My name is Brian DeRocher. I'm from Washington, DC. And I've been involved with OpenStreetMap for 10 years. I started out with this group called Mapping DC, and we started Mapping the Zoo. It's a group of local mappers. It's not affiliated with any company.

We're just amateurs, and we love the work. We love the map. It was founded by Kate Chapman and Andrew Turner, supported through people like Mikel Maron, Dale Kunz, and others. So Mapping DC aims to improve the OpenStreetMap in the DC

area, and also a bit into Maryland and Virginia. We host events about every other month, where we get together like this. We'll meet up, usually outside a metro stop. And I'll hand out field papers to teams, just teams of two,

and they'll capture a bunch of data. Much of the geometry data, like the roads and the buildings, are already in OpenStreetMap for DC. So what we're doing mostly is capturing the point of interest data, like if it's a restaurant, what is their cuisine? Or if it's a library, what are their hours?

Or maybe businesses have a website or a phone number. So we're trying to capture that information. What hours are they open? What hours are they closed? Stuff like that. As I said, we captured this data on field papers.

And then we gathered together, usually at a cafe or at a library, to record this data. And in meetings like this, we often have newcomers who don't know anything about mapping. So this is an opportunity for us to teach them. And it's always good times with the Wi-Fi. And then occasionally, we also just go out

and have some drinks. So we call them Mappy Hours. So my group was created in 2009. Over time, people were saying, you should really get on Meetup. It would really support the group. And I was kind of hesitant about it being like,

oh, it's like this outside service. And I don't want to rely on them too much. But I caved. And around 2014, I joined. So it's been a mixed blessing. So right off the bat, lots of people who are interested in GIS or mapping or cartography

are drawn to my group. So we now have over 400 people. And it's great because they handle much of the back end stuff for you, like RSVPs for events. And people who sign up get automatic reminders. People who belong to your group learn about events.

There's also discussion boards. And I think that's about it. I mean, there's more stuff too. The nice thing is that they also handle dues. So some of the costs, I have costs that I pay myself. But I could delegate that cost to the members.

I presume that if I did that, I would not see anybody. I don't think anybody would pay to join this group or pay for this. So I'm going to list out a couple of reasons why Meetup is not really a good fit for us. And then I'll present a solution. So for one, you do get hundreds of people joining your group.

But really, only about 2% show up ever. So that's about 8 to 10 people per event out of 400. And then once they do show up, they often don't return to the next event. Because when they're there, they think, oh, this is work. I have to walk up and down the street and take notes and do stuff. And I feel like I'm just, you know.

So this starts to highlight that the crowd that uses Meetup is not really the crowd that is into OpenStreetMap. I was talking to Alan. We were talking before about this. Or they did just two different types of breeds.

Mappers are kind of individualistic, I think. Whereas with Meetup, it's a social thing. Usually, the format for a Meetup event is you get there at 6. You have snacks and socialize, build your network. And then at 7 o'clock, there's a presentation. And by 8 o'clock, you're out.

OpenStreetMap and Mapping DC events are much different. So here's the second issue. That's the cost, of course. It started out at $72 every six months. But the costs have gone up over time. They bill me in groups of six months at a time, so in June and in December.

And just recently, it went up to $99. So that's putting it at about $200 for the whole year. Now, people tell me that the OpenStreetMap US nonprofit will defray the costs. But that's not really sustainable for tens of groups. If you do that for tens of groups in the United States

or 20 to 30 groups in the world, it's just not sustainable. Another issue. Meetup, it doesn't belong to OpenStreetMap. They don't have control of it. So one day, and now we know that WeWork bought out Meetup.

What is WeWork going to do with Meetup? I don't know. It's a little bit of a risk for me. What is my group going to do if something like that disappears? So I need something that's going to be there always. Will it ever disappear like GeoCities or Google Reader? Has anybody used Google Reader and have it just disappear on them? I'm seeing head nods.

