Nestoria Interview: Zain Memon from TenderMaps

Zain Memon has one of the best personal websites I've ever seen. 

If you can't read it clearly, his one line of text reads: is a 23-year-old coder and entrepreneur from San Francisco, CA. 

Armed with little more than that information – and the knowledge that he was one of the people behind a mapping project called TenderMaps, I decided that he would be worth questioning for the blog.  The two other pieces of information I had about him at that stage were that he was/ is part of Y-Combinator project Movity - which is a site that helps you decide where to live based on the finer details of what the location you're considering is like - and that on LinkedIn his job title is listed as Director of Corporate Espionage at Trulia.  (Trulia purchased Movity, so that may be another small clue.). 

There's also a small photo of him there:

Here's our exchange:

I came across you because of your involvement with a project called TenderMaps, can you give us an introduction to the project and explain your part in it? Thanks.

Places look very different in our minds than in the maps we carry in our pocket. Anyone who has ever scribbled a map on the back of a napkin can attest that places are defined not by their streets and highways, but by the way people move through it. We want to take those napkin maps and combine them to see a map of a neighborhood as defined by the people in it.

So, we hit the streets with the most accessible data collection method we could think of: paper maps and markers. We asked people about their neighborhood -- the Tenderloin in San Francisco -- and their hand-drawn responses are what you see.

I did the back-end work of taking paper maps and converting them into transparent tiles with scribbles on them. Sha Hwang, who did the front-end work, took those scribble tiles and put them on the slippy map.

Can you also explain the technology behind getting the hand drawn maps off the page and into the system?

Our paper maps are printed in grayscale, and the markers are colored. Each of the paper maps has a small QR code with the location coordinates of the map (generated from Stamen's Walking Papers). We scan each paper map into an image and programmatically "lift" the drawings off it, and then place those drawings onto a our web map in the locations we got from the QR code.

Do you think this sort of low tech version of Open Street Map has legs or would it only work for small communities?  I think it's really interesting that it's sort of doing almost the opposite of what projects like Map Kibera are doing in less developed communities.

Imagine how beautiful TenderMaps would look for an entire city. I think the goal is definitely a little different than projects like Map Kibera; rather than focusing on what the cartography looks like, we're trying to think more about how people see it.

Did you ask the 'sharpie jockeys' questions about themselves as well to get at more of the ethnography of the maps?  And if so were there plans to incorporate this into the filters?  'Cause that struck me as one of the most interesting things about this project - that it allowed social and geo to come together in a more personal way.  

Yeah, you can see more information about each sharpie jockey as you drag the slider at the top. Filtering by their self-reported details is actually a really good idea -- for example, see which streets are heavy on those grandmas looking for a deal.

Here's one of the hand drawn maps from the project.

Following on from that question did you have grand ideas about what this project could lead on to?

We've gotten a lot of really interesting feedback on how to tease useful trends out of this data. For example, you could see the paths that most people take home at night, to avoid finding yourself on a dark empty street when walking home from a bar. I also mentioned above that it would be cool to grow this into a hand-drawn map of a large metro area.

Can you talk us though your background in mapping and geo?
What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of traditional cartography and the web?  And do you have any views on what sort of innovations could happen in the future of the geospatial space?

Sha has coined the term "NoGIS" to describe the work of mapping technologists like myself who don't have a traditional GIS background (as a nod to the NoSQL movement away from traditional databases). Software like Mapnik and Polymaps have done so much to make it easy for even inexperienced developers to make large GIS applications without the steep learning curve of ArcGIS and CAD software. That's the direction I see our field moving towards: map technology built explicitly for the web, rather than traditional mapping concepts ported to the web.

Did you discover any similar/ or other interesting mapping projects while you were in the process of creating TenderMaps?

I got to try ModestMaps for the first time while creating TenderMaps, and I'm surprised at how versatile it is. I use it pretty much every day now. TileStache is another toolkit that changed the way I approach GIS projects. And of course, none of TenderMaps would be possible without Walking Papers.

I have to ask - your job title on LinkedIn?  What's the story with that?  

If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

(Well, fair's fair.)

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far into the blue sky.)

My one wish right now is better SVG/Canvas support in IE. It's coming in IE9, but that still means half of our visitors can't see most of the awesome stuff we're doing for at least a couple of years. I would be positively giddy if someone wrote a tool that somehow transparently added SVG/Canvas support to IE, maybe using a Flash layer or something.

Thanks Zain.  I'm sure you're a mystery man to watch.

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