Thanks to everyone who came to our February meetup on Tuesday!
Things we talked about:
Opened the session with a quick introduction to what Maptime was where it comes from (Stamen) and what other cities were doing.
After a quick round of introductions (name, job or side work that brought them here and ‘Why are you interested in Maptime?’) by all 13 people, we began the quick presentations and demonstrations of building data.
First, Eric Brelsford showed how to pull data from Open Street Map using Overpass and how to query for specific types of data, partially in a presentation format, partially by doing a live query. and actually getting data off of OSM. In the background, Andrew Hill from CartoDB was following what Eric was doing and brought it into CartoDB. Awesome demo that showed people a full process.
Then Andrew went into a demonstration of PLUTO data. He has a great set of 20+ maps that he uses to demo the capabilities of CartoDB and the strength of PLUTO data. We explained lightly what the data was and where to get it, and Andrew went into detail on a few maps, then proposed a Spiderman swing map. This map would be a visualization of how Spiderman might get all the way through Manhattan without touching the ground and we were all super impressed with the thinking. We coined it Swingscore(tm) after Walkscore.
After feeling out the direction of the crowd and pressing for questions, we determined some very basic tutorials would be good. Jeff Ferzoco took everyone through getting the building footprint data from the NYC Data Mine, downloading it and bringing it into three formats. First, the sip files were zipped and brought into CArtoDB and styled for one of the qualities (can’t remember which one). Then the same data was brought into Illustrator using Mappublisher and styled using Themes. Lastly, the sip was dragged and dropped into QGIS and layered with other data.
We started a discussion about getting data and how to make it work, which led to a demo of data put into openRefine directly from wikipedia, processed, formatted and exported into CartoDB. This was apparently very helpful to most people and reinforced how incredibly useful openRefine is.
This was at the 45 minute point, or so. We opened up the room for a bit and discussed what people wanted to work on.There were some questions directly related to what we had done previously, which we answered. Everyone was powering through experimentation on their laptops and axing questions along the way.
We discussed the next meeting (Geocoding) and that we’d be looking for a new location for next time. We gauged what people wanted to talk about after that, and determined that it was pretty open, though some seeds of new ideas came out (SQL in CartoDB, Leaflet) and we discussed how we wanted to have a space on the internet.
The organizers afterwards determined a GitHUB is the best idea. We created that the following day. Jeremy was also working on logos for the whole brand, and those were shown around and critiqued.