At Public Lab, we've grown the Grassroots Mapping community into a broader effort to enable communities to understand and respond to environmental threats with DIY techniques.
cross-posted from PBS's IdeaLab. How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project
Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project.
MAKING A MAP
cross-posted from PBS's IdeaLab. How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project
Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project.
MAKING A MAP
Hello Public Labbers and Grassroots Mappers!
To date, the documentation and open science literature we've made as a community has been published under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, allowing anyone to reuse, remix, adapt, improve, and redistribute our works. Today, the PLOTS Web working group would like to propose that we as a community adopt a separate license for our hardware designs, and after much consultation, we'd like to adopt the CERN Open Hardware License.
Here is a prototype rig that performed well on its maiden flight. The design might be appropriate for matched visible/IR cameras for vertical photography, like the Canon A495s from the Balloon Mapping Kickstarter project. For such a use, it would require the addition of an intervalometer to trigger both cameras simultaneously. I am not yet sure how to add that function.
Alex Mandel, Michele Tobias, and a couple of others photographed the foredunes at Pacifica State Beach in Pacifica, CA, using a kite aerial photography rig. The kite was a Skyhook 30 outfitted with an SLR camera. The wind was strong - about 25-30 miles an hour - which allowed the kite to lift the heavier camera. The flight went well, but there were some minor concerns. The biggest concern was that this kite needs a more substantial tail than we had (a home-made drogue tail about 15 inches long) in higher winds to keep it from waggling back and forth, swinging the camera.
A Picavet rig is a very common type of KAP/BAP rig, I've added it to the juice bottle in a fairly simple way, using 1/2" key rings.
We held a Ballon Mapping and Kite Making Workshop on the Campus of San Marcos on Jan. 28, 2012 with a group of about 10 people from: Open Street Map Peru, Saberes Nomadas, and San Marcos Univ. (physics, geography, sociology, and geographic engineering depts.)
I've made an instructional video on efficient image sorting with Preview and Finder, for quickly winnowing down big groups of images to small sets, ready for MapKnitter:
This is for use with the PET Bottle Rig
Instead of using a balled up piece of tape, a pebble, or some other thing to hold down my camera's shutter, I've gone to using a knot. This makes it easy to hold in place, and makes setting it easier. I prefer a rubber band, but tape also holds it down. tape may be more useful for bulging, non rectangular cameras.
Are you embroiled in an cartographic dispute? Do you disagree with the official version of your geography? Contact us through the public mailing list.
Grassroots Mapping is part of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, founded by a group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model.
We're now trying to learn from our balloon mapping experiences to develop new DIY tools with a variety of local communities. This is an open community and you are welcome to join, and encouraged to contribute!
Purchase the Grassroots Mapping Forum, our new community research journal/archive/zine/map, where we hope to share ideas, techniques, and stories from the Grassroots Mapping community. It is printed on a single 22.75x35" newsprint sheet, folded down to just over letter size, and includes a full color reproduction of a grassroots map along with essays, illustrated guides, and interviews on the reverse.
You can find out more, and purchase the first issue here for $17 shipped.
We're helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming yeas.We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery into the public domain.
You can see all of our data here: http://publiclab.org/archive/.
Browse some of our best imagery on Flickr.
Techniques and tools for people who want to make maps, on the Public Laboratory wiki. Includes readings and case studies on grassroots mapping projects.
You are currently browsing the archives for the kite-mapping category.
Instructions on how to use cameras on weather balloons to create high-resolution maps.
Want to start mapping? See the Balloon Mapping Materials List to get started.
