I’ve always love maps, way before we have readily acce to them in the palm of our hands. I remember going to the Instituto Geografico Nacional (http://www.ign.gob.ar/) with my friend when when planning to go to Patagonia and Cordoba in our summer and winter vacations. It was a mix of discovery and learning how to read maps and find your way.
My name is Silvio Casagrande and my passion for mapping found a new way when I figured in 2008 that you can help others: moving from Argentina to Timor-Leste, a country recovering from a long lasting war, I realized how I could help others with my passion for maps and my IT skills. I started using Google Map Maker in my work there, mapping and documenting the existing government fiber optic network, also I started mapping and documenting small villages, their streets and markets, roads, emergency rooms… helping others to find their way and find places and people. The tasks became social when with my buddy divers we started mapping the diving spots of Timor-Leste, a work that still has e-presence: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Diving_in_East_Timor or https://wikitravel.org/en/Dive_Sites_of_Timor-Leste.
With our family wet raveled the South East Asia and Australia and New Zealand and then again we moved to Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean north of Libya: my wife getting her second UN assignment after Timor-Leste now in Libya. Our 2 daughters and ourselves needed of course a continuous review and update of our bearings!
From Map Maker via Google Earth to Google Maps, learning how to map the world!
At the beginning a laborious task now it is easy to continuously improve layer upon layer on top of Google Maps: your photos, reviews, add new places, comment on them, add little facts. Taking care of reviewing them and being precise: others will use your information!
What do I like to map?
I like to map the places I know, the places I visit. I like mostly to take an always nouvelle view: capture a new detail of a place I know pretty well. Or you think you knew pretty well. However visiting the same place with a different light, aware of new things, shadows, this is how I like to look around: on my daily commuting to my job, when going to drop/pick my daughters from school. When visiting the shop again, and figuring discovering that something change.
This is the approach I call “look this place again and again through-fully, because tomorrow for sure I’ll be in a different place”. The daily routine sleeps your senses, and you put your mind in automatic, without realizing that a new shop, different people, a building has been renovated, the scenery around you is alive and continuously evolving.
When is Timor-Leste I used to dive the same places again and again, and some of my friends asked me “do you not get bored of diving in the same place?” Interesting question, and I realized that I loved to go to the same place again and again. Those underwater small places where every dive different: different the light, different the season, different the currents: the coral and the animal life was evolving and living around you every minute every second… Also I learnt to see the patterns: things that look the same, however change, though not random: there is a logic underneath that governs how things around you are changing.
So far I was always looking and helping others to find new places, pointing to new things, or updating facts. The detailed, precise facts are still my main concern: how do we know data is accurate? how do we know that the fact is right? The effort of millions of Google mappers is a bottom up approach: I like that approach, whoever who edits, who monitors, how this could be possible so others more billions can trust the facts in the different layers? The advantage of today technology when I compare 30 years back to what I have available for a trip is amazing! It is much more easier to share and contribute, however the downsize is the potential abuse… I will ask myself why, however I can think that many will have different ideas of about what’s for the common good cause.
What are the minimum rules that should be reasonable for everybody to comply? Are really different world views that should be respected and allowed in one platform? If only one common view is the “good one”, does it means there is an objective to impose into others one view?
I do not think that, I think that a common understanding is possible: and building on top of that common understanding different readings are possible. This is like languages: it should be some common mechanism for human beings to talk and speak, and write and read, however there are so many languages using the same framework! A common system is not the recipe for one standardize view!