Yeah, thanks for everyone for joining me. I work on a project called Microcosms. I've been working on it for a couple of years. And I'd like to share it with you all. Let me just get my timer started. OK. So I'd like to know, how many people here have done an edit in their own city?

OK, that's like everybody. Now, I'd like to know, if there was a team of people in your city, would you join them and do some editing collaboratively? Yeah, about half, more than half. OK, that's good to know. So this is a project to help you with that sort of endeavor.

OK, who am I? I'm actually not into geospatial or GIS myself. I'm just a software developer and actually work in the field of cybersecurity. But one day, I needed to build a map, a website with a map in it, and I found OpenStreetMap, and I've loved it ever since. Yeah, I've been a volunteer with OSM since 2009.

And I took over MappingDC, an organization in DC. I took over after Kate Chapman moved on. So we are MappingDC. No corporate sponsorship, just a bunch of volunteer mappers working together

to improve the state of OpenStreetMap in the DC area. We've had mapping events for several years. We do on-the-street mapping. We get together with clipboards and printouts from field papers or walking papers way back in the day.

And we'd actually take notes and then go to a cafe or a library and open up our laptops and learn and teach people how to edit the map. These days, much of the geometry is already there, and we're doing more attributes of the POIs.

So these days, it's more mobile mapping with StreetComplete or GoMap or VisPucci. So my organization has been using meetup.com for several years, and there is a cost to that. It is about $200 every year.

That was two years ago, and the prices have been going up. It's a mixed blessing. How many people are on meetup.com? Okay, so you know what it's like. You know that you get hundreds of people in your organization. I have about 400 people in my organization,

but to any particular event, about eight to 10 people show up. So I wonder if it's really worth the cost, and I'm thinking about a better way to do this. Is there a better way to support your local community by using osm.org? Build this functionality into osm.org.

So that's what I've been working on. The meetup does, as I said, it does have some good advantages. It'll get your events publicized very well. You'll find other GIS people, but when they come to your event, they didn't really expect to do any work. They're like, you want me to do what?

I have to capture all this data? So you're not finding the right people. They don't often return. So I often say, these are not the mappers you're looking for. This is the type of person that we're looking for. This is an edit that I found in the local area just a couple days ago,

and GregMapp1 is adding residential features such as houses, mobile homes, and garages, et cetera, and I look him up, and he's got over 4,000 edits. This is the type of people who I'd like to support. There are people in your cities already doing tons of mapping, and these are the people who I want to connect with,

build a community around, and support their efforts. So this is what I just said. Sorry. I have this highly scientific survey that I've done. The number of returning people who are just normal mappers is much, much greater

than if you were from meetup.com. So I've been working on a project called Microcosms. Now, I'll do a little side quest here and tell you a little history. I built Microcosm app as a side project, and I shared it with Andy Allen,

who is here at State of the Map US two years ago in Colorado, and I was just chit-chatting with him about this app, and he's like, no, no, no, this has got to go in osm.org. This has got to be mainline, proper feature in osm.org. So I took that, and I forked the project.

I created my own branch, and I started adding all the functionality in there. That was pre-pandemic, and now, I'll be honest, this whole project has been a hiatus due to the pandemic. I've got two young kids, and it's been tough. So I'm excited to get back into it now, and we're gonna get this thing merged into osm.org.

So this is what it looks like. Wait, I had one more thought. Oh, I'll tell you later. So it's a new top-level navigation item called Microcosms, and events, is events there too? Yeah. Good.

Events is also there. That's like a little side benefit. Microcosms is literally, if you look at the word, it means small world, cosm meaning world, and micro obviously meaning small. It's to support your local communities.

Now, I'm not talking about the US chapter. I'm talking city level or lower level, and I'm also thinking about non-geographic areas. So a microcosm could be a group of people who have a similar interest in supporting the pride, like gay pride, or people who support

rails-to-trails projects, nationwide projects, but specific in interest. This is a screenshot from the OpenStreetMap dev server. I'll go back to it. So there is a dev server out there, api.dev.openstreetmap.org,

and you can play with this if you'd like. People have been using this tool, giving me feedback, filing bug reports, and really supporting the effort, especially the people in the local chapters, chapter of the OSMF.

