> Coincidence? Was it also coincidence that Google Maps added data for the > Isle of Man in the weeks following the complete release of Cloud Made's data > set for the Isle of Man. Was it coincidence that Google launched MapMaker > that allows anyone to edit the map, without mentioning any projects which > for years had been telling Google, in good faith, how to do it? > > If you think I'm picking on Google, they're just the biggest and best > target. The BM comes equally from freetards, startups, angry Jordanian > colonels, mismanaged charities, beauracratic nightmare international > organizations. I'll leave that rant to you.
Traditional mapping maps static industrial features - roads, highways, services-for-pay. All of these things correspond to the urgencies of a corporate need.... So it's already a poor starting point to imitate them - likely to be unsatisfying for us. "Real" maps probably are simply too complex a problem to map in a top down way; I doubt Google or others could even make or buy or own "real maps" - maps that would show us what we really needed to know about our landscapes. Beyond ordinary maps there are concepts, places and issues that if recognized would probably create some difficulty for a corporation that offered them. Just today Mikel was commenting on the number of security checkpoints that Palestinians travel through on a day to day basis - are those checkpoints mapped? Can they even be mapped? I'm sure there's a lot of anger, frustration and rage there as these people struggle to find sanity - both the oppressors and the oppressed are trapped in their roles here - god help them. A 'real' map of the Palestein issue; the people, the crisis spots, the psychic landscape, if dominant, would probably transform regional politics as it more clearly focused world attention on the stalemate and brought more visibility to the topic. Such a map is unlikely to come from any kind of corporate interest. The free data community may need to work harder to move into mapping transient and volatile human information. We should be mapping information that in some ways has been historically un-mappable because it is 1) not valued or is 2) actively seen as threatening or is 3) simply too hard to map using traditional GIS. Ultimately a lot of what Google and others offer is "old information". In a way this is devalued now. You can find a hospital but you can't know that there is a doctor who happens to be a block or two away right now - who might help for free or for an exchange of services - perhaps under the table - but in an asserted trust. It's really so important because it ties into the whole idea of commodifying transactions, and what happens when we are "rich" but have no "money" - and how that removes a lot of power from people who are not regional. There is some kind of relationship between time, information and money and between our choices to give or not give a fraction of our energy to find vital life information. Even then, I think that's really just a start; I think the whole focus should shift to be centered around ecosystems, not people, or only people insofar as they contribute to ecosystems... It's the lack of water, or food or nature that is fueling a lot of the conflict that we see.
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