Meetup Blog - Tu 19 Nov - Saramago bar, CCA, Glasgow

Lots to discuss (more than usual?) at the this quarterly meetup in Glasgow. Following on from an Open Knowledge Foundation event in the same venue the night before, there was a large cross over of people wanting to join us to discuss the spatial side of open knowledge.

Big part of the night was spent discussing plans for a State of the Map Scotland event for next year - possibly early in the year - Spring/Summer. This time we are keen to bring SOTM Scotland back to Glasgow (where it started 3 years ago). Partly because Glasgow is convenient for yours truly, but perhaps more interestingly it’s also the winner of a Future Cities Demonstrator prize. The prize is to help Glasgow innovate around smart city ideas and open data to make a better city. So we are hoping to tap into the activity around smart cities & open data in collaboration with wikimedia, libraries and open knowledge foundation to create a really great event.

The future cities demonstrator will be delivered by Future City Glasgow team as part of Glasgow Council. They have a beta website which has just gone live here. Lucy, the outreach co-ordinator was there to give us the lowdown on what’s happening. You can follow news on twitter here.

Bob from CityStrolls a keen activist for the Commons was talking about the importance of making social connections and getting people involved. This is always something worth thinking about and also something we can get better at. Interesting to discuss the Common Good - which in Scotland is a legally protected collection of assets owned by the public. And the thought that new commons of wikipedia and openstreetmap etc are in a way, building on this legacy (but hopefully won’t be as easily overlooked).

Graeme, wikimedia volunteer - was interested to find out more about openstreetmap and how the two projects are helping each other. Great to see wikipedia using openstreetmap maps as default and perhaps future integration in wikidata. Also it was good to hear how wikimedia was reaching out to get more women involved, working with the Women’s Library.

Duncan, was talking about his experiments with opening up the architectural process both by using openstreetmap to create 3D models and generally how to make the whole design process more open. Check out his blog

Julian and Eileen were discussing moving house and trying to find a new place which needed good public transport links and dark skies for astronomy - sounds like a good GIS challenge - there is a dark skies dataset available…

I was showing a little demo of linking google spreadsheet data to openstreetmap objects. Just been playing with R and the Rcharts library which links to leaflet.js.

So another great Glasgow meetup topped by Saramago bar providing us free bar snacks (we always manage to get free food at our events…)

Next meet-up in Edinburgh Tu 10 Dec 2013 from 7:30pm at the Guildford Arms more info here