The OSP’s have gathered around their respective working tables in Brussels and Barcelona, to prepare Software History Mapping Night, tonight from 20:30 – 22:00 (GMT+1).

For this occasion, Nicolas has created a rudimentary, quick, lo-tech collaborative mapping tool:
http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map
http://www.ospublish.constantvzw.org/map/sandbox (crazy layers!)*

In a SVG compliant browser (Firefox works but Opera is more stable), this tool displays the SVG files that have been uploaded to ospublish.constantvzw.org/map/svg. It does this in order of upload, and allows you to navigate layer by layer!

We are drawing our map layers in Inkscape on A3 size, landscape (which is interpreted as 1488.19 x 1052.36 pixels for some reason).
If you want to add a layer yourself, be sure to not flow text in a box (will result in a black rectangle). Select text>unflow in Inkscape. You’ll also need to use webfonts (times, arial, georgia, verdana, courier etc.)

To add files: upload them to map/svg (or to test use: map/sandbox/svg). Use this ftp info:

server: ospublish.constantvzw.org
username: ospublish_map
login: softhistmap

(The ftp access has now been disabled; if you want to contribute: e-mail us!)

For a webcam view on our working table, view:
http://www.giss.tv:8000/history.ogg
Sorry, there is no sound.

If you need help or want to stop by to say hello, we’re all here:
irc://freenode/softwarehistory

OSP is looking forward to your layers!

*More about what, how and why in this post.