Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay’s personal blog

As part of the Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities, we are organising a one day seminar titled ‘Mapping for Sustainable Communities - An interactive day of reports and discussion for community practitioners, academics and community groups‘.

This event is scheduled for 17th June 2008, starting at 10.30 and finishing with a reception around 7.00 in the evening. It is free and open to anyone with interest in community mapping.

This is how we describe the event:

The seminar will consider recent work and ways forward. It is being organised by University College London and the London 21 network as part of their ‘Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities’ project funded under the UrbanBuzz programme and their Environmental Justice programme. These projects use internet-based and paper mapping along with other tools to work with communities on collecting and collating local information.

The seminar will bring together academics, practitioners and community groups to discuss the use of mapping as a means of engagement and tool for collaborative action, and to consider the benefits and limitations. The seminar includes sessions for academics and practitioners and a celebration of community work.

Outline Agenda
10.30 am “Academic” Session - Theory & Research

• The use of different methodologies in participatory mapping
• Mapping, impacts and inequalities
• Panel discussion: the balance between participation and the use of technology

2pm “Practitioners” Session - The Practice of participatory mapping

• The use of mapping with local communities
• Mapping, empowerment and Community Development
• Local Government, Regeneration and the use of community mapping
• Practical workshop: starting a participatory mapping project

4.30pm “Community” Showcase - work in progress

• A brief introduction to the development of the two projects, followed by presentations about the five case studies.

6pm Reception

Now, just because a session is tagged as academic, practitioners or community, it doesn’t mean that we want just one group - the whole point is to have people from different groups joining the discussion throughout the day. The titles are about the ‘hats’ that you put on during a session!

The conference is free but numbers are limited. Register on-line at http://www.communitymaps.london21.org/includes/mcsc_conference.php

This week, we have released the ‘Suburban Town Centres Profiler’. The application can be accessed from the Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres website, and was originally developed to support hypotheses development within the project’s team. It’s been quite a while that we’ve been working on the range of maps and information the profiler is based on, practically since last summer.

All the details about the profiler are on its website, but an interesting point that underpins it is that, in some cases, it is worth sacrificing the interactivity of the map itself to allow users to concentrate on the information. In HCI terminology, the main task is not about interaction with the map but with the information and its meaning, so providing interactive maps will actually reduce the usability of the application!

The maps on the profiler do not support zoom in, zoom out or panning. However, they are not meant to be interactive by themselves. The idea behind the application is to allow systematic and consistent comparison of many layers of geographic information across a range of 26 town centres in London’s suburbs. To achieve this task, the interface allows us to switch between themes and explore various datasets quickly, and, by ‘locking’ the map itself, we can ensure that we are looking at each Town Centre at the same scale and to the same extent. I’m sure that there are other cases where such an approach is the correct one – not all interactions are necessarily helpful to the user’s task…

MySociety’s FixMySteet is somewhat similar – it is holding the scale constant while allowing Panning.