Grassroots Mapping

After some discussion on the mailing list, I put together this poster/handout image which shows everything you need to make a balloon or kite map (besides people!). Feel free to distribute! I’ll start printing this on the back of the print maps I make, and hopefully this will help people get started making their own maps.

Download the Full size image

Some of you have seen the above screenshot on Flickr; don’t worry, we’ll be launching it soon! As some of you may recognize, we’re duplicating the ‘distort’ functionality from Photoshop, similarly to what Michal Migurski suggested last November.

Also, Chris Blow asked about how we’re dealing with very large batches of photos… well, yeah, we’ve used hugin for mass stitching… but it was so much easier to explain to people how the hand-warping interface works (i.e. “it’s like the images are made of rubber”) to non-technical participants, that for small mapping projects we wanted to use this paradigm.

Also we’ve been talking to NASA AMES about using their /Vision Workbench software, perhaps as part of a rectifying web service for folks who have large sets. So basically we’re pursuing different strategies for bulk/expert use and for novice/small-scale mapping.

From my experience in Lima, using photoshop’s distort tool (which works like the above) was actually faster than doing control point generating and stitching with hugin. But we generally only took like 20 photos max; these communities were pretty small.

For grassroots mapping enthusiasts in the Bay Area, I’ll be speaking at Where 2.0 in San Jose on April 1, presenting the Grassroots Mapping Lima project and talking about our plans for future work. Afterwards, we’ll try to do a demonstration flight at the Where Faire.

Where 2.0 charges admission, but WhereCamp is a free and open ‘unconference’ and I’m hoping to do a workshop there where people can build their own rigs, do test flights, and generally do a bit more hands-on work. More on WhereCamp soon — we’re still finding out if we can fly at Google’s Mountain View campus… they’re the hosts.

Pat Coyle and I are starting work on an illustrated guide to grassroots mapping with balloons. Visit the wiki page to see our initial notes and sketches.

Another day, another new grassroots map! After working with residents of Cantagallo at the beginning of February to produce the first map of their community with Daniel Miracle of Escuelab, we met with members of another of the 3 groups of Shipibo living in the same zone in the center of Lima. Upon seeing the maps we’d made, they were excited to make one also.

Sara Gomez of CEDRO, who introduced us to Sr. Ricardo, the president of one of the multiple political groups in Cantagallo, pointed out that if we make a map, we should do the best to serve all parties who live in Cantagallo – meaning that, among other things, we should create a single map of the entire settlement, collaborating with as many groups as we can, and distribute it as widely as possible. The situation was complex – the political groups don’t break down along clear geographic lines, but they are engaged in geographic dispute, and are submitting separate bids for state recognition. I’m still struggling with how to aid these groups in their bid for land title without getting pulled into a local political conflict — if that’s even possible. We cannot say, for example, that this mapmaking is a neutral act – but we can try to create tools which support equal access to geodata, and which are hard to use in exclusionary ways.

It remains to be seen how this plays out, but at the very least, we were able to work with a Señor Ricardo – president of one of the other Shipibo groups – to make a more complete map. Politics aside, once you get outside and start flying balloons, everyone becomes an excited kid, at least for a while.

My hope is that these maps will support all parties’ claims to title in their negotiations with the Municipality more than they create or further aggravate disputes between the various groups in Cantagallo. I’ll be staying in close contact with my friends there to see what happens.

Andrew Ellis and Alexander Wang of the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design created this short video which has some great footage of balloon flights and some bits of me talking about Grassroots Mapping.

Digital Cartography from dynamicmediainstitute.org on Vimeo.

Late Wednesday I finally finished the first draft rectification of the kite/balloon images from Juan Pablo II and also of Cantagallo; I took a cab out to Surco to where they have plotters and ran off a couple big maps for each community. On Thursday, Carla, Nancy, and the CEDRO teachers stayed out the whole day in Villa el Salvador because there was a parent teacher meeting at 6pm. In the meantime we got out the big map and all the kids found their homes (just like in Google Maps, right?) and outlined them on trace paper.

