This is a great concept! Wonderful work so far, and I hope to see it continue. Where are you getting the map data? There are spelling errors (Willomette should be Willamette) and words are cut off on tile boundaries. Both panning and loading new tiles is very slow, at least compared to Google maps. Also, unlike Google maps, panning stops when my pointer exits the map box. Thanks for sharing! Evan On 6/20/05, Anselm Hook <anselm@hook.org> wrote:
Here is a first pass functional mapping module for civicspace and drupal as demonstrated here:
http://civicmaps.org/?q=2005_06_20_Scappoose_Events
Essentially if you were to install drupal and civicspace you could have a location blogging site up and running quite easily now. Are there any other such services in the world at all right now? I don't think so; so I do believe (at least from our limited perspective) that this is something that may be genuinely useful.
Here is the site for the download:
http://maps.civicactions.net#download
This is hot off the presses and undoubtably there are defects. However it is a milestone in our development work here and as is often said 'publish early and publish often'.
Having reached this milestone I wanted to briefly summarize what the deeper purpose of this was since it is not documented on the site:
* Civicactions, myself and quite a few others are continuing to look for ways to help energize real world community not just virtual community. The challenge is that a lot of our urban landscapes are somewhat mechanized. They've scaled up to industrial proportions but we have not equivalently developed an industrial scale voice. Although possibly a romantic view, there is the feeling that in earlier and smaller communities it was much easier to inadvertently be a part of the social knowledge commons of that community. The hope here is that rich client side mapping tools that are dispersed over many many servers (instead of centralized) will help create a more true, richer and authentic voice than what we get from the commercial mapping sites.
* This work although free is actually quite expensive. It is time consuming and labourious to develop for very little financial gain. At the same time if somehow services like this could 'raise all ships' then perhaps we might not have quite so much a need for money in our society. Money is a substitute for awareness. As local currencies show one undervalued function of money is as a discovery tool or a catalyst. If I were better connected to my own physical neighbourhood I might be able to message all my neighbours asking who could lend me a ladder, or a boat or some such thing - rather than purchasing one or renting one. Or equivalently I might have a lot of free time on my hands and could volunteer for some fun local neighborhood project if only my peers knew I was interested. For many people, especially in mobile urban societies, it is hard to have that kind of groundedness and trust. Tools that accelerate that process, that show us our landscape, our peers, where our friends are or have been, the knowledge that they shared... well these are all ideas that are out there and have been discussed quite a bit - bu it still doesn't feel as if they have really been exercised. So this is more of the same in a sense; continuing to try to push out tools that help get computers to come out and play with us, and help us in the real world, instead of sucking us into a virtual contextually disjointed reality. If 80 percent of human discusion involves space and location then 80 percent of our tools should support this.
We definately appreciate feedback and even flames - post your thoughts on the http://civicmaps.org site. This process is driven by user feedback and interest. Continually in open source development one is trying to pick the absolute best project and absolute best use of time that one can possibly pursue. Feedback on this particular project will dictate if it gets more attention and time.
- a