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FISOL, Tapachula / OpenStreetMap

I was invited to participate at Festival Internacional de Software Libre (FISOL), in Tapchula, Chiapas. The other invited speakers were Sandino Flores (tigrux), Alexandro Colorado (jza), Eric Herrera (crac), John Hall (maddog) and Fernando Romo (pop), all well-known due to very different contributions to the Free Software movement in Mexico and abroad. Several other people also presented tutorials, but I was not involved in that part, and mentioning one while not the rest would be unfair. The conference was quite massive - Tapachula is a medium-sized city (~200,000 people) in Mexico’s Southernmost point - Sadly, due to its geographical location, it is mainly famous for being the region where illegal immigrants from Central America enter Mexico towards the USA, and it is a known spot for all kind of abuses, both from the authorities and from gangs of thieves. This is the third time I come to this conference. The first two years (2005, 2006) it was organized by the local CUCS university and it was reasonably large, but this year it counted also with many other universities in the region. Attendance was… HUGE. We were told around 1600 students were registered to participate, and I expect at least 1000 to have actually been there. Very amazing and encouraging! It is, by far, a base-level conference - Most attendees had had no previous contact with Free Software at all, or had at most toyed around with a distro for some hours. Some people, of course, are already working and involved, on various different degrees. All in all, quite encouraging. But not only I had fun (and got extremely tired!) at the conference, or at the beer sessions afterwards. I also got to push some more publicity (and work, of course!) towards my new favorite pet project: OpenStreetMap. As many other Debianers, I joined the fever last August, during Debconf. So far, I have been quite busy tracing and mapping; I am quite fortunate to get the OSM addiction while living on the edge of the well-mapped area of Mexico City. So far, I have mostly worked on the Ciudad Universitaria and Coyoacán areas, where some sensible improvement can be felt. Lots yet to do, for sure, but I’m making progress. Still, mapping Coyoacán sometimes feels a bit futile. Why? Because all of my cycling/tracing/mapping sessions look almost like a little blip on the overall state of my city, which is way better than what I expected - Most of the central city is done (although lots of work is still pending on the very large outskirts - but getting there can be a trip just by itself!)… But this time, I had the opportunity to do something new, something better and sensible. And, yes, it feels very good. How does the map of Tapachula look for just a weekend of mapping activity? And, yes, I only went out once (morning running) expressely to get some new traces, the rest of it was while being transported by car to the conference-related activities. And I didn’t even have to say once “lets go by a different route”! ;-) Just for comparison: Last week, Tapachula’s state was quite similar to what they have today on Google Maps - Just the major highways in the area. Besides, if you look at the satellite map for Tapachula, I estimate I managed to map around between a fifth and a tenth of the city’s surface. So, have you got a GPS? Do you enjoy going out on the street, be it walking, running, cycling on driving? Or even if you don’t enjoy it, are you sometimes forced into it? Start contributing to OpenStreetMap now!

Comments

Bucio 2008-09-25 13:04:41

:) yep, u talk is good :),

:) yep, u talk is good :), thank for visit tapachula ;),I hope u come in the next event, in march.


Samsagaz 2008-10-13 23:50:24

Apoyo eso….

Yo también pienso que sería bueno tenerte de vuelta aquí en Tapachula. Como debianita en crecimiento, me agradaría aprender de un desarrollador del proyecto Debian directamente, aunque claro… sin acaparar XD.

Saludos.

PD. Espero que el relajo que armaron en el teatro los concurrentes no los espante de venir de nuevo.