Mapchester

Mapchester has launched :). Grew out of discussion at the Open Plan Workshop, into a OpenStreetMap Data Gathering Weekend, and flash hacking effort based on an open sourced, time navigatable worldKit. Drew says...

The inaugural Mapping Weekend brought together a wide array of different people, transforming them into map hackers and citizen cartographers: people who walked / cycled / drove / bussed / trained / skated the city streets recording GPS tracks and road names. These tracks were then uploaded to the OpenStreetMap database and edited into coherent map features.

From this data, a Manchester map has been created for Futuresonic 2006 - presented as a test-case for producing a usable, functioning city map and festival guide via this open source, collaborative approach.

Though still in its infancy, at an experimental stage with many glitches, the Mapchester online map includes the functionality that can be seen in commercial digital maps, and also features calendring tools. Not only static features such as venues and landmarks appear, but also time-based events. By scrolling across the time bar at the bottom of the screen, club nights, live music gigs, exhibition
openings and other festival happenings appear and disappear across the city.

The cumulative result is a picture of a weekend in the life of Manchester, a map of events taking place across the city, a snapshot of its musical and creative culture.

This first version is designed to be "good enough" to function as a festival city guide. Please be aware that this beta version may have some errors, and is not appropriate for all uses. People using this map do so at their own risk.