VisionOn.TV OpenStreetMap interview

As well as giving a talk at OpenTech, I also did little interview about OpenStreetMap for VisionOn.TV:

visionontv-interview-frame.jpg

It’s on youtube.

The “Documentation” link I mentioned is wiki.openstreetmap.org. Find out all about the OpenStreetMap project there.

The video featured here is an animation of OpenStreetMap edits back in 2008 (It’s stunning. Watch it full-res for the best effect) There’s even more worldwide editing activity on OpenStreetMap these days.

The talk I gave at OpenTech earlier in the day, is described in the previous blog post (also available as a video) That was going into more depth particularly for developers interested in using OpenStreetMap

Video

Thanks to the nice folk at VisionOn.tv for organising an interview in their “pop-up studio” there. VisionOn.TV is a pretty interesting citizen journalism project. Their approach was to do almost all their editing (e.g. dropping in the OSM animation video) “live” as they recorded the interview. This probably gives them a more fun live TV feel to their “studio” activities, but it also seems like a clever approach to avoid endless faffing with editing

…which is a big problem with creating video. I spent hours and hours on this tutorial video. The results were not really worth the time it took (That tutorial is now out-of-date for several reasons too) At the time I realised that I could have achieved almost as good a video by practising a few times and then recording the whole screencast in one take, rather than doing things piece by piece and editing clips together, which just takes forever.

I’m interested in this stuff because video is the way to reach out to the masses. Make stuff which appeals to the short attention span of the youtube generation. The Video approach is a no-brainer. The process of making video is difficult. For OpenStreetMap we need better promotional videos and video tutorials. Compare videos on that list, with the “guided tour” video (well flash animation actually) which is front and centre on waze.com . It’s a slick persuasive pitch to ordinary non-technical people (Important note: Don’t be persuaded! waze.com is one of several companies who get people to contribute geo-data, and then hoard it for their own commercial benefit. You should be supporting the not-for-profit OpenStreetMap project instead!)

This interview video is not a slick pitch. I’m concentrating on trying to explain OpenStreetMap in a persuasive way, and as a result I’m furrowing my brow and looking too serious. And when I first watched it back I thought I’d really failed to get various important messages across, particularly about the open data aspects of OpenStreetMap. But I guess that’s the short video way. Dumb things down and miss out the details. I feel better about it when I see a facebook comment from my (non-techie) sister saying “good explanation, I get it now!”.

OpenStreetMap at OpenTech 2011

I gave a talk at OpenTech 2011 yesterday. This is a big open source open data London technology conference. A lot of fun.

I gave an overview of the developer ecosystem around OpenStreetMap data, how web and mobile app developers can use OpenStreetMap, and how the OpenStreetMap tile server is only a small part of that. This included a whole sequence of shiny new slides to illustrate these points by gradually building up a nice diagram.

Watch the talk video on youtube

Slides on SlideShare.net

The session listing on lanyrd has some photos etc linked from there.

The following is the slides in a form which is less likely to crash your browser, along with notes


 

Open Technology enthusiasts will have heard of OpenStreetMap before

 

If you’ve only taken a quick look, you’ll perhaps have the idea that OpenStreetMap is an open source competitor to Google maps. It kind of is that, but that’s not really the whole story.

 

It’s more accurate to compare OpenStreetMap with wikipedia. It is very much the wikipedia of maps. Similar for a number of reasons….

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