One week ago I was back in Cambridge for the Media in Transition conference at MIT. Returning to the constellation of cities that compose the metropolitan area of Boston is always great. I enjoy a lot the kind of conversations, encounters, and trajectories I can have there. It is an excellent place for net-weaving, [...]
It was great to find out about the different kinds of collaborations that are emerging between Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects. As the projects grow and their databases become more complex and rich, members of the communities have been experimenting with different ways of integrating their data, creating interesting mash-ups. For instance, the integration [...]
I am glad I finally had the opportunity to participate in Wikimania, the international conference where wikipidians and other wiki practitioners get together to discuss, code, and reflect about the future, present, and past of Wikipedia and its sister projects. This year, the conference was host in DC, at the George Washington University campus, [...]
OSM in Action.
During the six years of history, the OSM project has been able to grow thanks to the volunteer work of an active community of amateur mappers and developers. Although this community is geographically dispersed around the world, it has organized itself in several localized projects. In the OSM wiki it is [...]
In July of 2004, Steve Coast, a 24-year-old British computer scientist and entrepreneur, started OpenStreetMap (OSM) with the objective of creating a free editable map of the world. Tired of the problems data proprietary companies generate by the restricting geographical information (In the UK, as in other European countries, geographic information is very expensive and [...]
On January 12 2010, after the catastrophic earthquake (magnitude 7.0 Mw) near Port au Prince that triggered a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of volunteers distributed across the globe worked together to create an updated and complete digital map of Haiti. Using computers, photographic imagery, and the tools from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, they were able to [...]
During the summer I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2010, I became a regular visitor of the website CatracaLivre (Free Turnstile). The site helped me a lot to organize my cultural life and to experience the city in a diverse and rich way. In a South American megalopolis of the size of Sampa, [...]
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