With only a few days until we depart for Lima, preparations for the mapping party are coming together not too badly, and there has been more interest in the event than first anticipated. This reflects more ignorance and naivety on my part about the extent of open-source activities in Peru, rather than any grand revelation or discovery. Curiously, other mapping parties are starting to emerge across Latin America, and whilst I can’t attribute any influencing factors to the Lima effort, it is great to see other people employing the same wiki-template and event structure that we designed for Lima, and use it elsewhere in South America (today in fact sees a mapping party in Merida, Venezuela, based on the Lima format).

I’m not sure if anyone would agree, but I like thinking about these mapping events as micropolitical gestures which encourage yet more micropolitical moments and spaces. The map rendered by OpenStreetMappers continually appears on the edge of becoming, and its wiki-functionality means that there is no inherent security to the map; an icon which features on the map tomorrow could be gone by tomorrow, or multiplied in a week. Part of this thinking contributes to questions about the ostensible divide between virtual and the real worlds; between the digital and the fleshy – the more I’m involved with OSM, the more I’ve felt these divides crumble. OpenStreetMap is intensely corporeal, from the first walk around a town with a GPS unit in hand to the final edit on a laptop in a pub/cafe/train station/home; these are shared bodily events, no matter how many fibre optic appendages we attach to ourselves. It doesnt stop there. Being part of the wiki-community can also be intriguing, baffling, alarming and occasionally hurtful; dealing with how to create and navigate wikis, learning wiki-etiquette, moderating flame-ups (mailing-list bitch fights); in short OSM is a maelstrom of affect – something I’d like to map myself, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Sometimes making a map feels like a labour of love, but it might be this which captivates so many users.

N.B. there will be updates on the mapping party on this blog, and at identi.ca – an open-source twitter. Check out the OSM Peru Group here.

It’s not exactly viral, but the Lima mapping party is becoming contagious and its co-ordination rapidly out of my hands. It seems that there is already a vibrant open-source community in Peru, albeit a virtual one which as yet remains below radar….or some kind of detection. It seems too that some of these guys have done OpenStreetMap activities in Peru, but they were not aware of some of the staple features of OSM like the wiki, the country profile and the mailing lists. I think this says two things; one, OSM is still a largely Anglo-US-European project and two, that despite the ease of hyperlinks and electronic tags, facilitated by wikis, there is still room for word-of-mouth…that there needs to be some kind of gesture or spark which generates events. The OSM party in Lima has become that gesture.

Pains me as it does to mention Starbucks, I keep seeing this short, but affecting, refrain everywhere. Why is it that we have to rely on monstrous coffee-chains to be doing the PR work of geographers?

A brief report back from the 2010 State of the Map Conference in sunny, hot Girona. It’s been an interesting and hectic day, with the conference opening on a business theme (as is usual for the Fridays of an OSM conference) – that meant lots of established and emerging commercial organisations pitching their interest in OSM and the occasional institutional plug – but it also raised interesting questions as to what direction OSM is taking. OSM’s activities are founded on community activity (virtual and actual), yet future viability seems to lie in commercial collaboration (after all, the coffee breaks are all sponsored by money-making parties); that does not necessarily entail subsumption by evil corporate behemoths, but it does put into focus OSM’s reason for being, and mode of operation. The only thing that can be concluded at this stage is predictably, ‘watch this space’ – OSM is undergoing changes in its licensing regime and time (and space) will tell as to what role vernacular knowledge has to play in the generation of OSM cartographies.

Elsewhere I met some very interesting people across OSM and academia, namely Yuwei Lin (conducting research into some of the motivations for involvement with OSM, amongst other open-source research), Muki Haklay, one of the few academics to be doing empirical work on OSM, Harry Wood, a leading light of OSM in London and OSM’s humanitarian response unit – and also Mikel Maron who has lead a project to generate an OSM map of Kibera, Kenya. Mikel’s project is impressive in its scope and ambition, but what really struck me was that he was acutely aware of the potential risk that OSM activities, unchecked, can lead to the re-inscription of problems and inequalities that OSM sought to overcome in the first place. Really interesting.

Just a word on the feeling of the conference, I’m amazed by the amount of people on their laptops during the conference talks – there is definitely a geekish element to it all, and unashamedly so – but it’s funny to see people tweeting during a talk “I’m learning about x, y & z, by Dr x, y & z”… when they’re doing anything but. Or perhaps I’m being overly-dismissive and they’re adept at multi-tasking. On the other hand, with the amount of wi-fi, Tweeting, Facebook-ing, and flickr-ing going on, however seemingly disruptive, it does make the conference feel live, electric, and dare I say, virtual.

Tomorrow sees the opening of the general conference, so there will be more input from the OSM ‘community’. Looking forward to it. The breaks are very long, but such is the Spanish way, and after some initial reservations with a 2.5 hr lunch break, I’m quite enjoying them – hasta manana!

Also – you can view the conference by live streaming, and catch constant updates by Twitter – just visit this page, here!

Currently organising the Lima Mapping Weekend for OpenStreetMap in August 2010. I think it will be Latin America’s first OSM mapping event, but that could be sheer hubris.

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Lima or Peru, please come along to Plaza San Miguel on Saturday 21 August. We’re planning to map the district of Pueblo Libre, but of course it’s up to you where you’d like to map! Even though GPS devices are useful, owning one is not essential, and you can easily get involved with sketch maps – one of the best ways to trace lines, roads and points of interest is to use ‘Walking Papers’ which allows you to print OSM coverage of a particular area.

More details to be posted soon, including una version en espanol!

Check out this tweet-generated maps of London, New York and Munich, from Digital Urban.

Reminiscing about Greenmaps in Colombia… //Pereira // Risaralda // 2008 …added a little archive research material to the fieldwork page, check it out here.

fieldwork traces:

OpenStreetMap’s State of the Map 2010 conference is fast approaching, and my paper “Vernacular mapping and the ethics of what comes next” has been accepted for the Sunday morning. Not sure what to make of this as my title sits somewhat incongruously between people who know what they’re talking about.

That said, it’ll be a welcome trip to Gerona, right at the heart of Catalonia.

3cs this side of the pond. Read more here.

Off on a bit of fieldwork tomorrow, joining an OpenStreetMap mapping party in Witham, Essex.

GPS device, check; voice-recorder, check; pencil/paper, check; standard-issue geography student waterproof jacket, check.

Ready to go.