Transformap Community Report #9

November 2016

Dear followers and contributors of the Transformap community,We are happy to offer you the most recent community report, full of exciting events and new features in our mapping ecosystem. This report is a curated collection of developments in the TransforMap ecosystem during the last month.

Read on for latest news about:

You can also find this report on the discourse forum and share your reactions there. If you are new to Transformap, or just would like to know how to contribute, you can start by reading our “How to get involved?” page.


Upcoming Events

19.11.2016 - Berlin : MapLab #1: The Map as a Commons

The narrative of the Mapping as a Commons manifesto has been adapted by an event this week hosted at Supermarkt Berlin.

How can we use mapping as a community resource and process? The first laboratory on collaborative mapping will be dedicated to a survey on available projects, software and digital infrastructures. We will select and set up a suitable platform to run a mapping exercise about the Südliche Friedrichstadt.

25.11.2016 / 3.12.2016 - Kassel : Mapping the good life

A mapping workshop will take place in Kassel on November 25th, organised in the context of Transformap by Transition Town Kassel, Ecobytes and the Dokutopia parallel initiative around next years documenta. The workshop outcomes - a map of alternatives for a good life in the region - will be presented on December 3rd, when Alberto Acosta will be in Kassel (North Hessen, Germany) with an event about buen vivir.

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/mapping-party-in-kassel-documenta-14-docutopia/1219


Communities

The Gardens of Berlin

The Berlin city will have a new gardens map available in 2017. At the same time, planning is undergoing to bring the platforms Stadtacker.net (urban gadening) and Grünanteil (crowdmapping of garden parcels) to the next level. Can these efforts be coordinated as to make date available?

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/gartenkarte-2017/1032/5

Translating the Transformap viewer

With the weblate system in place (as described in the previous community report), the translation of the menu items the Transformap Viewer is already undergoing. The initiative is being led by the SuSy project partners, but anyone is more than welcome to contribute with translations. Just visit https://weblate.transformap.co, register and you’re ready to start translating into your favorite language!

Taskforce for dissemination of the alternative economies on Wikipedia and Wikidata

@alabaye invites us for an orchestrated effort to disseminate concepts and projects on Wikipedia and “to dream about a Wikipedia article series on alternative economies”. Read more about the idea and other proposals like linkages to Wikidata on discourse

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/wikipedia-contributions/1213

Farewell to the Yunity WuppDays in Witzenhausen

Yunity has settled into an experimental living site at Bad Dürrenberg and is investigating its ever new relations to the still-to-be-maintained Foodsharing.de legacy and its other descendants like Sharecy (Blog). Their aims, interests and activities currently touch TransforMap narrates in multiple places, i.e. by browsing the Mapping of Mappings for possible travel routes or by consciously engaging in a tempospatial self-organisation process with the yunity contributors map. We are glad and happy to see them disperse into new adventures again and are already looking into finding new chances for crossing paths.

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/wuppdays-12-witzenhausen/1227/3?u=almereyda

From Marauder’s Map to Convene

There is a description for a “yunity contributors map” that resembles to the Marauder’s Map known from the Harry Potter franchise. This effort concludes preliminary work around an anticipatory, uncertain and distributed real-time mapping of peers’ locations.

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/from-marauders-map-to-convene/1233


Technology

Service overview

@species created an overview of online services that make up the current TransforMap testbed.

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/transformap-services/1226

Mapping of Mappings

The Semantic MediaWiki on https://wiki.transformaps.net/ now generates thumbnails, so you can view beautiful little preview images of the collected maps. Several other developments made the experience of this maps atlas more pleasant.  For example, the topics overview offers a powerful tool for navigating hundreds of map on the alternative economies!

A great invitation to the community can also be to engage in the open todos of the transformaps wiki. That is a great possibility for everyone with any skillset to contribute!

Wikibase

Our informants have passed on the information that WikiData is now trying to federate. Help finding the gist of the actual activities and jump in.

https://discourse.transformap.co/t/wikibase-federated/867/12

Weblate

The weblate translation system for Transformap is now in production. With very few steps people are empowered to translate the menu items of http://viewer.transformap.co/ as well as https://susy-mapviewer.github.io/transformap-viewer into their own language. Find a short HOW-TO here.

Development Infrastructure

Always working at the intersection of building the TransforMap services and the infrastructure that maintains them, we are reapproaching more than two years of previous work on bringing together backend layers that support our frontends. These contributions target Pull Requests to the upstream projects Dokku and CouchDB.


Projects

CHEST questionnaire

With the end of the CHEST funding, we have been asked to share a questionnaire to be filled. It is very simple and takes around 2 min to fill in. Please find it on this link.