Maptime Boston
1st Year Retrospective

Jake Wasserman / @jwass2000

Andy Woodruff / @awoodruff

Mike Foster / @mjfoster83

Maptime Summit — 2015-06-08

History

  • Jake met Lyzi @ SOTMUS 2014
  • Jake, Andy, Mike separately discussed having non-technical Boston geo meetup
  • Lyzi, Beth, Alan sent onboarding materials
  • Kickoff 6/25/2014
  • 1 year anniversary this month!

The Meetups

  • One per month
  • Each event starts with brief Maptime overview - quotes from maptime.io/about and lyzidiamond.com/posts/why-maptime
  • Try to encourage participation, asking questions, etc
  • Speakers generally target ~30 min of material
  • Post slides to Meetup list

The Tutorials

Anatomy of a Web Map OSM 101
QGIS (Mike invents the #ratmap) Leaflet
Github for geo-data Show-and-Tell
Holiday Potluck CartoDB
D3 Spatial Data Formats and Data Sources
Projections and Coordinate Systems Mapbox Studio and CartoCSS

The People

  • Cartographers, programmers, GIS analysts/researchers, data scientists, local government GIS engineers, journalists, graduate students (operations research, linguistics, MBA), OSM enthusiasts, hobbyists
  • Broad age range
  • Between 15-30 people at each meetup

The Space

  • Meet in an open cafe area
  • Large picnic style table that seats ~12 people plus number of smaller tables that seat 3-4.
  • Reserved every 3rd Wednesday through end of 2015 :)

Difficulties

  • Of our 10 tutorials, 7 led by organizers - unsustainable
  • How often to repeat while maintaining interest?
  • Stagnant chapter website

Looking Back

  • It's been good for the community (we think)
  • Being an organizer is a lot of work
  • It's been fun!