A typical microcosm would look like this. Again, there are similarities to the meetup page. Here's a better-filled-in example of my own microcosm. This is a slippy map. On the right side, you have a description of your group.

I don't have any links that share, but you can have links that share out to your Twitter, your Facebook, your other communities, your Drupal site, or whatever. You can join the organization or not. Membership in all these organizations, I assume, would be free to join. Anybody can join. Then a list of events on the left side here.

On the right side, a list of all the members. Scrolling down a bit, you can see a list of recent changes in your area of influence. So the real idea here is that there are people who make changes and they check that box that says, I'd like somebody to review, like I'm a new mapper and I need somebody to review my change. Well, you can see that here, oh, up here,

and then I intend to link over to OSM-CHA here where you can do a proper review of that edit. But the idea is you've got people in your local area who make changes and need a review, and then you've got the other expert mappers in your area, but it's hard to connect the two.

So this is bringing a location, bringing those people together. Another event support is for diaries. So we've already got diaries in OpenStreetMap, but I'd like to know what's going on with my people in my local area. If you go to diaries, you get a ton, like OSM.org,

you get a ton of diaries. Most of them are not even in your language. So the benefit here is you're gonna get to know what's happening in your local area. Here's the link for the dev server.

Now, something that I'd like to announce is that, actually, it was Martijn who said you should get this going, that let's get a live server going. I'd like to start using this. I don't care if it's merged into OSM.org or not. Let's get an instance running. So I got that on my own website,

mappingdc.org slash microcosms. You could go there now and start supporting your own local communities. You may not have one, and you could be the founder of your local community in your city. Maybe you don't have the time to support it all the time but you'll start to build a team of leadership

and then you can share responsibilities. And then you've lit the fire, like you've got it going in your local community. In fact, there are three groups who are already using this, Michigan, Utah, and I think Des Moines.

So there are some next steps. So what's done so far? I had to draw a line in the sand about what's 1.0 and what's gonna be 2.0. The feature, the merge request into OSM.org, it was too big. It was like, it's just really too big. It's too much of an effort. And Andy Allen and Tom, what's Tom's last name?

Tom Hughes. They said you gotta break it up and make it smaller. So I'm working on that now. Yeah, I'm gonna skip that for now. So here's some future ideas. On that slippy map for your area, what I'd like to do is not just display the map itself,

but what activity is happening in your area. What events have happened? What events are coming to happen? Where are they? People have change sets that need review. Where are they? I know the Virginia part of the DC area better, so I'm gonna focus on those and I'm gonna review those change sets.

So it's gonna be like an activity map. What else do I have here? Ian is here. Ian, I think you mentioned badges. I think this is a great idea. Badges for people in your community. Let's see, what else? Oh, I had an idea, like going back to the Foursquare idea, like where there was like,

you could become a mayor of an area. You could become like the lead expert of the five or so blocks around your neighborhood, around your house. Adopting a street or integrating with this new website, community.opestreetmap.org, which was what? Just announced a week ago, two weeks ago, you know? So this could be, whereas opestreetmap.org

can organize your events and the activities of your hub, for ongoing discussions, you would integrate with communityopestreetmap.org. Other future ideas in terms of quality assurance. I'm a big fan of quality assurance. There are all sorts of activities

that you can integrate with at this local level. Like for DC, we have a project where we got city data of all the bike lane data. Like what streets have good bike lanes, dedicated bike lanes, shared with the cars. And so we went through that data line by line. It probably should have been a map roulette task,

I'm sorry. But it was a good project, it was a side project where we just went through that data, feature for feature. And then of course, integrating with KeepRite. There are more future ideas. I'm gonna skip this. And thank you, I'm on all these sites.

I'm open Brian, and also tomorrow I'm organizing a talk about community, organizing your local communities like Microcosm, mapping DC. Cool, so thank you.