Category Archives: Maps

Launch of the m(‘)appare Milano project (March 13, 2008)

Announcements, Maps

[this presentation was written in Sep. 2008] Act (and communicate) locally; think as globally as needed

Collaborative free mapping takes on Milano
Between March and June 2008 a collaborative mapping campaign was hosted in Milano, through the collaboration of GFOSS.it, an Italian not-for-profit association for awareness raising on free/open source geographic information systems, a group of activitists from the OpenStreetMap community, and MenteLocale, a daily radio show from on mobility broadcast from Radio Popolare.

The project was named M(‘)appare Milano, emebbeding in a single name two concepts: mapping and appearing.

While collaborative mapping has its gist in the wikipedia-like dynamics, with a twist for techies in the use of low-cost but sophisticated equipment and data processing workflows, M(‘)appare Milano proved to be an interesting exercise in bringing the concept of free geographic information systems to the masses (and vice versa), with a relevant role played by the radio.

Now that we demonstrated that blind people, computer gurus, squatters, and showmen can all relate to the land they walk on -and to each other- through geographic location recorded on a PC, who knows what could happen in a new edition of this project ?

Kick-off of the M(‘)appare Milano Project

Announcements, Maps

[Note: this presentation was written in September 2008]

Collaborative free mapping takes on Milano

Between March and June 2008 a collaborative mapping campaign was hosted in Milano, through the collaboration of GFOSS.it, an Italian not-for-profit association for awareness raising on free/open source geographic information systems, a group of activitists from the OpenStreetMap community, and MenteLocale, a daily radio show from on mobility broadcast from Radio Popolare.

The project was named M(‘)appare Milano, emebbeding in a single name two concepts: mapping and appearing.

While collaborative mapping has its gist in the wikipedia-like dynamics, with a twist for techies in the use of low-cost but sophisticated equipment and data processing workflows, M(‘)appare Milano proved to be an interesting exercise in bringing the concept of free geographic information systems to the masses (and vice versa), with a relevant role played by the radio.

Now that we demonstrated that blind people, computer gurus, squatters, and showmen can all relate to the land they walk on -and to each other- through geographic location recorded on a PC, who knows what could happen in a new edition of this project ?
Questa sintesi del progetto era stata preparata per una breve comunicazione nell’ambito del convegno internazionale Eura 2008 (European Urban Research Association), al Politecnico di Milano

Riflessioni sul tema(tismo) – on free/open source geographic information

Maps, Videos

This is an outreach video which I produced when I was acting as communications manager for GFOSS.it, the Italian chapter of the Open-Source Geospatial Consortium (OSGEO), between 2007 and 2010. You may also want to check out this article which I published on Mondo GIS for a little more context.

The story was conceived during a bus trip from Torino Porta Nuova to Lingotto, and the script written on the train back from Torino. The video was shot during the Christmas break in 2007, between Tatti, Torniella, and Follonica, in Southern Tuscany, and edited with footage shot during various events in the previous months.

…So you thought you had nothing to do with INSPIRE…

Maps, Talks

This was a presentation co-authored by Giacomelli and Cavallini (prepared 90% by Giacomelli), with the idea of representing the point of view of the Italian Chapter of the Open Source Geospatial Consortium (OSGEO) , also known as GFOSS.it, for which I served as the communications manager between 2007 and 2009.

For your information if you are not in the European geomatics field: INSPIRE is a Directive published in 2007 concerning Spatial Data Infrastructures in Europe.

Initially I proposed “So you thought you had nothing to do with INSPIRE” as an actual session for the conference to be held on July 4-5-6 luglio in Porto, Portugal. Eventully I had only one abstract sunmited (from Brasil!), and several “expressions of difficulty” to understand the sense of this Directive by many experts who in theory should have been seeing it as a great support to their activities. So the session was reconfigured as a single presentation, which is available here:

2007_INSPIRE_Porto_pibinkoScarica

Some anecdotes:

  • The image in the final slide is the logo which I designed for the Geographic Information Systems lab of the Centre for Research, Development, and Advanced Studies in Sardinia, when I went to work there in 1997. The logo was hand-drawn, and then digitized.
  • during the conference social dinner I was asked by the organizers to arrange a screening otff “The Revenge of the Killer Chihuahua and of the Zombies”. This was set up at any bar downtown Porto, and the header picture portrays a moment of the show (if you would like to see the movie, it is now available in streaming).

GRASS: A Historical Perspective and Some Working Assumptions for its Development

Maps, Talks

This talk was presented at the Eighth Italian GRASS users meeting, held in Palermo, Sicily, on Feb 14-16, 2007. The talk was #2 in the meeting schedule. This was not the first time I was speaking about free/open-source software, but it was the first time I was speaking about free/open-source geographic software. During the same days we also had the founding meeting for GFOSS.it, the Italian OSGEO chapter, where I ended up acting as the facilitator of the two-day discussions.

ABSTRACT

The presentation will provide some historical references to the development and the distribution of this system, in order to derive indications for its future developments. The presentation will consider various experiences made by the author, using GRASS since 1993, for applications in different settings (universities, public, and private sector), in relation to different domains (hydrology, remote sensing, archaeology), and for projects with different objectives (research, production, training). These cases will be presented with reference to two types of “environment”, i.e. GFOSS-only environments, and “hybrid” environments, where GFOSS and proprietary tools coexist. Experiences from subjects who have been directly involved in the development of GRASS from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties will be discussed, focusing on the phase where GRASS phased from USACERL to other maintainers, eventually leading to the current situation. The aim of the presentation is to contribute to the identification of possible strategies for the upcoming developments of the GRASS project, in consideration of some critical points which emerged in the past.