Tech Comm on a Map now includes businesses and groups

A month ago I announced my project called “Tech Comm on a Map”. The idea is to help us see what’s happening in the world of technical communication around the globe. Tech Comm on a Map puts tech comm titbits onto an interactive map, together with the data and functionality provided by Google Maps.

When first announced, the map included data types for conferences, societies, and a grab-bag called “other“, which currently contains a couple of historically-interesting morsels.

Now I’ve added two more data types:

• businesses for commercial organisations specialising in tech comm, such as consultancies, recruiters, publishers, independent technical writers, and so on.
• groups for smaller groups and regular meetups of technical communicators, either as part of a larger society/association, or as an independent group.

Any groups or businesses to add?

At this point there are very few businesses and groups on the map. Do you have one you’d like me to add? Please add a comment to this post, including the following information for each item. The information will be publicly available on the map, via an information box that appears when someone clicks on the relevant circle on the map:

• Type: Conference, Society, Business, or Group
• Name of the business, group, society or conference.
• Description.
• Website address (or an email address that people can use to get more information).
• Street address (this is essential, to position the item on the map).
• Start and end date for conferences, or meetup timing for groups (e.g. “First Wednesday of every month at lunch time”, or “Every Tuesday at 7pm”).

Note: Don’t add the names or addresses of any individuals, unless it’s your own name and address. We need to ensure we have people’s permission before adding their information in a comment on this post, or on the map. Any information you add here should be already publicly available on an organisation’s website or other publication.

Contributors to the project

Thanks to the following people who have helped me add data to the map so far: Sarah O’Keefe, Ellis Pratt, Stefan Eike.

Thanks also to Stefan Eike and Stephen Farrar, who have both contributed to the code on GitHub.

More coming

Excited? I am. 🙂 If you’d like to know more about the project, check out the introductory blog post. Soon I’ll write another post with the technical details of the APIs and other tools involved. In the meantime, here’s Tech Comm on a Map.