Community Almanac - RFP to build an online mapping platform

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challer's picture
Posted by challer on November 19, 2007 at 6:48pm

The Orton Family Foundation, which we frequently work with, just put out an RFP to build an online mapping platform that helps them do community asset mapping in cities and towns they work in. Read more >>. We feel like it's a great match for Drupal and are planning to put a proposal together, but would love to partner up with someone who's involved, or wants to get involved in the gmap rewrite, to make sure we can use this opportunity to help move this effort forward. Please drop me an email if you're interested or have thoughts/questions at chris [at] placematters [dot] org.

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Interesting!

Posted by danaktivix on November 27, 2007 at 2:21pm
danaktivix's picture

Sounds very interesting. I guess you're based in the US?

The biggest goal for me in the future: something like Google's Google's My Maps - but that's editable by a user community. Specifically:

  • 'My maps' has excellent interactive tools for adding overlay polygons and editting them - points we can do, but this little feature all by itself has such potential for interactive map making. If you haven't used it, go make a 'my map' and add one.
  • It would be ideal to have drupal-style user access control to editing map elements - possibly on a layer or group basis.
  • The resulting maps also need to have flexible view access control; which is less straightforward if different layers or groups have different permissions.

The one thing that made Google Maps take off (I'd argue) is its intuitive interactive style (and also speedy loading, I suppose.) I'd argue that any Drupal implementation needs to aim for this too - as in their interactive polygon tool.

I'm hoping to start on something like this myself - I've just started a PhD in a geography department in the UK, and want to help develop a community mapping site. I wonder how possible it is to work together? Or, indeed, how desirable, internationally? Perhaps it would be better to work in specific countries? E.g. I could work with others in the UK.

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