We have 465 markers on the map. Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay are very interested in joining, which will be great but we have to prepare in terms of scaling. Since we are a grassroots project that is not money-generating, we are trying to use free tools available out there for our map. One thing Nick experimented with was combining markers in clusters. Let us know if you can suggest anything else to deal with scalability issues, please contact Nick.
Norway’s team finished both Video and pdf Tutorials for olpcMAP and both are brilliant! Thank you, team, for your work and creativity! I adore Example project marker with koala picture! To be posted soon.
Adam is organizing Haitian event on Tuesday this week, if you are in Boston area on that day and willing to attend please contact Adam.
We are trying to finalize the look of our news page. It is high priority as we all want to know what initiatives are happening in different parts of the world. We could be following netvibes format, crowdmap format or creating our own format by separating the page into functional sections:
1. Updates from mapmakers… Here we would mention new feature as soon as they arrive, and other updates, examples: olpcMAP Tutorial is finished and where to find it…or how many new videos were uploaded from SF OLPC Summit, or link to poll “What front page should look like?”
2. Meet-up. Upcoming meetings/conferences/ideas. This section could accept posts from all markers. We can list all OLPC related events happening in the world, step by step, line by line. Here will be all upcoming sessions, meetings, conference calls (including Sunday calls) for all groups, no matter what region. Then people can join whatever event they like, also invite others to their meeting (just like Meetup). It could possibly be like Craigslist: post an idea and people will follow-up (off-map for now) with those who posted.
3. Autofeed to new markers activity from Google maps, so that people know who is new and who is active.
4. Blogs or links to blogs.
5. New jobs and internships (anyone can post here).
6. Featured marker or beauty contest winner of the week (with short explanation why).
7. Trivia question of the week or just a hard question 
8. Autofeeds about OLPC and the map from other media, like olpcnews, youropenbook.org, twitter, etc.
For now, you can install Google Translate and it will translate the page to your language if it is not English, maybe we can come up with something even better in the future.
To implement postings we could have a form to fill out so that anyone can leave notes for every section and it will link to their markers(via bookmarks) or email. This makes easy for Alex to grab bits of news from here and create tweets… This page will be the heartbeat of our map.
Please, let us know what you think by writing to the team at beautify@olpcMAP.net.
