It was two fantastic days of hacking, discovering, sharing and generally having fun. OSM HackWeekend opened a lot of doors in the process of learning new things, sharing new ideas, building new tools, hacking on amazing stuff. It was the first time Mapbox BLR played host to two days of hacking, working on tools that build and escalate OpenStreetMap and the results were anything but ordinary.

Hack weekend (2 & 3 of July) served as a platform for meeting a lot of new and interesting people and the turn out we had for the event was equally diverse and intriguing. We had twenty one people attend the event from different places across India and it was fascinating to hear what their interests are and why they thought OpenStreetMap HackWeekend would broaden their perspective and give a new edge to their work profiles.

Day 1:

• Day one of Hackweekend started with Arun (PlaneMad) taking the participants to the world of opensource mapping with a session on OpenStreetMap. Many participants were new to mapping on OpenStreetMap and this introductory session was the icebreaker and a conversation starter. With people slowly getting the idea of open-source mapping and how it came into being with OpenStreetMap beginning its reign, the focus slowly turned to the tools that maintain and perfect OpenStreetMap. Kushan took charge of explaining the goals of the HackWeekend and what we planned on accomplishing over the weekend and thus, the hacking —————- began!

  

Day 2:

• Day two, even though it had lesser turnout than day 1, was no less fruitful. Everyone continued to work on the projects they started the previous day and by the end of the day we had a solid progress on the tasks initialized. Here’s the hackpad of the ideas that everyone worked on, and to summarise what everyone worked on:
• Manoj, Maning, Jinal and I worked on localising iD editor by translating instructions to Malayalam, Tagalog, Gujarati and Kannada respectively.
• OpenStreetMap main website has had some translation to Malayalam by Manoj and also, he worked on visualising 3D buildings.
• Ram Gopal (VoidSpace) worked on Open GTFS: a way to generate GTFS feeds for anywhere in the world.
• Prashant and team worked on using GL JS to visualise population and literacy rate in India.
• Asif and team worked on creating an app using android SDK that tracked the location of a transport and estimate the amount of time it would take to reach the next stop or station.
• Ravigopal did a Jekyll and css re-organisation of the OSM India website.

Amidst all the hacks and so much information to process, we didn’t realise it was time to conclude the event. With a brief session of discussing what everyone worked on and what were their learnings from two days of hacking, we wrapped up the OpenStreetMap HackWeekend. Eagerly looking forward to more hacking and more fun!

Cheers!