Mapping SOO project locations

jane · May 8, 2014, 11:53pm

I was thinking of putting up a map of all the places SOO is running (or has in the past run projects) for the workshops and training programs pages – I think it would be need to reflect the diversity and global aspect of our activities.

Does P2PU currently use any mapping tools? What would be compatible with WP or the P2PU website? Any recs from others who have used open source mapping tools?

Billy is exploring cartodb.com for a CC project, but wondering if there is something we’ve already used that is free. Maybe just google maps? Doesn’t necessarily need community editing capability since I’ll probably just add everything manually myself.

bekka · May 9, 2014, 9:33am

Hey Jane

That’s a wonderful idea - I think it would be great to get a sense of where things are happening. And would look awesome too.

There are a lot of tools out there, and I guess it depends on how much detail and programmability you’d want. Google is free, but not “free” but it is easy to use, and familiar.
OpenStreetMap might be a good option too?

dirk · May 9, 2014, 1:35pm

The easiest would be to use Google maps and embed that. A more involved option would be to use leafletJS, it’s not that hard. I played with it a bit here. Some JavaScript is required and I haven’t found a good tool to author geoJSON (haven’t looked very hard though)

@1L2P I know LCL is using something else, what is your experience with that?

1L2P · May 9, 2014, 2:09pm

For learning creative learning, we compared a few mapping solutions and ended up using Zeemaps.

https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=871132

@grifpeterson explored the different options and would be the best person to ask for more details.

bekka · May 12, 2014, 2:31pm

Jane - the webmaker people are using this: https://mapsengine.google.com it looks pretty good.

tim · May 12, 2014, 11:55pm

Billy and I used http://mapalist.com for Intro to Open Science because it pulls data from Google Spreadsheets which made it easy to have other people provide data.

grif · May 21, 2014, 6:59pm

Like @1L2P said, we settled on Zee Maps for LCL (see here). Zee Maps doesn’t limit you to 1,000 pins like Google Maps does and, if you’re willing to pay $30 or so a month, there are some interesting features you can unlock. The biggest setback for us was having difficulty navigating between people’s map pin and our other tools (Discourse, unHangouts, etc).