Maptime

Maptime: Open Mic Night

It’s an Open Mic Night. We’re going unrehearsed, off-the-cuff, unplugged. However you wanna say it: Tonight, the stage is ours!

… and by stage I mean projector :)

It’s a very unstructured Maptime and we’re here to fulfill your mappiest-heart’s desires. We wanna see what you’ve been working on. What makes you click? What did you learn this week? What did you get stuck on? What’s on your Round-To-It list? What blew your mind? Does someone in this room know something you’re itching to understand? Let’s find out.

We think it’s about time to take that back-burner project off of simmer. So tonight is the night to show off some of your skills, ask a buddy to show off theirs, or make a friend with the same jams. We’ll have a bucket of topics/questions to contribute to/answer from, two screens available, and pizza for the masses. Feel free to bring a bottle of wine or beer :)

Pizza arrives @ 6pm. Lock-up @ 9pm.

See you there!

Join us: Wednesday, Oct 12 2016

A Brief Introduction to Geographic Data Formats & A Crash Course in Carto...(DB)

Whew! What a title. We missed you in August, so we’re brining you a two-fer September! Bring a machine if you’ve got it - we’ll be making a map or two.

We’ll start with a basic overview of a few data formats you might’ve heard buzzing around (shapefile, kml, wfs, geojson, geotiff). If you’ve got favorite tricks or tools for file transformations now’s your time to shine.

This overview will be followed by a surprisingly productive crash course on visualizing and styling geographic data using Carto.com lead by Emily Ashley. If we’re lucky and you’re down, we may even get to touch on using SQL (structured query language) in-browser to filter and analyze spatial data in Carto. How cool is that? So please bring a laptop if you’d like to follow along (recommended!) We’ll have example data sets to work with, but feel free to bring any that are of interest to you and we can probably make it work :)

Schedule:

Pizza and geo-gossip* @ 6pm

Discussion & tutorial @ 7pm

(Lock-up @ 9pm)

*geo-gossip is maptimeNOLA’s version of show & tell + lightning talks. The floor & projector are open for the first hour of the meetup to share interesting projects, struggles, blogs, news, or mappy stuff you recently learned you think we’d like to learn, too.

If you have any links you’d like to share with us before you forget send them to maptimenola@gmail.com or tweet them at @maptimenola (or remember them).

Join us: Wednesday, Sep 14 2016

Raster Fun and MaptimeNOLA Turns One!

Can you believe it’s been a year, already?

Join us Wednesday for #maptime as Chris Sliwinski leads a discussion on using rasters to perform spatial analysis. Over the past year, we’ve covered a lot about vector data (geometries like points, lines, polygons) but what if we want to display area information that cannot easily be divided into vector features? Well, we (and plenty of mappers before us) have got ya covered.

A raster, in it’s simplest form, consists of a matrix of cells or pixels organized into a grid each containing a value that represents the conditions for the area covered by that cell - like digital aerial photographs, imagery from satellites, digital pictures, or even scanned maps. They’re super cool and useful. We’ll check out some terrain data and fingers crossed perhaps Chris will lead us in a live demo using rasters for spatial analysis in flood studies. I’m excited to see what he’s got to share!

After the presentation, we’ll take a moment to eat cake, check out our year-in-review, and chat about what you’d like to hear and share with maptimeNOLA over the next year.

Schedule:

Pizza and geo-gossip @ 6pm

Discussion & tutorial @ 7pm

(Lock-up @ 9pm)

Did I mention there will be cake?

Join us: Wednesday, Jul 13 2016

Maptime: A Closer Look at the Coast

Please mind the location re-shift - we are returning to LaunchPad!

Maptime is happy to welcome Ezra Boyd from Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation and Scott Eustis from the Gulf Restoration Network. We’ll be hearing about the Multiple Lines of Defense and the Coastal Master Plan (which is a set of geospatial computational models to evaluate restoration and flood protection projects) and other exciting projects from both the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation and Gulf Restoration Network. Join in as we learn more about how we can protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf Region.

As always, during geo-gossip we’ll continue our show & tell of interesting projects, news, and resources. If you have any links you’d like to share send them to maptimenola gmail or tweet them at @maptimenola (or remember them).

Schedule:

Pizza and geo-gossip @ 6pm

Discussion & tutorial @ 7pm

(Lock-up @ 9pm)

Join us: Wednesday, Jun 08 2016

Maptime: Making Sense of the RTAs Data

Hi all. It’s that time again: Maptime! This month we’ll be taking a look at the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA)’s data. Benjamin Eckel has been doing a bit of work with the geo-data and will be sharing tips and tricks on what he’s learned. He’ll lead a discussion on how to get access to the data (which is harder than you’d think) and how to use & understand the underlying data.

As always, during geo-gossip we’ll continue our show & tell of interesting projects, news, and resources. If you have any links you’d like to share send them to maptimenola@gmail.com or tweet them at @maptimenola (or remember them).

Schedule:

Pizza and geo-gossip @ 6pm

Discussion @ 7pm

(Lock-up @ 9pm)

PSA: There will be a general discussion on ways MaptimeNOLA members can participate in the National Day of Civic Hacking on June 4th so stick around if you’re interested!

Join us: Wednesday, May 11 2016