… join the
Boston OSGeo Enthusiasts Meetup
next Tuesday, May 18th, 6:30-8pm
at the Bocoup Loft (319 A St, Boston, MA 02210)
… and meet other Open Source mapping software users and developers, share experiences, learn about tools, discuss projects and developments.
To RSVP, please just add your name to the Doodle.
For more information and to participate in planning the meetup, please join the mailing list and follow the May meetup thread.
See you there!
Last week has been pretty intense. My department finalized a, for a regional planning agency, rather unusual project and ran a couple of community meetings during the week. What happened in those meetings wasn’t the typical PowerPoint presentation followed by a Q&A. People, mostly of younger age, played a 3D video game and participated that way to Boston’s Chinatown Masterplan process.
Emerson students created the excellent video below, that captures the very core of the project in about 3 minutes:
I only got during the final phase of the project involved, helped testing the game, setting up the website and organizing our community meetings, but it was an absolutely exciting experience to take part in. Especially the first community meeting, hosted for Chinatown residents, stood out with an highly energized atmosphere.
The game helped in the meeting as ice breaker, facilitated engaging discussions about the neighborhood and provided a fun environment for the audience to work with. We all were somehow surprised when we actually saw game mechanics kicking in. At the point where scores and winners are announced, people started cheering, got all excited, compared scores and discussed strategies why one couldn’t complete all tasks or what would have been a better way to play.
The good part: it all had serious, real world backgrounds – well, real world compressed into 30 minute tasks. However, the game deals with existing challenges of Chinatown residents. The game allows players to walk in somebody else’s shoes through Chinatown and complete tasks as another person, equipped with different skills and opportunities. It’s an educational game, used to gather feedback on and engage in an urban planning processes.
But it’s still fun to play, and fun is the one aspect I wouldn’t underestimate here. It helps to broaden the audience of the community meeting, attracts especially younger people and provides an experience you wouldn’t expect.
Although the game can be played online, it is designed for meetings, to be played by people located in the same room. The game serves as facilitator for participation and gets people talking to each other, very actively as we found out during the meeting. The game is not designed as standalone solution.
The online game version should extend the dialog started during the meeting and provide opportunities for others to chime in at any point (we’re working on it, almost there).
Further readings:
That’s pretty exciting: just came back to Vienna, spent the morning poking around in OSM and the OSM wiki to figure out who the mappers are and if there are any community activities planned and ended up reading a press release saying that Vienna is completed in OpenStreetMap.
Awesome! Big kudos to the local mapping community! The quality of the map is impressing!
As for the rest of Austria, there is a huge data import going on since Fall ’08. More information on the process you’ll find at the wiki page. People all over Austria with good local knowledge are needed to support the import process, help identify errors and improve OpenStreetMap in rural areas.
If you want to make your town visible in OpenStreetMap, sign up and start mapping. It’s very easy and can be done using nothing more than an internet browser. Even better: spread the word, host a Stammtisch, tell your neighbors about OpenStreetMap and create your own map of your village.
For interested people in and around Vienna, the next Wiener OSM-Stammtisch is scheduled for Friday Jan 23rd ’09, 2pm, at the Metalab.
Simple, yet interesting: search Twitter for a place name, bundle returned tweets in a new stream and watch what’s going on there.
Compared to a pure geographic search, the semantic search returns tweets about that place, instead of tweets located nearby. The content of geotagged tweets isn’t necessarily directly related to the place, as the geographic search results show. A combination of both methods might be useful though.
…preferable in OpenStreetMap as Helge from the NGO Laafi suggests and support development in Africa with unrestricted access to free public maps.
Google basically asks for the same thing, with one small difference: your edits go to Google, and not to Africa:
… By submitting User Submissions to the Service, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and create derivative works of the User Submission. …
Yesterday, after reading the post about routeable OSM data, I discovered the download section of CloudMade. By country they offer OSM data in various file formats. Shapefile is one of them. I downloaded the Austrian OSM data as Shapefile (still, after decades, the unbeaten #1 file format when it comes to geodata interoperability btw). There are 3 filesets included: highways, POI and natural.
After loading them into QGIS and having a quick look at the data, I must say that I’m impressed by the data quality and level of detail. Recently I proposed that our public national mapping agency should support projects like OpenStreetMap and provide parts of their road network data to the OSM community. Hereby I take this proposal back, I should’ve had a look at recent OSM updates first. The OSM road network data is, after some initial checks, better than what I’ve seen so far from our national mapping agency for general mapping purposes.
Dear mapping agency,
I’m afraid some of your departments are obsolete by now. You simply missed the train. The community has taken over your job and does it with friendlier, and probably more sustainable, licensing.
What I’ve to figure out now is a simple process how to send data edits on the Shapefile back to the OSM database. There is a good chance that we, while using the data in projects, will work on and maybe improve attributes or features. A smart tool to bridge desktop GIS and the OSM database would be very helpful here.
