Every community forester knows how important events are in growing a thriving community. Whether it’s training classes, volunteer tree planting days, conferences, or even webinars, events are how community members bond and come together to achieve their goals. As we’re looking back over 2014, we thought it would be useful to recap all the events OpenTreeMap was a part of this year to give you an idea on how you too can use OpenTreeMap to engage your community.

The largest OpenTreeMap to date, the City of Edmonton’s yegTreeMap, was launched earlier this year to coincide with a big event: Canadian Arbor Day! For over 50 years, Edmonton has been giving its 1^st grade students free seedlings to plant at home, and this year they used their new OpenTreeMap to capitalize on this tradition and have community members contribute data and stories on the trees they were planting. The City of Edmonton performed a comprehensive promotion effort, including press, community events, tweeting, and blogging, which paid off in favorable press coverage and resulted in a map of over 267,000 trees.

Another very active OpenTreeMap, TreePeople’s TreeMapLA, also launched this year. Rather than one large event, TreePeople has been using the map in a series of smaller events throughout the year to support their programs, including a recurring “Thirsty Thursdays” theme pairing mapping of trees that need watering and stewardship in Los Angeles with a trip to the bar afterward for volunteers.

For Azavea’s part, we organized an event called “EcoCamp” this summer, a hackathon themed around sustainability and the environment. Hackathons are 1-2 day events themed around a particular issue or problem area, which bring together software developers, designers, and data analysts along with subject matter experts in the theme being addressed. Azavea has organized hackathons before, and they’re popular among Philadelphia’s civic-minded technology community. Since we’ve been working on OpenTreeMap (which is also civic hacker-friendly open source) and our other green stormwater infrastructure work for a while, we thought it was time for an environmentally-themed hackathon to convene both communities to work on shared problems. We had teams work on trash and sanitation data, parks data, urban agriculture, and more. Pairing tree enthusiasts with civic hackers and other communities through events like EcoCamp is an effective way to spread your mission and programming to a very diverse audience.

We also presented OpenTreeMap at a workshop at the Constructed Environment conference in October, focused on using crowdsourcing techniques to collect data about the environment and cities (page 34). The conference convenes researchers in the fields of architecture and the built environment from countries around the world each year. This year, it was hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, which allowed us to use the newly-redesigned PhillyTreeMap in an interactive tree-mapping workshop with attendees.

The Arbor Day Foundation’s Partners in Community Forestry National Conference came in November. For the second time, we were honored to have our presentation proposal accepted at this fantastic event that attracts urban and community foresters and friends from across the US and beyond. Along with our partners Lee Mueller from the Friends of Grand Rapids Parks (an active OpenTreeMap client) and Erica Smith Fichman from TreePhilly, our presentation “Hackers, Beer Geeks, and Arborly Love: Reaching Out to Unexpected Audiences in Urban Forestry” highlighted the power of events like EcoCamp, Brewer’s Grove, and the Arborly Love campaign to introduce and excite new people about community trees. We were thrilled with the standing-room only crowd during the presentation, which demonstrated how valuable out-of-the box public engagement ideas are to all of us. If you were unable to attend, Lee, Erica, and I reprised our conference talk for the third OpenTreeMap webinar of the year.

Want to learn more in-depth ideas about how OpenTreeMap can be used to engage your community? Our other recorded webinars are great resources. Our first webinar in 2014 covered how to get started with the then-brand-new OpenTreeMap Cloud (how far we’ve come!). Danny Carmichael from TreePeople in Los Angeles joined us for our second webinar, focused on mobile citizen science efforts and gathering data using the OpenTreeMap iPhone and Android apps. We post recordings and question-and-answers from each webinar on the OpenTreeMap Blog, as well as announcements of upcoming ones. Be sure to keep an eye out in 2015 or make sure you subscribe to receive bi-monthly OpenTreeMap’s updates by providing your email at the bottom of the OpenTreeMap website!