Grants:TPS/Susannaanas/State of the Map 2013/Report

Event name:

State of the Map 2013

Description of your participation:

I gave my presentation Wikimaps on the first day. The documentation includes both slides and a video recording (starting at 3:54).

I spent a lot of time with Tim Waters and Katie Filbert going through the principles of development with the Wikimaps project. I discussed with Katie the guidelines for creating geographic properties for Wikidata, as I was going to attend a round table of academic projects producing historical gazetteers after the event. The gazetteer event was going to take place in ISAW/New York, a meeting with the Pelagios 3 project, the Pleiades, the PastPlace, China Historical GIS and the NYPL/LOC gazetteers.

I interacted with all Open Historical Map representatives who were present. David Evans gave the presentation of Open Historical Map, that I also had participated in making. The presentation was credited to Jeff Meyer and Rob Warren in addition to David. Other OHMers were Tim Waters and Jerry Clough, whom I already had met in the workshop I arranged in State of the Map Baltics in Tartu, Estonia.

We arranged a birds-of-a-feather event jointly with OHM. Tim gave a nice report of the meeting here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/historic/2013-September/000313.html. As there were not so many of us from the projects, the nature of the event was more to inform others (and each other) about them. Jaak Laineste, the chair of OpenStreetMap Estonia, who will be participating in the Wikimaps Nordic, attended as well.

In the Hackday, Tim Waters and I brainstormed about the way in which to develop Wikimaps. I will add the results to the Wikimaps pages. The main goal, however, was to reach mutual understanding about the nature of the project talking face-to-face.

Also, I contacted with Yuwei Lin, a researcher at University of Salford, who has researched the diversity dilemma in OpenStreetMap, which is even more striking than in Wikimedia. Yuwei's presentation was named: Those 3% Female OpenStreetMap Mappers. We decided to work on a Wikimaps mapping workshop for Manchester Histories Festival 2014 (http://www.manchesterhistoriesfestival.org.uk/ ) 29-30 March 2014.

I talked to several people from the whole range of OpenStreetMap projects: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap was prominently in focus, as Kate Chapman was elected a board member with a striking number of votes. Many people within the Wikimaps project have connections to the HOT project as well. I discussed how OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia relate to one another with a board member of the OSM. I also got familiar with Christian Consonni's work in Italy, and how the Italian Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap work together and in close collaboration with Open Knowledge Foundation. This is valuable for us in Finland as well, as we have all the organizations of "openness" represented in a relatively small country and try to find ways to support each other's work. There was a nice Japanese example of mapping with historical maps.

I attended the meeting for governmental geodata, which was a great group of people, though ran short of time (still 10 minutes overtime, taking time from our b-o-f)

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

Talk to people. Keep the contacts. Tweet a lot. Pick up topics in tweets. Meet more people.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

The number of editors has not necessarily been given a boost, but I would presume we will get a couple new active participants in the project. By today, the presentation on slideshare has been viewed 334 times. There were hundreds of participants (I cannot find the numbers!!) and 100 speakers. In Alyssa Wright's session it was mentioned that 10% of the participants were women, which many thought to be exaggerated. Most of the participants came from the UK.

Detail of expenditures:

• Flight + 5 nights hotel 505,14€
• Airport transportation 2 * 6,30€ + 2,63€ (£2,20) + 4,00€ (£3,40) = 19,23 €
• Participation fee 93 € (80 £)

Total 617,37 €

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):

1,37 € left over