[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Geospatial Atlas

[Barry Rowlingson]

Do you think an atlas of beautiful maps produced with open-source
technology (software and data) could be made? Here's what I was
thinking:

 * Put out a proposal for beautiful cartography, stunning maps, and
insightful visualisations done with OpenSource applications and/or
Open Data.

 * Collect map proposals as images on a flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/osgeomaps/

 * Get enough, have a community vote/expert opinion for the best 50 or so.

 * Get high-res or vector versions of the winners.

 * Get authors to write a note for the book, explaining the software,
the techniques, and the impact of their work.

 * Edit them into a glossy colour book, publish on a publish-on-demand
site (eg lulu.com).

 * Give free copies to the authors of the top ten voted maps or maybe
all the ones included (I'll pay for these unless someone wants to
sponsor it).

 * Release the PDF under an open license. Of course.

 * Profit!! [By selling copies on lulu at a small premium for OSGeo]

I don't think the production effort is very much, I just wonder if
enough people are producing maps that will look good in A4 or larger
(we're all about the web these days, right?) and if publicity can be
sustained enough to get 50 nice maps. The timeline would be set so we
have lots of glossy copies of these sitting around for sale at FOSS4G
2013.

 Good idea? Or will we just get 45 maps which are stamen.com
watercolour backgrounds with some points pasted on? There is a
perception which I think we've all heard that Open Source GIS packages
can't do cartography, but with a little help from Inkscape I've seen
some great-looking maps on posters at conferences.

 ESRI used to (still do?) produce an Arc/Info atlas (I have a vague
memory of something A3-size in our GIS research lab 20 years ago) of
maps - surely we can do something like that now. Obviously I'm
sticking my hand up to do the work for this, my concern is purely
whether we'd get enough entries. I'd like the bar to be quite high.
Most of the work is going to be done by the mappers themselves.

Shoot.

Barry

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