Great News from Indonesia!
We are so pleased that the work of Jakarta Mapmaker Marco Kusumawijaya and colleagues in using post-tsunami community participatory restoration techniques has been received an important award – Dubai International Award for Best Practices 2008!

Marco has written the project description below. One year after the tsunami, on December 26, 2005, the Banda Aceh Green Map was published (linked at the bottom), and their rebuilding work continued. Involved in Green Mapmaking since 2001, he and his colleagues across the country have published a great diversity of maps, websites and related resources that celebrate biodiversity, green living, the rich cultural heritage and disaster prevention as seen at GreenMap.or.id. If you would like to help the Indonesian Green Map Hub (see the impressive map they have linked to their website's upper right), please contact Elanto Wijoyono at joeyakarta [a] greenmap [.] or[.] id- or contact us to help you contribute to their work! In this photo, Marco is plaid in front, and co-chair Elanto is in white, find some history here, too. read more »

For me, Green Map's Director, this fall's highlights included traveling to South Korea to be part of the Seoul Design Olympiad.

This 21 day kick off event leads up to Seoul being designated as 2010's World Design Capitol, attended by 2 million people. Mayor Oh has embraced the concept of 'design is Air' and these exciting keywords: Sustainable, Convergent, Experiential, Participatory and Connecting, expressed in a conference, exhibition, competition and festival. Held in the Olympic Stadium, transformed by 3600 citizens into a gigantic recycled plastic sculpture. read more »

Hello mapmakers from the entire world!

I want to share with you, our progress about green map in Colombia, first of all, Joe Gerlach, who is a student from Oxford University; he has ready his reporting about the research on the processes of green maps made in Colombia. And I would like to share this information with all the people that are interesting in know more about the green maps in Colombia. There is a video in YouTube, which can give you an idea about Pereira Colombia and all the people who is involved in the process:

The Open Green Map is our participatory mapmaking tool, now in preview phase. Explore and learn at OpenGreenMap.org

Enjoy this 5 minute video presentation.read more »

Cette semaine, reprise des activités de l'association. Réunion mercredi 17 septembre, à 20h à la mairie d'Eteau.

The Jones Falls Trail Green Map will make its debut at the Jones Falls Watershed Association's Rally for the River! festival on September 21st, 2008. Our map uses 30 Green Map icons to highlight "Discover & Enjoy!" mappable resources on one side and lists the "Learn and Take Action!" resources on its reverse. It includes a green-mapped inset of Druid Hill Park, our 756-acre central park.

The festival typically attracts 5000 people. It closes part of the interstate highway to allow a few hours of intense pedestrian and wheeled activity, food, music, and boat journeys and frog races down the stream below the highway.read more »

Here is a quick link to our:

November newsletter

September newsletter

Find more Newsletters here!

Enjoy!

For me it's very gratifying to share with the Green Map network our activities that we have done in the traditional coffee growing region of Colombia during this year.

First of all, the process with one of the high school (Gonzalo Mejia Echeverry) has become stronger. In this moment, Fundación Geovida (our local non-profit organization) have been designing an eco-landscaping feature inside the school, a beautiful ecological path made of bamboo. We will be highlighting local myths and legends along this thematic path. An architecture student is volunteering with us in its development. This idea has been welcomed by the local history teacher, and the art and biology teachers that have decided to coordinate all their projects around one: Green Map Project. read more »

By Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 07/15/2008

After three years in the wilderness, a movement to map out green spaces in Jakarta is back in vogue, riding the global trend toward an environmentally conscious lifestyle.

"The campaigning stage is over, people are aware of the 'green' lifestyle now. Let's focus on green maps' effectiveness, power to change, availability and design," Marco Kusumawijaya, a founder of the "green map" movement said Saturday.read more »

The team developing the Open Green Map interactive mapmaking and social networking site has been very busy. Happily, we succeeded in opening this exciting new tool to our network of Green Mapmakers in July!

While the public debut is not scheduled until Fall (date TBA), Phase 1 is complete! Mapmakers are starting to create their own Open Green Maps. You click OpenGreenMap.org and choose from the list on the right to start exploring!

This website's public use and site submission features are being created now. If you would like more information, check the FAQ or click Contact and send us a message. We'd love to hear from people who want to participate and/or support this monumental undertaking!read more »

Over the past weeks, Green Map System, the Open Green Map, Mapmakers and their locally-led mapmaking projects have received the attention of the press.

Below you will find the different articles and blogs that celebrate the success of Green Mapmaking as an initiative that strength a sustainable future.

More articles and blogs about our growing global movement are listed in our News section.

