map data loaded into OSM.

Mikel has been dutifully recording our progress on his weblog, and posting photo updates to Flickr. Also, he’s posted some videos of GPS tracks made by the workshop participants to YouTube, which we have been assembling with some code from the OSM Subversion repository. The second Mumbai video, particularly, is quite lovely. Do keep an eye on these media sources, if you’re interested, as we hope to update them regularly.

Thanks are due to very many people here in India for their tremendous generosity, particularly Nagarjuna G., Alpesh Gajbe, Prof. Jitendra Shah, Swapnil & KK & the whole Indictrans team, Prof. Venkatesh Chopella, T. B. Dinesh, Kiran Jonnalagada, Gora Mohanty, Prof. H. S. Rai, Indranil Das Gupta, and a whole host of others we still have yet to meet… You all rock. Jai Bharat mata!

Posted in collaborative mapping, events, talks, openstreetmap |

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