Hey Folks,
Have you ever been about to take a trip somewhere new and thought ‘hey, I wonder if I’m close enough to a PASS Chapter to catch their meeting’ or for speakers, ‘if I can speak at their meeting’? Well guess what, I’ve had the same question. So I went to the PASS website and tried to figure out if Abilene was close to Houston. Unfortunately there was no easy way for me to figure that out because the chapters were all listed on separate pages and there is no map.
So I did what I’m sure everyone does, I sent an email to Blythe Morrow ( twitter ) saying hey Blythe, “we need a map off all the PASS chapters around the world”. Blythe said “That’s a great idea Aaron!! When can you have it done?”
Doh! I didn’t realize that I was volunteering myself for this but I figure hey this is our PASS so I smiled and said “I don’t know, send me the data and we’ll see”. I built out a map, and we ran into some issues with chapters not having quite the right address the software could recognize. Fun stuff like that.
Along the way I realized Rob Farley ( blog | twitter ) not only knows how to do this stuff, but can even do it with Silverlight. I roped him into my little guerilla-community-service project, but we quickly noticed a problem: quite a few of the chapters have addresses that are not where the group actually meets but instead where the chapter leader lives or works. That being said, we quickly realized that we now need all 211 chapters to give us their meeting addresses, not their mailing address.
Right now all we can show you is a static map of the chapters in the US. If we can get all of the addresses from all of the chapter leaders verified, we can give you a zoom-able map of all the chapters in the world sometime soon (*that soon part is completely up to the chapter leaders).
What needs to be done? We have sent out an email to all chapter leaders asking for at the very least their meeting address and which day of the month the chapter meets. If they also want to include a twitter handle for the group and/or chapter leaders, a picture of the chapter leader(s), chapter logo, or anything along those lines we can add those as well. Please send this information as a reply to the email that has been sent out to all of the Chapter Leaders.
[Click on the map for the full size version]
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