Tomorrow morning (Friday, May 11th) the hacekr bus will leave São Paulo in another trip, this time it is the city of Paraty, Rio de Janeiro for the event Virada Digital

As part of the many workshops(15 and counting) and hacks that we will be doing during the trip and while there, such as the file share market, data scrapping with python and others, there will be a Mapping Party too. We plan to improve OSM for that area and gather more contributors/teach how to use the tools.

If you live nearby or know someone that will be going to the same event, please share the invitation. The time and details of the mapping party will be fixed in a flipchart with the bus, that will be parked most of the time between the “Hub Estrela” and “Hub Dome”.

The hacker bus trip to Ribeirão Preto was awesome! And I think I need to do a follow up on my previous entry regarding how the mapping parties went now that the contributions are online and I am back at São Carlos…

We stayed in Ribeirão Preto for 3 days, and visited 3 different neighborhoods one each day: Branca Salles, Quintino Faci and Campos Elíseos, but the mapping efforts happened only on the latest 2, on the first day the bus arrived late and there was no time for me to kickstart the workshop.

Anyways, both Thursday and Friday we met a bunch of students (12-14 years old) and the bus crew split them into different activities during the afternoons. For the mapping effort we gathered 8 students on each day.

We began the workshop explaining to them what OSM is and why should they care to build their own neighborhood map. Then we putted on paper the names of all the nearby street that they knew, and also the ones they didnt knew so we could later go there and find out.

After that we borrowed used cameraphones and cameras for the ones that didnt had one and formed two teams of 4 so we could go out on the streets and start taking pictures of street name signs, corners, bus stops, public telephones and other points of interest. Each team left with one GPS logger as well.

At the end of each session we copied all photos to a machine with JOSM and quick showed the trace with the auto-guess pictures in them.

Our time was short, so unfortunately we couldnt show deeply how to trace the actual streets and upload to OSM, but we got their emails in order to send them the assembled map once it got online afterwards.

Also, I’ve recorded a screencast demo’ing my JOSM workflow for photomapping(in Portuguese).

Here is the map of the first day/neighborhood:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?box=yes&bbox=-47.78564,-21.12164,-47.77765,-21.1313

And here is the map of the second one:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?box=yes&bbox=-47.81192,-21.17086,-47.80187,-21.164

For more pictures visit my album on flickr or Julio Boaro’s album on Google+

SESC - SP is organizing a Hacking event[1][2] in Ribeirão and the folks of the Hacker Bus project[3][4] will travel there to give some workshops and work on other projects focused on that city and their local communities.

Ribeirão Preto is a desert on OSM[5], so I want to use this trip / opportunity to create better maps of the city and the neighborhoods where the bus will park, I think some of the neighborhoods might be "Quintino Facci II" and "Branca Salles (perto do Cesomar)" but you can follow the thread on google groups for more info[6].

The trip is from March 14th to 16th, the bus departure from São Paulo - SP, people interested in travel with the bus can fill-up an online form[7] to reserve a place.

So my idea is to try and organize a Mapping Party there, there will be lots of students to help and any other contributions are welcome =)

[1]: http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/programa_new/busca.cfm?conjunto_id=9621
[2]: http://issuu.com/sescribeiraopreto/docs/caderno_marco_2012?mode=window&pageNumber=17 (Flash)
[3]: http://onibushacker.org/
[4]: http://onibushacker.thacker.com.br/
[5]: http://osm.org/go/NqlUAwT--
[6]: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/thackday/yVwOWKfgJcA/discussion
[7]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFBlNDdiYVRuWU5MVDZSdlNMeFNlV3c6MA