Interview with Thomas Turnbull from Green Map

One of the really nice things about open source mapping is that it's being used to make the world a better place - OSM helped out recover Haiti from under the rubble of its earthquake and non profit sites like Green Map allow communities to map their local area in a way that's useful to them.  In the interest of finding out more about one of our favourite feel good topics, open source maps, Nestoria Australia spoke to Thomas Turnbull from Green Map.

Thomas is an open source web developer living in Brooklyn, New York. A geographer by training, he worked in Scotland for a few years teaching people about composting before moving to New York to work for Green Map. Through Green Map he became passionate about open source technology and grass-roots mapmaking. He now works for Zagat, a restaurant review website, and continues to serve on the board of Green Map.

Thanks for talking to us Thomas, can you just give those who've not come across it yet a brief update on the Green Map project?

Green Map is a non-profit founded in 1995 to work with groups all over the world to map green living in their community. Green Map has worked with over 700 communities in 55 countries to map a wide range of points of interests, such as bike routes, recycling points, parks and green businesses. Mapmaking was traditionally a specialized skill. Green Map works to make it a participatory process that anyone can do.  Mapmaking is a really powerful way for people to understand their community and a surprisingly useful way to make improvements.

Can you talk about the work you do, specifically for Green Map?

While I was working at Green Map I was leading the development of their online mapping platform. Drupal has thousands of add-on modules to add more features to the website, such as mapping. On top of these modules I then did a lot of custom development to get the site working exactly as we needed so that people could easily map their neighborhood.

I now work elsewhere, but am still on the board of directors, where I mainly advise on technology as they build out a mobile website and iphone app.

At Nestoria we're big fans of everything open source, can you talk about your own interactions with the open source community?

My first real interaction with open source was in 2007 when I moved to New York to work for Green Map. They needed to build a website where all the different communities making maps could log in to access the mapmaking tools, share ideas and publicize their maps. They decided to use Drupal for this. Drupal is an open source content management system, a tool to build interactive community-driven websites. As a freelancer I had been coding my own content management systems, but suddenly I was introduced to this tool built by thousands of people all more talented than I. As I started to work with Drupal I discovered that Drupal was more than just a piece of free technology, it was also a huge community of people who were passionate about the code that they were writing, and who wanted more people to use it. In the years since then I have got deeply involved in this community, attending the monthly meetups, helping to organize local Drupal camps that are attended by over 300 people, and recently going to Copenhagen to present at DrupalCon. Drupal's new slogan really captures what it's about: "come for the code; stay for the community".

Do you know of any examples where other people have done cool things with what you've contributed to the open source community?

There are loads of fantastic Green Maps that have been made by different groups around the world using the mapping platform that I built for Green Map. Some of my favorites are Baltimore and Cape Town.

Currently there's only one I know of in Australia, in Rosehill NSW.

It's also amazing to know that I wrote a few lines of code that are being used for the White House website.

What are some of the diverse range of maps that you've made and that are appearing on the Open Green Map interface?

 Some of the Green Maps cover a wide range of points of interest, such as the Baltimore map. Others choose to focus on something very specific. There's one map of Clackmannanshire, the smallest county in Scotland, which shows all the voluntary organizations there. It blew me away to see how much was happening in such a small area.

Another of my favorites, given my background in composting and my life in New York, is the NYC Compost Map.

Do you have a wish list of things you'd like Green Map to have/ do that there just hasn't been the time or technology for yet?

The biggest limiter for Green Map has been funding. The last two years have been very tough for non profits. We have loads of ideas of new tools that we would like to build, but it is tough just to cover day to day expenses, let alone to start new projects.

What do you think about the current trend for pinning information to maps - do you think this is the 'way forward'? Especially online?

The rise of smart phones over the last few years has made location really important. If I'm looking for a place to eat this evening, I don't care if it's had 200 five star reviews if it's on the other side of town. If I'm looking for a place to recycle batteries I'm willing to go a little out of my way, but not if I can't reach it by public transport. The projects that interest me most at the moment are those
like Yelp and Foursquare that are able to combine location with time-sensitive information and user interaction.

We love finding unusual a clever mapping tools and mashups online - do you have any you can recommend?

One mapping mashup that I saw recently was a map that uses data from the Census Transportation Planning Package from 2000 in the US. It shows commuting patterns by zipcode overlaid on a Google Map.

Trulia is a US-based real estate search website. They're doing some amazing stuff with mapping. They have so much data and use it really well - for example in letting you search for property in particular neighborhoods or zipcodes. Their map that shows property price movement overlaid on a map is impressive.

Cloudmade's style editor is also amazing. It lets you customize the colors of OpenStreetMap-based maps through a really simple user interface.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add that I haven't asked you about?

There's a great tutorial on mapping with Drupal at

For people who want to learn more about Drupal in general: find your nearest meetup, or go to http://drupal.org to learn how to set it up.

Thanks for sharing with us Thomas.

Find out more about Thomas on his website or by following him on twitter.

 

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