Maptime is an exciting new initiative with the mission of “opening the doors of cartographic possibility to anyone interested, by creating a time and space for collaborative learning, exploration, and map creation using mapping tools and technologies”.

Maptime chapters are starting to pop up all across the globe by folks who are interested in sharing their work and learning about what other local mappers are up to.

Following this year’s FOSS4G-NA Conference in San Francisco, Katy Decorah, from Mapbox, and I realized we were neighbors, both living in New York’s Capital Region and working remotely for geospatial technology companies. We got together to establish the Maptime Albany chapter and had our first meetup on April 21st.

What’s mappening in the Capital District?

Our first meetup was held at the University at Albany and turnout was decent on fairly short notice. After some brief introductions, several of us gave short presentations on some of the projects we’ve been working on.

• Katy summarized What is Maptime? and showed off her awesome Static Map Maker project.
• Alex Muro from the Albany Visualization And Informatics Lab (AVAIL) demoed some of their cool projects, including GTFS Analyst and the GeoGTFS API.
• I gave an introductory presentation on Fulcrum and did a quick demo showing how to build a form, collect records, and integrate with the Slack communication platform.
• I also spoke a little about my BootLeaf map template as a starting point for simple web mapping projects.
• OSM master Richard Welty spoke about the Open Historical Map and his Ghost Tracks Project.
• Paul Hein from JIMAPCO showed off some of their latest interactive Chamber and Tourism Maps.

Join a Maptime Chapter or start one in your city!

You can learn more by visiting maptime.io or following @maptimehq on Twitter. Take a look at the Maptime Chapter Map to join your local chapter or Setup a local chapter to join the Maptime community!

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