Has anybody used GeoCities? Yes, all right. I cross that out thinking nobody's going to get that reference. I hear GeoCities Japan is still up and running. So the fourth issue is that Meetup doesn't care

about OpenStreetMap at all. They care about their business model and supporting groups, but they'd have no specific interest in OpenStreetMap. I think they actually do have one map on their website which uses OpenStreetMap. But beyond that, it's not much more. They don't care about coverage.

Are you covering all of the restaurants in your city? That's what I mean by coverage. Quality assurance, what are the mappers doing in your area? Are they doing good edits, poor edits? And where can they go to find help? It doesn't discover those people who are out there just mapping

on their own, and there's a lot of them. If you look at a bounding box and you just say, who made changes in this area, you're always bound to find a new person. And then the other thing is people who, let's say those people do stumble upon your Meetup, Meetup will then berate them with other groups.

Oh, you're interested in cartography, or GIS, or Map Time, other groups. So they're actually going to divide your people's attention. So I thought we need something better. And I built something called Microcosm. So literally meaning small world to support local groups.

Now, I don't mean chapters in the sense of OpenStreetMap Foundation. Those are basically countries. The US is a chapter of its own. I'm speaking of smaller groups, city level or even smaller. So Mike, people have thought about this before. So the work that I've done is based on several things.

In 2013, there was a pull request built called the group sketch, pull request number 297. And a lot of people worked on this, but it kind of fizzled out. Then for the 2017 state of the map, Mikel Marin had a talk about building up a stream up US community,

where he just opened it up to the whole group and we were all bouncing off ideas. Every city was represented and sharing great ideas. And I thought we really need to take this and mobilize it and build something. So in 2018, I started building Microcosm app.

The idea was I wasn't ready yet with OpenStreetMap and its core product, the website and the rails API to contribute into it. So I built something upside on the side on my own. And then last year at state of the map, I was talking to Andy Allen, who's one of the sysadmins. He says, that should be in OpenStreetMap.

So you should really be contributing to core. And so that's what I did. I basically took the project I built in 2018 and I just trashed it and I started again by building a branch on OpenStreetMap.org. So what does it add? It adds the Microcosm itself, which is the local group.

Anybody can propose to create their own group, any city. Each group has its own links. So for example, maybe they have, maybe that group puts their pictures up on Flickr or maybe they put videos up on YouTube or whatever.

And then really to replace meetup.com, there's the events. So it'll host the events and it'll do RSVPs for people who are attending those events. So I'll try to zip through this. This is just a list of some of the features

that were in the group sketch, the Microcosm app and what I plan to do in OpenStreetMap. I don't need to go over this. I think people are getting hungry for lunch and I won't be keeping you. Let me just see. Yeah, I'll skip this.

There's still more work to be done. In my pull request, I mean, in my branch, I have not created this pull request to merge it into OpenStreetMap yet. It still has much more work to be done. And part of the reason why I'm talking about it here today is to gather interest, to gather some of the requirements that people have, to get feedback on it and to see if it's really something

that we wanna do as a community. Let's see. There's some details here. I'll just go through them in my demo. Oh, one of the other things that we can do. Just like Meetup, let's say you're going to propose an event. You can blast it out to anybody in your group.

Now, this would not send out emails to each person, but it would leverage the messaging system that's already built into OpenStreetMap. All right. Let's see. There are some use cases that come by that happen on occasion. For example, there's a new Meetup group, I'm sorry, a new local group in Texas.

And the organizer there is reaching out to me for some advice. So I wanted to put in this website like a how-to or a toolkit on how to host a mapathon or a mapping event. And also some of the things that I do, people take a lot of pictures when they're at mapping.

So they'll take a picture and then save it for later to take more notes off of that. But often they never get around to digitizing their photographs. So what I would like, if possible, is a place where they can upload their photos so that other people in the community could digitize that and get that data into the map. That has storage requirements.

