Hello friends! I'm Jamie Gray, I live in Brooklyn, New York by way of Dallas, Texas. I'm a Product Designer / UX Designer, here's my portfolio. I hope to contribute to the OpenStreetMap community develop map-based products that are ultimately able to help people improve our understanding of the world, so we can change it for the better.
Indoor Mapping, for indoor navigation, improving accuracy of business listings, optimizing flow (throughput) of pedestrians through complex urban terrains
Wish list:
Editing: easier tools for editing indoor map data, take some UX/UI inspiration from floor planning apps and websites
3D Wireframe view: to peek inside of buildings, like an x-ray view (shown below)
Wire-frame view, to be able to see inside / through buildings
x-ray 3D wire-frameCamera viewport settings, adjust angle of view (see also: field of view, projection) (gif)Adjusting the focal length which results in angular distortion. Side by side comparison of wide angle vs telephoto camera angle of view settings
An editor with 3D visualization and editing tools.
Sunlight studies, realistic shadow rendering, reflections on skyscrapers, etc.
Script to generate 3D snapshots cities to put on Wikipedia for every city (using Wikidata)
would help identify cities which cities lack 3D OSM data, and would get more contributors from Wikipedia
Build a partnership with Google to license their 3D imagery
Circumvent Google by building our own publicly licensed 3D imagery
Contract vendors to gather 3D data to be hosted on OSM
Zooming out all the way should show a spherical earth instead of a flat projection.
Urban planning should be collaborative process, where development is determined by community needs. If there was a temporal dimension to OSM, we could not only accommodate historical maps, but also future maps, in the form of proposals. Specifically, grassroots, non-approved, community-led proposals. As opposed to the top-down proposals given to communities by the profiteers and gentrifiers who seek only to raise rents and profitability, which often leads to displacement and discontent in the community.
ability to submit a proposal to be voted on by the community
vote and comment on proposals from the community, architectural firms, planning bodies, etc.
existing map contributions are aimed at improving the "as-built" dimension, OSM does not yet support "future plans" mapping.
Proposals can be placed in a time-series at "sometime in the future"
figure out which aspects of placemaking could be modeled in OSM
Policy Idea: Rooftop Productivity Index (blog post)
General Systems Modeling
Theoretically, all complex systems (environmental, economic, social, political) could be modeled and attached to geographical attributes on the map. This would allow users to contextualize themselves within those systems.
Building Information Modeling (BIM)
Wiki - The generation and management of digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of places.
According to the Good regulator theorem, we must build a 1:1 model of the economy if we can begin to attempt to control it. (democratic control, of course)
System models are typically visualized as flow charts, diagrams, with states and logical pathways. Some useful concepts are explained by Graph Theory and Network Theory.
All that's required is to map entities/nodes onto physical geography, and build the proper visualizations and interactions. (eg. systems collapse as you zoom out, etc)
Potential Data Sources for System Modeling
Public records (financials, tax documents) are useful for mapping organizational structures, they indicate the flow of information and materials within an organization. Therefore, record compliance could be a primary target goal; for each entity, institution, workplace, how many records do we have access to?
FOIA requests apply to US Government institutions, muckrock is a popular example. This would be broader than FOIA, it'd encompass non-governmental organizations as well.
Social Impact
I'd love to find ways to use mapping technology to have social impact such as poverty alleviation or disaster response.
OSM has, as far as I can tell, two temporal dimensions:
Changes to the real world over time
Updates to the map over time (the map approaching the real world)
Both of these dimensions should be exportable and viewable as timelapses.
Head Hunting - Talent
We should try to find skilled workers who work in the proprietary mapping industry to encourage them to contribute some of their time to various OpenStreetMap projects.
Is this legal? All of this data is publicly accessible through LinkedIn so I don't think I'm breaking any laws or anything.
We can also look for talent on freelancing sites such as Fiverr and UpWork.
Feature Requests:
Just some feature requests for various components in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. I need to find ways to introduce these ideas into the correct channels for tracking such requests.
Smooth scrolling: The map jerks at zoom intervals. I wish it was smooth like Mapbox or Google Maps.
Allow users to zoom in farther to view more details.
Thinking sidewalk granularity, for "placemaking" studies
meta: how to send feedback?
meta: a collaborative usersnap interface for sending feedback
UI Component Documentation
All UI components could link back to the wiki, which would allow us to see the github repos, make and submit code changes, and create issues and suggestions.
I propose we create crowdfunded bounties for bug fixes, as well as new feature development. This could be modeled after Monero's Community Crowdfunding Service (CCS) (link)
