Transformaps website

See also: https://twitter.com/transformap  

The Transformap website is at once a:

• Map
• Blog
• Forum
• Wiki

From the Blog:

Mapping socio-economic innovation with OpenStreetMap

A distributed process on making the alternatives visible. Please feel kindly invited to contribute and share.

You can contribute by filling in mapping-initiatives in the directory, according to the very short and easy guidelines in the beginning.

Link to the Directory of "Mapping the Mappings"

14mmm is an initiative formed by more than 20 organizations within the varying fields of commoning and collaborative economy to collaborate on Mapping Alternative Social and Economic Innovation. Initiated in autumn 2013, a kick off "Munich Mapping Meeting" took place on March 6/7, 2014. Since then, we're on our Road to Degrowth and to a hopefully become a standard for mapping alternatives.

We are working out the following and would like to keep your attention for five minutes. We show where we are and invite you, if you find some interest, to become part of it.

the situation

Many well intended people, initiatives and organizations started and are continuously starting to produce maps of projects, initiatives and commons in their own interest. This includes i.e. sharing activities, free harvestable trees in the countryside, ecovillages, coworking spaces, cargo bikes (for lending), give boxes, startup projects and non-profit initiatives.

This mélange is exciting and helpful to meet their needs "beyond the market", to enable people to engage in these fields and connect to the initiatives of their interests or neighbourhoods to make fair use of the common goods.

the problem we identified and want to solve

• There are many "alternative tribes" out there. And each of them creates its own map. These maps are usually not connected to each other. That is: they are invisible.
• For the mapping, most are using the state of the art, easily available mapping tools. Mostly google maps (proprietary) and open street maps (open source).

• In the current most common setups, every mapping initiative is mapping in non-connected layer.

• So we have many many non-connected maps, and the data, for example in the same field of interest, is not accessible for initiatives in the same field in another place (e.g. a broad variety of maps for permaculture gardens and projects that is existing, and not connected).

• Many many hours of work are done in a parallell way and don't create synergeties.
• In many initiatives, especially voluntary-based, as soon as the initial energy is running out, the maps are abandoned, cannot get updated and get useless after some time
• In short: There are thousands of alternatives to the dominant economic system. But they are nor visible nor "easy to access" for common people.

What we are dreaming of:

• We want to make the fact, that 'The Are Plenty of Alternatives' (TAPAs) visible and easily accessible on a single map based on a free infrastructure."

• We collect and connect a broad variety of mapping initiatives to identify areas and ways of cooperation to produce synergetic effects for the working processes and mapping outcomes.

• Establish categories, in fact a whole taxonomy that fit our needs and suggest them to the Open Street Map community for adoption. Currently there are for example tags like museum, train station, ... we would like to integrate food coops, urban gardens, ecovillages, giveboxes, ... The Open Steetmap Community is a peer based open source collaboration community, and we are already working with OSM people helping us to link OSM an transformap properly. With the integration of new ecosocial-collaborative-communitybased categories, we can put our information directly into the ground layer of Open Street Maps. From that ground layer, every initiative then can take out the kind of information they are interested in.

We want to engage with various communities to join forces. All data anyone puts in Open Street Maps is community based, open source and freely available.

• As a midtime goal, we want to organize mapping jams, where people come together to bring the alternative world together on maps that are opening windows to engage with people and initiatives. The first global one will take place on March 6/7 2015, exactly 365 days after the first meeting of the transformappers.

• As a longterm goal, we dream of establishing decentral structures, that can communicate with each other and can display even data, that is not so easy to put on static maps, as events, community areas of food coops, movable ressources, .... and we dream of becoming a standard for Mapping the Thousands of Alternatives out there.)

How we are currently developing:

• engage with different communities - as hopefully you : ) - to get in knowledge, needs, contributors, ideas
• from that inputs develop a prototype for the taxonomy in open street maps with the open street maps community
• develp prototype approaches for mapping processes and try them out with the communites to get feedback
• work on the pagmatic short term goal to develop categories as well as the longterm goal of distributed networks of knowledge that can exchange mapping data