Who's talking about the Open Green Map?read more »

朝日新聞関西版に「キッズグリーンマップ＠大阪・中之島」が大々的に紹介

7月20日（日）の朝日新聞関西版朝刊に、 グリーンマップの紹介記事1Ｐと「キッズグリーンマップ＠大阪・中之島」が、見開き2Ｐで大々的に掲載されました。

このプロジェクトは、夏休みの宿題は勿論のこと、海外などでは定例化 している地域の大人が世話する子どものためのサマーキャンプのプログラムや夏の特別授業、また学校での年間環境学習などにグリーンマップを役立ててもらおうと、グリーンマップジャパンと朝日新聞広告局が協働で取り組んだものです。read more »

Carlos Martinez, Green Map System's Latin American Liaison and Office Manager, became a US citizen today!

This Colombian-born environmental administrator was also in today's New York Times, thanks to his healthy green habit of bicycling to work, then bringing his bike inside to store safely at the office.

As reported by Colin Moynihan:

" When Carlos Martinez bicycles to work in Manhattan from his home in Jackson Heights, Queens, he must ride along Northern Boulevard, a broad and busy thoroughfare, before crossing the Queensboro Bridge and heading south on Second Avenue toward the East Village.read more »

L'OpenGreenMap du Pays Rochois est commencée!!!! Pour l'instant, seuls quelques site sont inscrits. Demain 8mercredi 2 juillet) une réunion est prévue pour développer tout ça! En attendant d'avoir plus de site, l'OpenGreenMap est encore "privée" et sera ouverte prochainement au publique. Ce n'est qu'une première étape. A la rentrée, nous iront voir les responsables locaux des communes du Pays Rochois pour avoir leur soutien et concrétiser sur une carte papier la Carte Verte du Pays Rochois.

En attendant, voici un aperçu de l'OpenGreenMap du Pays Rochois:read more »

Last month, the University of Victoria in Canada held the third CUexpo08, the Community-University Exposition 2008. The traditional territory of the Coast Salish First Nations welcomed participants from North America and special guests from all around the world. This event was co-created by the Green Mapmakers in British Columbia.

CUexpo08 was a great opportunity to showcase exciting community-campus reserach and action initiatives from different countries. Some of the thematic areas were knowledge exchange, sustainability, poverty, housing and homelessness, healthy living, climate change, community economic development, social economy, food security, arts based activism, Aboriginal leadership in research.read more »

Open Green Map is taking shape, as described in our June-July Newsletter - click here to read it (you can join the mailing list on our homepage).

Our Open Green Map team includes a great mix of developers, designers, outreach and education specialists, including (from left to right in the picture:) Miikka Lammela, Andrew Sass, Carlos Martinez, Thomas Turnbull, Gottfried Haider, Anna Krusic, Wendy Brawer, (not shown here:) Bob Zuber, Yoko Ishibashi, Yelena Zolotorevskaya, Lee Frankel-Goldwater, Maddy Goldfarb and Kathryn Podobinski. read more »

Expo 2008 is an international exposition where countries, non-government organizations and private companies gather. This year the main topic is Water and sustainable development. The thematic squares are: Thirst, Cities of water, Extreme water, Water and energy, Shared water, Aquatic inspirations. This global gathering will be held from June 14th to September 14th in Zaragoza (Spain), and our Japanese friends from Green Map Aichi (which formed around EXPO 2005) will be representing our growing movement.

The pavilion El Faro will be the gathering spot for NGOs around the world. July 17th is Green Map Day, leaded by Green Map Aichi. The stage program will include Green Map video clips from Cuba and Asia, Icon games, music, gifts and a new Spanish slideshow presentation, which you can view here:read more »

I will start to periodically feed this blog with series of articles filled with information about Dubai, aiming to eventually touch on the environmental issues, trying on one side, to highlight the importance and beauty of this unique city, and on the other side, to provide Dubai Green Map project with a backup of database, information and facts, about the city's natural, cultural and green locations, address the sustainability matter, and increase public awareness of the necessity to care about Dubai and preserve its environment.

Articles will include information and facts that are gathered from different resource, which will be stated respectively.read more »

Green Map System is pleased to recognize the Shimata Green Map, which is now featured among the collection of Green Maps from all over the world. Thank you and congratulations to the project leader, Yuko Shiraishi and her pupils at Shimata Elementary School. We also appreciate Yuko's blog entries on their map-making process (in Japanese!).

The large map is very nicely hand-crafted and reflects the students' care in researching their community. An accompanying booklet provides a well-written description and photo of each site in this collage of both pleasant and hazardous places in the area. We are glad to hear about the elementary school students rediscovering what their district has to offer as well as presenting ideas about what they would like the future to be.

We look forward to hearing any changes that your team brought to the community. Great job!read more »

As we are developing our social mapping website for sustainable communities, the Open Green Map, we are meeting more developers of open technologies.

OpenStreetMap.org is an exciting example of a free geographic resource. It's a kind of wikipedia for maps - a free editable map of the world, and anyone can add roads, bike paths and other geographic data to it. Around the world, many are contributing to it. In some places, mapping parties are being held to spur the collection of data.

Green Map System is pleased to provide the venue for NYC's first open mapping party, hosted by OpenStreetMap's initiator, Steve Coast, at our global office. Steve says: read more »