Weary Mappers

If you want to be a Mapper,
Just come along with us,
By the bright shining light,
By the light of the moon;
If you want to be a Mapper,
Just come along with us,
By the bright shining light of the moon.
{With apologies to Professor Julian Olson )

Weary Mappers are on tonight ...
Where:  Weary Traveler Free House
When:  about 5:30
come hear an in-person post-Weary Mapper Canoe Trip VI re-cap.
We had singing, late-night-light-up frisbee on a sandbar, close-ups of bald eagles and sandhill cranes and an all-around good time on the Wisconsin River!

In the meantime, I've got a lot of writing to catch up on in the next few months and need to clear my head of some of the map chatter before I focus on a few key topics.

To that end, here's a bit of the old-style Mapper e-mails for your Tuesday enjoyment:

I'm in the midst of writing for the WLIA newsletter/website and have had a chance to ponder a few more philosophical vantage points on collaborative progress in the field including What Does It Mean to Be a GIS 'Champion'? and Do the “Hot Topics” in Geospatial Unite or Divide Us? I'd be interested in your thoughts.

It's August already and there's plenty of app development work to get done before the Fall Outreach season gets in full swing.... of particular note is the 2011 FOSS4G conference - Sept 12-16 in Denver - back in the US after 5 years!  We had a thread on the wearymappers site with some interest earlier this year.  I've recently gotten permission to attend and would be interested in knowing who else from Wisconsin may go for potential room-sharing etc.  And here's FOSS4G's own Top 10 List on why YOU should attend.

On the topic of international, last week we saw that the UN Economic and Social Council has set up a specific committee on global geospatial information indicating it's time to get serious about taking advantage of geospatial for international issues.

But we all know that any international or smaller scale integration should feed from best available source information for which Municipalities are really the growth sector in transitioning from a traditional facilities/engineering approach to incorporating enterprise geospatial for wider application of the city's information.
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While Leica just released their Cyclone software for better management of point-cloud data, I'm as interested in what collaborative groups are doing with remotely-sensed information particularly as our sensors become more local and high-res - take for example the Public Laboratory.
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On the programming beat, we (various mappers) have been making quite a bit of use of the Jquery library in apps lately... for which the gmap3 Jquery plugin for Google Maps may be of interest to some of you...
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On the commercial data side, we've all heard and followed the growing collections of Google and Bing (Microsoft) as well as ESRI Community Maps etc. not to mention the sub-providers like NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas but where will players like WeoGeo and Nokia Maps fall into the mix as we see movement toward capturing part of the base map market on mobile devices.
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So much more going on... but I'll save some for next week.

Parting shots -
Thanks to Jamon for pointing out the Rorschmap
You know geospatial is getting more mainstream when we see celebrities' names attached to spatial initiatives - right ; ? )
I've yet to understand the true utility but there's always room for another 2-D/3-D hot spot viewer that knows Jack eh?
And finally, whether you're from the open source world or just an GISer who likes to Google answers, we like folks who share their experience.  So I was pleased to see this article by the News app team from the Chicago Tribune on their experience with Making Maps - particularly high-speed tile rendering and deployment.

My dear friends.
Are you weary?