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.