OpenStreetMap Cleveland!
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 5:16 PM, william skora <[email protected]>wrote: > Great discussion so far and perfect timing for us in Cleveland, we're > having our first event of 2013 tomorrow. > http://www.meetup.com/cleveland-civic-hacking/members/23087451/ > > Given Cleveland's population relative to other cities, our mutual > interests and the sheer overlap between OSM and open source GIS tools > (QGIS, postGIS, Tilemill, cartodb, etc), other co-organizers and I thought > it would be a great fit for our user group to focus on both OSM and > FOSSGIS/Open Geospatial tools. > > (Personally, I think this synergy is really useful: one feature of OSM > that deserves to be emphasized more is being able to use that data in > really neat ways - maps, visualization, analysis, etc - that you couldn't > do with google maps). > > Some things that we've run into, could need help on: > > We haven't thought of a name yet (related to above): Open Geo ? Open > geo-spatial ? Open Gis ? OSM/FOSSGIS ? Naturally, I'm also soliciting > suggestions at tomorrow's meeting. Semi-related: call ourselves a user > group ? Community ? IMHO, user group, to me, has a negative connotation of > a bunch of old white guys sitting around (ala GNU, BSD) and not interacting > with other communities in their area. I guess this (determining a name) > sort of also relates to what actually we'll be doing... I crafted a very > crude mission statement a few days ago (on our wiki page), but a mission > statement is something that should be developed by the group , and refine > itself organically as activities go on . > > How often to hold meetings ? I'm thinking bi-monthly, regularly scheduled > would be a really good fit. We had 3 events last year although not on a > regular basis and it was definitely noticeable of a loss of momentum after > the first 2. Agree with Serge on his point. In other organizations that > I've led or participated, it is much easier to maintain momentum by having > regularly scheduled meetings. That said, this is a problem experienced by > other organizations that I've participated/led in and I've already had 3 > state their interest but unable to attend due to a conflict. So we may > rotate the day of the week, but keep the same week. > > Should we as a group choose something to work on ? One thing that I've > noticed from last year's meetings and HOT: there were a few users who saw > OSM to help them reach a particular goal or scratch their itch of a > particular interest (verifying roads to facilitate routing, mapping all of > the places of worship in an area, etc) and began mapping that but there > were others who were interested but, for lack of a better word, were > overwhelmed of what to begin mapping and where. > (As I type this out, I'm thinking to suggest to them tomorrow to map out a > few restaurants/bars or other POIs in their neighborhood). > > Has any other OSMers encountered this in their users group ? Should we > focus on a particular topic, (after soliciting suggestions from members) ? > > I'm likely going to use JOSM to walk them through their first edits. I've > used JOSM at past meetings in Cleveland (most of our attendees in the past > have been relatively technically savvy) and while in Senegal for HOT. iD is > a couple months away (?!) from being able to be used in this context. > However, Potlatch's emphasis (on documentation, maintenance) is likely to > decrease (maybe not, I'm just basing this on my impressions) soon as well. > Interested to hear what others have done or planning to do. > > Lastly, when I first started using OSM a couple years ago, I was really > frustrated by a few terms that were sometimes unique to OSM, sometimes used > in other areas of GIS) that appeared convoluted (some of them were just a > result of British English being used) or went into overwrought, technical > detail, or were simply outdated. > > So, I'm preparing a cheat sheet that very briefly describe these terms, in > less technical language. Aimed to be a supplement to people who may not > have a laptop or smart phone with them and just want a brief reminder what > these terms mean as they make their first edits, hear them used in my > presentation, discussions, or reading OSM documentation . > > https://gist.github.com/4614619 > > I encourage to fork and improve it, feedback. > > Regards, > Will > > PS - I found this great overview of open-source mapping/geospatial tools > by Nate Kelso - a great supplement that I plan on sharing with attendees. > https://github.com/nvkelso/geo-how-to > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > >
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