All right. All the work that I've done has been test-driven development. So I use a framework called Cucumber where you can describe features in English, pretty much. It's a small language. It typically works like this,

given that there is something. When I do something, then I expect to see something. And the nice thing about this Gherkin language is that anybody can write it. So if you belong to a group and you have needs, like I wish that this tool would do this thing, you can add stanzas like this to the source code itself.

And then later on, developers will satisfy those requirements, assuming it's a feature that we all want. So here's an example about creating an event. So given that there's a user, Abe,

and this user is an organizer of the microcosm, when this user logs in and they're on the Mapping DC page, and when we click Upcoming Events and click a New Event, we set the event to blah, blah, blah. And then we submit the form. When we go to the Mapping DC page again, we should see Update DC Bike Lanes.

So it's stuff like that. All right, let's go into the demo. So actually, so this requires switching laptops. So let me just see what else I have here. I'm just gonna finish up a couple slides here. So given that this is a feature

that would be on osm.org itself, there's numerous opportunities for integration with other services. So I'll list them out here. So you can think about like you're a group and you wanna gather, you wanna make sure that all of the bike racks are covered.

You could create in Martine's tool MapRoulette. You can create a task that does that and then delegate that task to people in your group and track that progress through OpenStreetMap.org. That's just an example. Another example is a change set review.

Now I know that OSM-CHA already does this, but we would integrate with them. So there are, you can delegate your team of people to a task on OSM-CHA to review change sets, to make sure that they're good quality or to provide feedback.

Alan was talking to me before and saying, he wishes that he could get feedback on his own work. You know, he makes changes, but how could it be better? So this is a nice feature that is already built into OpenStreetMap. You could say review my change set. And local groups could satisfy that requirement in addition to Mapbox.

I'm looking for people to help me out. So I need people who are good with communications. And I need some power users. I need designers, because I'm not a designer, but I'm a builder. Does anybody know what these are from?

18, thank you. All right, so now let me switch over to my other laptop. Just give me a minute.

In fact, if anybody else has a question now, I'd be glad to take it while I get set up.

And also, welcome new mappers to my community. I wanna say they're doing a good job. Yeah, in that middle version that I created in 2018,

it would actually call the API of change, like the change set API, and gather all the change sets in a box for let's say the past week or the past day, and look for those people who started making changes and highlight them to you as an organizer to send out those welcome emails and say, hey, how can I help you?

All right, what's my password? Which laptop am I on? Sorry, I'm getting stage fright.

Okay, are we good?

Just give it a second. Okay, so what I'm running here is a local copy of the website.

All right, it's called the Rails port or the OpenStreetMap website, right? So what we add is microcosms up here. And what we can do is I can log in.

Can you all see? Good, make it a little bit bigger. Okay, so since I'm an organizer of Mapping DC,

I can edit or work on my own, or I can show other ones. So this would be a one for GeoPhilly. And this would be the landing page for that group.

And since I'm not a member, I can join that group. So anybody, just like Meetup, anybody can join the group. Okay, so I join and I show up over here. Let's go back to my group.

All right, so what we're listing out here is the name of the group and their location, a small blurb about how this group identifies itself, different from other groups. Under Share is a list of links that the organization might use. For example, the photos on Flickr or YouTube videos or their, its own personal website or mailing list

or presence on Facebook and Twitter. The group can have multiple organizers. Steven Johnson and Andrew Wiseman have often helped me out. And then we will list out the members over here. And on the left side, Upcoming Events.

And then Recent Changes. So this would be a list of change sets. This would actually probably be kind of a huge list. So I'm not sure how to present that. And then also, since your members belong to your group,

you can see what their diary entries are. So we can integrate with the rest of the OSM architecture. So let me just go ahead and show you some of the events. You can get a page just of the events for this organization, but also you can get a list of all the events

that are growing across all of OpenStreetMap. Now, the really nice thing about this, five minutes, is that the calendar functionality on the Wiki has always been like this, in my opinion. We could build a true calendar API with something like this.

All right, so this would be an event page where we have the name of the event, who's it organized by, who's organizing this particular event. And if you're going to not a description, these would be slippy maps, of course, and then allow you to have directions. It would be mobile friendly.

