Discussion: out of date

How often are maps updated up your way, or even refieldworked

I think the Bruce Ridge MTBO map was at least partly updated for the ACT champs this year.

I assume much of the out-of-datedness related to MTB tracks?

I'm (just) old enough to remember when the northeast part of Bruce Ridge was the Belconnen tip.

Yeah mostly MTB trails but the vegetation could do with an update too. They usually do a minor update each year (at least the bits of the maps where the courses go), but it doesn't seem to have been done for Bruce Ridge this year. Or maybe it did but the most recent version didn't get used by the course planner (one of the things I'm pushing for as a director of the OACT board is the use of some sort of version control software for our maps :P)...

Belco tip, that's that crappy bit in the middle of O'Connor Ridge yeah? What do you know about lead? (That's pronounced led, not lead, ie the element Pb).

Yes, that's it. As for lead, it's heavy, and it does bad things to your brain if you get too much exposure to it (although whether we can blame lead exposure for Reclaim Australia and associated groups is unknown, at least to me).

Exposure ---- that would be mostly either by eating lead-bearing dust (kids), or by working in a smelter where trace lead content of mineral ores is heated to the gas state and you breathe it in.

In soil? If it's been there a while you'd need to eat a fair bit.

How we are doing Version control in Bendigo, is the map is kept in the mappers DropBox, this is the only copy they keep, and any up dates are done to this file. The link to this is available to anyone needing the map, so all they can get there hands on is the most up-to-date version. Something like this Lyell Forest

If we need to look at a old version, we go back into the DropBox website, and select what ever older version we want

Yeah nice one Jim I reckon drop box, with it's built in kind of version control, will do the job nicely. Just need to get around to getting things organised...

Classic!! I got the DVD I'll have to watch it again (and learn it better)

We're just working on the Dropbox thing now in an effort to get all our maps in one place and up-to-date.

So have you guys set up a paid business Dropbox account for the club/association or have you gone for the free option?

Using the free option. What advantages do you think the Business one will offer?

None really! Just more capacity. The extended version history could be useful.

How do you manage sharing? Presumably only a select few have write access, but how do you control who has read access - a single administrator or do you have a few guys with admin privileges?

The only person who can read the file, or has 'write' access' is the mapper, or the person whose computer has the file/map on it.

And anyone who has the link can download. So maybe this is the area we need to control, give it to a few prominent PPL in the club, who can then download it, and send it to the person who needs it

OK but the club owns the account?

tRicky's mention of MTBO reminded me one of the cases I'd considered for the use of "real" version control (with the ability to merge changes, which obviously only works with certain file types) was when a map is forked into a MTBO map, which at a later stage has the tracks updated - the ability to merge those updates back into the real map would be awesome.

It would be pretty annoying if that Bruce Ridge MTBO map had the tracks updated and the updates didn't flow onto the (real) map. Anyone got any tips for managing that? Besides the obvious labour intensive copy/paste type approaches?

Unfortunately no. ISOM uses different track symbols to ISMTBOM.

Probably the best way is to get the person doing the changes on one to do it on the other but that obviously duplicates the work, plus you'd need knowledge of both styles of mapping. I think we only have one map in WA that is used for both and we happen to be using it this year, probably (if we can get accommodation sorted).

No, we all use our own 'free' accounts.