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. You can also find this report on the discourse forum https://discourse.transformap.co/t/community-report-8-october-6th/1206 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?" https://discourse.transformap.co/t/how-to-get-involved/231 page.
Community
Patterns of Commoning: a Transformap workshop by Silke Helfrich
From December 15th to 17th a workshop on Patterns of Commoning will take
place at the Transition House in Witzenhausen, under the lead of Silke Helfrich. The workshop will be in German. Almost all places got filled up immediately in the first days after the announcement. The registration for a wider public is closed, but there are a few places left for participants from the Transformap community. Please reconnect with TransforMap during the workshop! Read the full invitation here https://discourse.transformap.co/t/patterns-of-commoning-invitation-to-a-transformap-workshop/1197 and, in case you are interested in taking part, fill in this webform https://co-munity.net/transformap/anmeldung-patterns-of-commoning.
"Mapping as a commons", What does it means? A Manifesto
Based on raw notes from the Commons Space at World Social Forum in Montreal this summer 2016 and an initial version (0.1) by Jon Richter (@almereyda https://discourse.transformap.co/users/almereyda), @Silke https://discourse.transformap.co/users/silke has put together a /Manifesto/ calling for mapping as a commons. Her complete post, with context, can be read on her blog https://wordpress.com/stats/insights/commonsblog.wordpress.com. The Manifesto is also available on our Forum https://discourse.transformap.co/t/mapping-as-a-commons-manifesto/1181 where you are invited to post comments, feedback, proposals for editing, etc.
Map Camps for Winter: Map-estival
At the World Social Forum in Montreal, an initiative to spur and enable a long-term cooperation between different mapping initiatives has started. A first meeting to build a core group that moves forward with the project is being planned for the Winter. In perspective is a large Mapping Festival in Summer 2017, where massive mapping of a specific region can take place. For more information get in contact with Silke Helfrich (@Silke https://discourse.transformap.co/users/silke).
Value Flows and Yunity
The Value Flows project is progressively continuing with modeling their ontologies for Network Resource Planning. A main partner are the well known Mutual Aid Networks https://discourse.transformap.co/t/madison-wi-mutual-aid-network-mapping-summits/1060. A technical demonstration of this collaboration lives at http://locecon.org/. Recently we were looking together at the current entry points for the Transformap community's vocabulary work, the Wikibase https://base.transformap.co and the associated query interface. Nearing a 1.0 release of the Value Flows ontology and knowing the prospects of the Yunity project, we are now bringing them closer: Yunity strives for offer and request matching and is building a sophisticated platform, while Value Flows provide a stable foundational data structure.
Berlin community wellbeing dinner
On November 9th, the #communities:berlin https://discourse.transformap.co/c/communities/berlin/17 are inviting to a dinner at the Thinkfarm Berlin http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5544775 for sustaining our mutual wellbeing and mapping interests. We are using this place to gather feedback and opinions on whom to invite, which subjects and ingredients to put on the table and how we may endow our activities even further with already existing initiatives. You can find more information on the discourse thread https://discourse.transformap.co/t/09-nov-2016-transformaps-community-wellbeing-dinner-thinkfarm-berlin/1208.
Tech
RDF support for automatic generation of taxonomies as Linked Open Data
We finally managed to setup the Blazegraph database as RDF interface to our taxonomies!With this, we reached a major milestone: to have a database where we can create interlinked taxonomies and serve them as RDF (see the respective community story https://tree.taiga.io/project/transformap/us/154 for more details). It is now used to serve the translations of the (currently only) SSEDAS taxonomy in the TransforMap Viewer in 15 different languages http://viewer.transformap.co/#5/51.166/10.451. A guide on how to add your personal taxonomy will be provided in the next weeks.
Translation system now available
A translation system for Transformap now in place. Weblate https://weblate.transformap.co provides a facility for the translation of the user interface, and allows any user to contribute to the translation of any non-taxonomy parts of the Transformap Viewer.
Map editor
The work for setting up a Map Editor for Transformap has started. The technical team has decided to use Karte von Morgen's editor https://github.com/transformaps/kartevonmorgen, in conjunction with Transformap's own API https://github.com/TransforMap/transformap-api. Follow and contribute to the development on our Taiga community story https://tree.taiga.io/project/transformap/us/27.
Research
Article project: collaboratively mapping alternative economies
Adrien Labaeye (@alabaeye https://discourse.transformap.co/users/alabaeye) is preparing a peer review journal article entitled "Collaboratively mapping alternative economies", where he proposes a three-pronged typology to help navigate the diversity of mappings initiatives in the field of alternative economies. Adrien is very much looking forward to gather feeback from people who have been involved in the practice of collaboratively mapping alternative economies. Please visit the thread on discourse for more information https://discourse.transformap.co/t/collaboratively-mapping-alternative-economies-article-project/1190.
CfP: Geographies of Degrowth
On the bridge between geographical research and theory of degrowth, the American Assocation of Geographers has launched a call for papers for its' meeting in April 2017 in Boston. Interested participants should send their title, 250-word abstract, and affiliation to Giorgos Kallis (giorgoskallis@gmail.com), Karen Bakker (karen.bakker@ubc.ca) and Federico Demaria (federicodemaria@hotmail.com) by October 15, 2016. More information on this discourse post https://discourse.transformap.co/t/cfp-geographies-of-degrowth/1198/1.
Projects
CHEST
The CHEST funding has officially ended on September 2016. Thanks to this fund, we achieved major milestones and were able to prototype - and in some cases even beyond - a series of tools and deployments that form the core of the Transformap infrastructure. Our final report, redacted by Get Active, has already been approved by the consortium coordinators. Ecobytes and Get Active have now to provide the final cost claims in order to receive the last chunk of funding.
Application to Prototype Fund of the Open Knowledge Foundation
As part of the efforts to stablise and extend the commons infrastructure which provisions Transformap, Jon Richter @almereyda https://discourse.transformap.co/users/almereyda) has submitted an application to the OKF Prototype Fund https://www.bmbf.de/foerderungen/bekanntmachung-1225.html, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research. The submitted application http://jon.wiki.allmende.io/view/bedarfsszenario-allmendeio aims at developing and stabilising a range of services that have been provisioned to the community via allmende.io.
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The Transformap Collective