CaliParks.org opens a door and listens to people being themselves outside This spring, CaliParks.org (a site I worked on with GreenInfo when I was still at Stamen Design) relaunched with a new look and a clear purpose: Highlight the thousands of photos pouring out of California’s parks every day. And it’s working amazingly well. I...
A how to guide (in the weeds, so to speak) Update on Tagging added March 25, 2016 The coverage of our efforts to mark prohibited trails prompted a fair amount of conversation on OpenStreetMap’s mailing lists (this message and following) and chat rooms. Based on community discussion there and elsewhere, the best solution for marking...
Turning bad social data into good information helps parks, the open mapping community, and salmon When we launched CaliParks.org, we created a custom base map especially to emphasize parks rather than the city names and highways that dominate most basic online maps. We made sure to pull all the park boundaries and names from the...
Just in time for Spring Break: A new version of CaliParks app puts 11,826 parks at your fingertips with crowd-sourced trails and millions of on-the-spot photos from Instagram Nature and technology might not seem like a good fit to some. But everyone needs to get outdoors more, especially kids. Now a new bilingual, mobile, web-based...
http://www.donorschoose.org/ combines what’s great about the internet with the untapped potential of American schools. Schools that sign up for DonorsChoose.org can raise money, a dollar a time, from people anywhere on the internet. The Huffington Post is helping out by sponsoring and promoting the project, Stephen Colbert is helping out by doing a roll call...
We’ve been working with the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University to bring to life their Sightlines Project. Stamen’s role was to review data from eight nationally representative, multi-year studies that involved more than 1.2 million Americans over the last 15 years and to visualize that data in an appealing and informative way. Sightlines...
The Earth Journalism Network, a project of Internews, has been working in geo-journalism for years. They stand out as leaders in using geo-spatial info to tell human stories. Because they are part of Internews, these stories cover crucial environmental, climatic, and political topics often for under-represented global voices. And their GeoJournalism team has also created...
When we launched CaliParks.org in February 2015, we also created a custom basemap especially to emphasize parks rather than the city names and highways that dominate most basic online maps. We made sure to pull all the park boundaries and names from the California Protected Areas Database (calands.org). That’s the nation’s most complete set of...
In a previous post, I described how we’ve carried out a first foray into trail curation on OpenStreetMap to deal with unauthorized trails appearing on the map. Rather than deleting them, we’ve changed their tags so they’re easily filtered out of the map but still present, so later mappers understand why those paths visible in...
Yesterday, we launched critical new work with our longtime partners at Climate Central: Mapping Choices lays out starkly the stakes of carbon emissions over the next several decades. It also shows us a much more sobering picture than is often shown in near-term climate change forecasts. That’s partly because this map isn’t about what will...