open source
Drupal participation month
It is looking like June is going to be quite an interesting month for participation, with a couple of projects being set up to focus on certain parts of Drupal for the month.
Last week, Advantage Labs announced Geo June, a month of focused development on the geo module. The geo module has a lot of potential to become the basis of the GeoCMS that Drupal should be (as long as the module stays generic enough), and Advantage Labs are keen to get more people interested and involved to help make that happen. During the month there are a number of physical events, but you're also encouraged to share your use cases and join in day to day with the IRC chat in #drupal-geo.
The Drupal User Experience Project also yesterday announced the launch of Microprojects to encourage user experience (UX) professionals to get involved in small bounded problems, working with a Drupal developer to implement their designs and suggestions for improvement. This seems like a great idea, not only because it's breaking down some quite large problems into bite-size manageable chunks, but also to get some outside experts - who may not have previously used Drupal - involved in the community.
If you're interested in either of these areas (or any of the other sprints which are happening), why not jump in and get involved. Having not spent much time on the Geo project yet, I'm looking to spend some time getting to know it in June and hopefully help to push it forwards, as well as starting the rewrite of the KML module to simplify it as a views display type instead of a bundle of custom code.
Isle of Man mentioned at Where 2.0
The Isle of Man got another mention at a conference today (this time it was Where 2.0, last time, a presentation at reboot 8) relating to the mapping work that a number of us from/on the Isle of Man have been working on for the OpenStreetMap project.
The OpenStreetMap project actually has a broad coverage of the island, admittedly with large chunks still missing, but it's a great start. Compare that with Google who seem to have decided against buying the Manx road network for their Google Maps site, despite their coverage of most of the rest of Europe. Ask maps on the other hand do have data for the Isle of Man, as well as some great high resolution imagery of the towns.
For businesses, organisations and individuals, buying data from the likes of Navteq and Ordnance Survey would allow some use of maps, though they would be heavily restricted with what they could do with them. Whilst they are pretty much guaranteed to be of a certain standard, they must pay a high price for that privelage: one which is not easily afforded by small businesses, organisations and individuals who just want to be creative with maps.
Building up our own open source dataset means that people will be able to use road information for many different purposes, with credit to the project, and hopefully at the same time give a little input back into the project as well.
Much of the work I've been doing with regard to the project of late has not been actual mapping - it's difficult when such a long way from the place - but instead research into meta data for the tracks that I've already created on the island. It turns out that the Isle of Man Government site is a treasure trove of information about road closures, which proves a great source for road numbers and names as well as starting and end points. Add in a dash of local knowledge and I can begin to build up a database of roads on the Isle of Man with which I can tag the streets I previously had no metadata recorded for.
Mapping the Isle of Man on Openstreetmap
Back at the end of last year I bought myself a relatively cheap GPS unit - the Garmin eTrex personal navigator. I had wanted one for a few years and frankly it felt strange having gone through two related degrees, being interested in the area, and yet still not owning one of my own. For a long time I had felt left out, not being able to take part in things like Geocaching, easily geotagging my photos or helping expand open source mapping databases.
For the first few weeks that I had the device, I spent some time working out what situations it would work under - from being in the open, to keeping it in my pocket, to being surrounded by trees, buildings and even inside trains - and what sort of accuracy it could achieve. Whilst doing that I was also building up my database of waypoints around Stuttgart.
Christmas time came, and it was time to head home for a short break. It was interesting holding the GPS up to the window on the plane, seeing the acceleration as we accelerated down the runway. This was all experimentation though, in the lead up to my main plan of action for when I got back to the Isle of Man.
I wanted to drive as many of the island's roads as possible, taking tracklogs as I went, to allow me to add them to Openstreetmap, the open source database of streets around the world. It has taken me quite some time in the weeks since, but I've finally mapped just about all of the roads I drove (or at least the ones where the GPS was tracking). You can see the result by zooming in to the Isle of Man on the site.
The mapping of the Island is nowhere near complete (it's mostly the southern end that I concentrated on), and now that I'm back in Stuttgart, I want to see if I can find people located in the Isle of Man with a similar interest in opening up this sort of level of mapping to the public. Anyone with a GPS (and computer connection) can help out by driving some of the remaining roads, or even fixing areas of the map that I've inevitably not mapped as correctly as I would have liked to have done.
