Certified crazy

The Freemap Mumbai workshop (in the series of workshops across India sponsored by FSF-India) was at HBCSE, Mankhurd on February 7-8, 2008. Dr G Nagarjuna introduced us to the speakers Eric Schuyler and Mikel Maron who gave an awesome two day hands-on to ~20+ of the workshop attendees.

Day one had us listening to Schuyler and Mikel talk about GPS and the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project among other things. Slides are available on slideshare. After the introductory session was over, they fielded questions from us, and introductions to the participants revealed most of them were from NGOs with particularly interesting needs – like Pukar Foundation, which plans to use OSM for mapping Social demographics – especially the Dharavi area, and others like SOPPECOM which plan to use the OSM database for ecosystem management. Interesting, really.

We headed out for a quick survey to do before we gathered for lunch. The 30-odd minute survey had my partner and I go around near the Sion-Trombay road right outside HBCSE and identify some POIs.  Post lunch, we were introduced to JOSM (pronounced as `jawsum’) – the editor. The rest of the day went in importing data from the GPS devices to .gpx files and loading the traces on the OSM server and opening up the traces and waypoint files in JOSM. Schuyler used party render on the collection of traces of all participants. This video is the result of the first day at surveying.

On day two, it was decided to either correct the AND data (that was consistently erroneous for Mumbai) or start mapping parts of Mumbai again. A bunch of us, however, wanted some more serious surveying So post lunch, we headed out to the Diamond Garden area in Chembur and mapped the area, and some surrounding roads. This video should be an indication of the fun we had there.

We came back and mapped some restaurants, clinics, banks and other POIs  and uploaded the data to the OSM database. Mikel writes about his experience at the workshop and with the Mumbai traffic – “Mumbai is actually pretty pleasant when you’re in one place, it’s the moving about which causes problems.”