Social Media + Parks

[danrademacher]

Earlier this year, we launched CaliParks.org -- open data + custom-built (and open source) social media harvesters to gather images and other data from almost 12,000 parks in California and more than half a million unique social media users, all to enable people to find parks where they can do what they want to do.

In the process, we learned that parks are social, and all kinds of people visit them, share their stories and images, and generally live their lives in parks. People want to see people like themselves in public spaces to feel welcome there. And we can represent them using social media, creating an invitation to diverse Americans to embrace their parks.

We’d love to do that for the RIDB data too! To get there, we started by using PADUS to get park shapes, and then we harvested Flickr photos from about 1,000 rec areas. We’ll make those available during the hackathon (probably as a CartoDB endpoint). And we can do the same for the park shapes we pulled from PADUS. Here’s a quick CartoDB map of the data we’ve gathered so far.

[danrademacher]

here's the flickr data we've harvested: http://sta.mn/s5z

[danrademacher]

and notes on our methods: http://content.stamen.com/mapping_the_intersection_between_social_media_and_open_spaces_in_ca