The best part of the day was meeting the parents and showing them all the great work the kids had done on both the history “project” and the “future” project. The model of the community in 7 years (as mentioned in a previous post) was especially exciting. See all pictures of the history/future projects on Flickr.

And finally, we presented the completed map of Juan Pablo II to the parents as well. Since the kids had outlined homes and such, we were able to show the president of the community (several of the leaders came) a completed map with annotations. He seemed pretty excited and we’re meeting up with him on Tuesday to talk more about it, and possibly stitch the map we’ve made onto an overall community plan they already have. This should help them fill in detail like homes and streets.

The meeting was at night, so we had a free afternoon, giving Cesar, Jesus, Jian, and a bunch of other kids the chance to build a really huge kite from bamboo and trash bags.

The kites didn’t all fly (Cesar’s did!) but we learned a bit about what makes a good kite. Next time we’ll try for a really huge one that is still stable.

The CEDRO teachers and I were inspired by Jay Silver’s work with Awareness Mapping (watch his presentation here) and so we’ve been doing some paper mapping exercises, though focusing more on history and buildings and such. The ‘history of the community’ project (view on Flickr) went so well that we assigned a ‘future of the community’ assignment and asked kids to bring in maps or drawings of the community in 5-10 years. They came back with some great stuff (see the project on Flickr), and two students went nuts and made a whole scale model of the neighborhood (7 years from now) in 3D!

Notice the great attention to detail in multiple story homes. There’s a pharmacy, hair salon, etc. I’ll be uploading more photos of this assignment soon, including a panorama of the model town!

Yesterday turned out to be a fantastic day – Daniel Miracle and others from Escuelab took me out to visit a community called Cantagallo which they’ve been working with for some weeks. Daniel sets up TV transmitters and creates local TV stations with a range of ~500 meters for only about $300.

The Cantagallo community is a group of Shipibo, a group native to the Amazon region of Peru, near Pucallpa. About 100 families have moved here to the bank of the river Rimac here in Peru, on top of a landfill, starting about 9 years ago. They’re currently in negotiations to gain a title to the land they’ve been living on, which the Escuelab folks believe belongs to the Municipality of Lima. They invited me out to come make maps with them in the hopes that the resulting data can support their territorial claim. Seeing a community so tightly knit, isolated on top of a small hill, in the middle of a metropolis of 11 million people, was pretty stunning.

The Shipibo kids were very sweet and with the exception of one kid who threw a rock at the balloons and popped one (he was sorry and pretty sad afterwards when I explained we’d used all our helium and couldn’t send the camera up anymore), very helpful with the kites and the balloons. There was some wind but we couldn’t get the kites to pull consistently, so we inflated 4 balloons and that worked fabulously! We managed to take clear, detailed photos of the entire site, and I rectified them last night in just about an hour. I’m doing a rectifying workshop at Escuelab today and have also promised to show Nancy and Carla from Manzanita “A” how to do this. See above the resulting map overlaid on Google Earth imagery, which looks to be about 3-4 years old. And of course nothing is shown on a standard paper street map of Lima:

I thought it was really interesting that the community still actively uses the Shipibo language, but also that there’s a debate among parents there as to whether it should be taught; some think that Spanish alone would be more useful for their kids. The state-run school there is bilingual. Other aspects of the Cantagallo community also show their dual desires to hold on to their cultural roots while still being successful in modern Lima. According to Daniel, even their choice of location – next to the Rimac river – was because they were accustomed to living next to a river and fishing.

We also managed to take a picture of a map the Shipibo of Cantagallo are using as part of their title negotiations – and hope to fill it out with streets, homes, etc. More on this soon.

And as we’ve been having a lot of success with paper mapping with kids in Juan Pablo II, we made a big collage map with the Cantagallo kids as well. We had a lot of help from Layner Morih, a young Shipibo guy who has a great rapport with the kids – he encourages them to speak in both Spanish and Shipibo. You can see him in a purple shirt helping assemble the drawn map.

Lots more pictures on Flickr