Barry: This is the coolest idea I've heard in a long time.
ESRI does a yearly coffee-table book for Arc-generated maps, the various satellite companies make calendars every year with their best hi-res shots... We should play the game too. Count me in, I'll volunteer to help. .mpg On Jul 28, 2012, at 4:33 AM, Barry Rowlingson <[email protected]> wrote: > Do you think an atlas of beautiful maps produced with open-source > technology (software and data) could be made? Here's what I was > thinking: > > * Put out a proposal for beautiful cartography, stunning maps, and > insightful visualisations done with OpenSource applications and/or > Open Data. > > * Collect map proposals as images on a flickr group: > http://www.flickr.com/groups/osgeomaps/ > > * Get enough, have a community vote/expert opinion for the best 50 or so. > > * Get high-res or vector versions of the winners. > > * Get authors to write a note for the book, explaining the software, > the techniques, and the impact of their work. > > * Edit them into a glossy colour book, publish on a publish-on-demand > site (eg lulu.com). > > * Give free copies to the authors of the top ten voted maps or maybe > all the ones included (I'll pay for these unless someone wants to > sponsor it). > > * Release the PDF under an open license. Of course. > > * Profit!! [By selling copies on lulu at a small premium for OSGeo] > > I don't think the production effort is very much, I just wonder if > enough people are producing maps that will look good in A4 or larger > (we're all about the web these days, right?) and if publicity can be > sustained enough to get 50 nice maps. The timeline would be set so we > have lots of glossy copies of these sitting around for sale at FOSS4G > 2013. > > Good idea? Or will we just get 45 maps which are stamen.com > watercolour backgrounds with some points pasted on? There is a > perception which I think we've all heard that Open Source GIS packages > can't do cartography, but with a little help from Inkscape I've seen > some great-looking maps on posters at conferences. > > ESRI used to (still do?) produce an Arc/Info atlas (I have a vague > memory of something A3-size in our GIS research lab 20 years ago) of > maps - surely we can do something like that now. Obviously I'm > sticking my hand up to do the work for this, my concern is purely > whether we'd get enough entries. I'd like the bar to be quite high. > Most of the work is going to be done by the mappers themselves. > > Shoot. > > Barry > > -- > blog: http://geospaced.blogspot.com/ > web: http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings > web: http://www.rowlingson.com/ > twitter: http://twitter.com/geospacedman > pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacedman > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