Another thing is to create more awareness about CC licensing and what community based work means. I’m quite often confronted with share-unfriendly attitudes like “pull down what you can get but don’t give anything in return”. There is very little understanding that sharing your work and data, base data to build individual projects on, creates a bigger benefit for all parties. I guess it’s a relic of times where geodata has been the most precious treasure you had to hide…
The problem: friends live in an area which is not covered by any map – it’s not in the local street map, Google map or any navigation system. Every time they give away the address, they have to explain where it exactly is and how to get there.
The area is old, but it was formerly used for garden plots only. As it happens often in Vienna, people started building small houses in their garden plots, then small houses start growing and transform the area into a (legal) residential area for permanent living with all necessary infrastructure provided.
Maybe their street doesn’t appear on a map because it’s a small and not a new area. Landuse slowly has changed over the past years, streets and pathways have been there for a long time but weren’t always publicly accessible. Maybe that’s the reason this area is still not in the radar of the big 2 street mapping companies: the area isn’t flagged as “recently developed, please map”.
The solution:
I showed them how to map their street in OpenStreetMap, with the result that they finally can point visitors to a nice map when asked where it is and how to get there. Mapping in OpenStreetMap through the browser interface is very easy and they will probably map their neighborhood too since it’s a totally blind spot on maps.
I don’t understand why so many people complain about the recently introduced video feature on Flickr.
90sec won’t turn Flickr into another YouTube – Flickr already haz cat photos btw – but 90sec allow users to create interesting versions of their static images.
I’m looking forward seeing more long photos on Flickr!
Actually the discussion about Flickr’s filtering system brought up some interesting details about user generated content and website owners in Germany.
No doubt that recent German court decisions regarding content of internet forums are going to turn out as a major problem especially for sites based on any kind of user generated content. Flickr is facing that issue right now.
This post in the Flickr forum elaborates the issue very well:
Without going into too much detail, despite having a sort of a right to free speech guaranteed in the Basic Law [note: Germany has no constitution, but instead this "Basic Law" official translation here.], this freedom of speech has some important limitations in practice.
Article 5 simultaneously grants this right:
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.And allows for it to be limited in common law:
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal
honor.So, one common practice is: insulting someone is potentially grounds for prosecution. If the person you insult is an official of any kind, you are definitely in trouble here – flipping the bird at a speed radar camera will get you a big “finger fine” on top of your speeding fine because your intention is to insult the poor schmuck in the traffic department who has to verify the license numbers in the photos. This kind of speech (as well as denying the Holocaust, glorifying the Nazi regime and some other kinds) are criminal acts. Fineable insults can include such seemingly harmless words as calling the wrong person a “stupid cow.” Watch your mouth!
Given that certain kinds of speech are not actually allowed a series of recent court decisions determined that people who run internet forums are legally liable for all entries in their pages. They are obliged to remove illegal speech (in the common law interpretations thereof) in every case whether the “troll” who placed the speech in the forum was anonymous or not. The common forum administration practice has been, until recently, to remove anonymous posts of an illegal nature but to pass on the legal responsibility (via disclaimers, end user agreements and the like) to non-anonymous posters.
One of the cases: Someone participating in a heated forum discussion last year (about child pornography, but this is irrelevant to this discussion) felt insulted by the non-anonymous posting of another user and demanded that it be removed. The administrator, sighting that the poster’s identity was known to all, declined to remove the speech, saying that it wasn’t their responsibility and that the non-anonymity of the poster allowed for sufficient recourse on the part of the insulted party. Well … in the end the person who felt insulted sued and won.
There have been a couple of similar instances and one made it all the way to the German Constitutional Court (the equivalent of the US Supreme Court here).
BGH zur Haftung für rechtswidrige Inhalte das Ende von kleinen Foren
Forenbetreiber bleibt mitverantwortlich
Domaininhaber/ Webhoster verantwortlich für Foreninhalte?
Abwesenheit schützt vor Haftung nicht!
Wann haften Forenbetreiber für Gast-Einträge?
Supernature-Forum geht beim LG Hamburg badenDespite the fact that this kind of decision makes it dangerous for anyone to run any website of any size in Germany with any kind of Web 2.0 features at all (comments, community, photo galleries, etc.), this is the current state of play.
Of course all this could have been communicated to users *before* the filtering system was turned on and Flickr wouldn’t have become almost a synonym for censorship…
For some reasons I get the feeling that Flickr is currently more run by Yahoo!’s legal department than by Flickr’s original staff…
A response from Stewart Butterfield (Flickr founder) to all that censorship troubles in Germany:
Unfortunately I can’t give a more detailed update yet or any concrete good news, but please don’t take our silence to mean that nothing is happening. We are doing our best to make the situation better as quickly as possible. I’m sure it doesn’t make a lot of sense from the outside, and we would prefer to be able to share all the context — believe me, this is extremely uncomfortable and we’d *strongly* prefer not to be in this position — but we don’t have a choice at this time.
Again, we will post more as soon as we can — in the meantime, all we can do is apologize.
I hope they find a solution soon, Flickr + censorship is only half of the fun!