FreeMap India 2008 Bangalore Workshop February 15, 2008

Free Map India: A Series of Workshops in February 2008

India is changing faster than ever. A cliche but true. Yet tracking the growth of India's cities and the transformation of the countryside, through digital mapping, has not continued apace. Geo data is closely held and inaccessible, too expensive, and simply out of date. The situation is similar throughout the world. But it doesn't have to be.

Over the past few years, there has been a revolution in cartography and GIS. Through open source software, the Web and the tools of neogeography, these formally specialized disciplines of mapping have been made accessible to anyone with knowledge about their local place. OpenStreetMap is mapping the entire world openly and collaboratively, and coverage is increasing exponentially. These tools are powerful, in some ways outpacing expensive proprietary and closed systems. The barrier of cost no longer exists. The only prerequisite is a will to know, explore and share.

This February, Schuyler Erle and Mikel Maron will hold a series of multi-day workshops in several India universities. Researchers, students, and members of the community are invited to participate, learn, and take stewardship of their city. These will be very practical, hands-on days, covering the entire toolset of OpenStreetMap and empowering participants to lead the growth of free and open mapping in India. We will map India!

Topics to be Covered

* General introduction to mapping, cartography and GIS
* Neogeography
* Open Source Geospatial Software
*

OpenStreetMap overview and instruction
* Surveying with GPS and data collection
* Photomapping
*

Contributing to and editing OpenStreetMap
* Rendering Maps
* Working with geodata and programming OSM and OSGeo tools

Locations

The final locations are still under discussion. But they are likely to be Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkatta, Trivandrum, and Hyderabad.

Mumbai will have a slightly different emphasis, due to the production of the Mumbai Free Map in 2005. This digital map covers Mumbai in fantastic detail, but not in a form usable for OpenStreetMap. We will be working on the techniques to transform the Mumbai Free Map data into OpenStreetMap Mumbai.

Software Development

This time in India will also be an opportunity to advance the capabilities of the software platforms. Particularly we will focus on low bandwidth and offline map production, and periodic synchronization with the master OSM database. This will aid the spread of OpenStreetMap throughout the developing world.

Workshop Leads

Schuyler Erle is a free software developer and activist. He is responsible for NoCatAuth, an early open source wireless captive portal, and geocoder.us, an open source U.S. address geocoder. Erle wrote O'Reilly's Mapping Hacks with Jo Walsh and Rich Gibson, and Google Map Hacks, also with Rich. Previously, he worked with MetaCarta in Cambridge, MA, USA, developing nitfy geographic projects like OpenLayers, an open source web mapping framework written in pure JavaScript, and Gutenkarte, a service for exploring the geographic dimension of classic works of literature. Erle is proud to be a founding member of the OSGeo Foundation.

Mikel Maron is a freelance web developer, specializing in Open Geospatial and Wiki tech. He's been active in the standardization of GeoRSS and in the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project, and co-founder of the geodata aggregator, Mapufacture. He's developed two of the first Wikis in use at the UN. Previously, Mikel worked as senior developer of My Yahoo! and researched evolutionary models of ecosystems for an MSc at the University of Sussex.

Official Website: http://wiki.freemap.in/moin.cgi/FreeMapIndia2008Bangalore