So it is a double birthday today!
Today is Mappery’s fifth birthday, it’s wonderful and a bit surprising that the thing that Ken and I started when we were on Safari together has lasted this long.
In 5 years we have published 1,250 articles which included almost 2,000 pictures. We started publishing 3 posts per week and worried that we might run out of content, now we are running at a post per day and have a healthy backlog thanks to our regular and occasional contributors (too many to name all of you). I couldn’t have kept this project running on my own and after Ken reduced his involvement I have been brilliantly supported by Arnaud and more recently Dan, they both bring new ideas, energy and in Arnaud’s case technical wizardry to keep the thing ticking.
Today’s first image is the FOSS4G:UK t-shirt, beautifully modelled by yours truly, FOSS4G:UK is tomorrow September 7th at 8 locations around the country, you can still register here. I got a bit of grief from my carto pals about the logo but I think it is rather cool, here is a larger version for you to critique
On the front of the t-shirt is the FOSS4G ribbon which has been used by every FOSS4G since the beginning, this time Barry took the flags of England, Scotland, Wales ands Ireland and threaded a glimpse of each into the ribbon.
So you may be asking why did I choose that as my birthday post? Well, 10 years ago I had the honour of chairing the global FOSS4G 2013 conference with over 800 delegates at Nottingham. Although FOSS4G was the biggest map event in the UK in September 2013, there were two other map events within a week of FOSS4G – AGI’s GeoCommunity (also in Nottingham) and OSM’s State of the Map (Birmingham). Someone came up with the idea of calling the group of events Maptember and Barry Rowlingson designed this t-shirt which was sold at the three events to raise funds for MapAction.
So there is the second birthday, 10 years of open source geo and open geodata activism for me and a lot of others in our UK community.
Let’s drink a toast to the next 5 years of Maps in the Wild and the success of Open Geo stuff in the UK. Cheers and thanks for your support and contributions.