So you could bring it up on your phone and just click on this. It would snap you over to, well, I don't have internet right now. Driving directions on OpenStreetMap.org. You can say, yes, you're going. There's a small glitch here where it still says zero, but we will fix that. Now it says one person is going.

And then anything else I wanted to highlight? Yeah, just that we will link right to the profile pages of the users and their diary entries. I think I've covered all the features that I've done so far.

I expect to be developing those again for like another month or two months or three months to really flesh out all the features. There's some security concerns where you wouldn't want members of one organization to be creating events on another organization, stuff like that. So that's about all I have right for now. Can anybody have any questions?

Yeah, so if, yes, it is.

Yeah, in fact, when you sign in, you can actually have your identity server be provided by somebody else. And I'm not changing any of that. Oh yeah, yes, I better take Maggie's question.

So only last year at State of the Map, I talked to Andrew Allen and he said, yeah, we should get this up there. So this is a feature that at least

he's willing to entertain. Maybe some of the other sysadmins, it'll be harder to convince them. We also have dev servers. OSM has dev servers at the international level and I think Ian runs a dev server at the U.S. level. I'd love to get this up and running there. And did I answer all your questions? Yeah, I think so. Yes, sorry, in the blue shirt.

Oh, great. Let's say I started a group past that are constantly.

Yeah. If I reached out for them, I can check that that was completed and then somebody else in that chapter. Right, so typically I'm thinking it'll show the activity of what's happening in your group at that time, whether it be the events that you're hosting or just changes that other people are working on. I also think that you can have projects.

Like in D.C. we're having a project where we're doing a survey or a review of all the bike lanes. The D.C. government has given us data and we're making sure that the data that they gave us is represented in OpenStreetMap. It's a very manual process and it's been delegated out to people. So I'd like to see their progress on that in a similar way that task manager presents progress.

And also it's a very user-centered driven website. So if there's a feature that you have in your community, let's talk about working on getting that satisfied. Okay. In the black shirt.

Right, I should repeat the question. I should have repeated everyone's question. The question is, if you were not signed in, would you still have visibility to the event details?

And I would say that may be up to the organizer. So we can make it happen that way as it's up to the organizer. Maybe there could be events that are public and events that are private. And by private I mean you just need to be a member of that microcosm. Yeah, we can do that.

We've got a lot of flexibility here. That's really one of the things that I want to really focus on. Building it your own, we can do anything we want. Using meetup.com, good luck. Okay, in the blue shirt.

So you're thinking of, so the question is, if there were other groups nearby, are there ways to group them together? So I think the word for that is federation, like a federated group. I don't know yet. It sounds like a great idea.

Okay, Maggie. Yes, so I should mention Teams.

I only learned about Teams about two weeks ago. And it seems like the work that I've done and the work that Mark Ferrara's doing is very similar. There are also some differences. Like obviously this is on OpenStreetMap.org. This is more focused about events and RSVPs and attendance. I don't know what his is really focused on. I think it's hot task manager tasks.

But we are just talking together and we're gonna try to come up with the best of both worlds. We were talking just a minute ago and the reason why he said he didn't go this route is because it's hard to get something into OpenStreetMap.org. New features.

Okay, last question.

Right, so one of the things that I'm thinking is support tools for organizers, which could tie into like Learn OSM or Teach OSM. So how could you be a better organizer of events and how can you bring together a community?

Okay. Oh, Maggie again. Sorry. I have an idea actually. Yeah, bring it on.

Here's a new tool thing where it comes, oh yeah, I can use that. If there's an event, like wing holes or whatever,

that may appeal to us. Or just the fact that like, hey, there's mappers in this area that I can reach out to and say, is there any type of coffee or actually not coffee?

Yeah, Maggie, I think this would absolutely be well received if you did some support like that. It would be great. Yes? Oh, wait, wait. Are we out of time? Okay, I think we're out of time. Some people might wanna go to lunch. Let's, feel free to, let's chat on the side.