Flutterby™! : The Map Room

Presentation at tonight's closing party was on the St Louis Map Room. Seems like the basic setup is to lay out a big piece of canvas, project a base layer on the canvas (this can vary: roads are obvious, but schools, parks, hydrology, depending on the audience), give people a prompt and a key with a pack of colored markers, and let them go...

Tonight's prompt was "the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) geographic community", the key had 3 colors, past, present and future. The basemap was a rough outline of North America. It was fun.

Other possible keys and prompts that were described were, for school kids, "places that make you scared, or happy". Family. Tired.

Apparently in the original there was then the option to let people create their maps, and then overlay other data on it and see what sort of aha moments resulted.

But I totally want to bring this back to my community. I'm thinking with bring something like this to Rivertown Revival or some other large community gathering. Maybe two, a North America or world map with prompts about how people relate Petaluma to the world (where have you been, where did your family come from), and one of Sonoma County with prompts about fun or exciting or what-have-you.

Needs a little brainstorming, but I think this could be an amazing project.

• Jer Thorp — In the Map Room
• St Louis Public Radio: Redrawing boundaries — real and imagined — with digital artist Jer Thorp at the St. Louis Map Room

Also, a picture from tonight's event, in-progress. So much interesting about how this map progressed: That identification was airport codes. Some houses, birth places, many gatherings. Some geographic features. Some interesting quibbling about locations and projections. Eventually some non-US-anians started drawing the Mexico wall in purple for "future"...

https://www.flutterby.net/Image:2018-05-17MapRoom.jpg

Even more at https://twitter.com/stlmaproom