"If geography is prose, maps are iconography."
~Lennart Meri
Welcome to the Geographic Survey Project, a part of the Colonia Citizens Network. With humanity starting to settle around the Colonia Nebula near the Galactic Core, opportunities arise for cartographers to step forward and map uncharted places in the area.
While the related Colonia Nebula Project is all about counting and cataloguing stellar and planetary objects to derive information and scientific knowledge, the Geographic Survey Project is about visualizing, naming and creating bonds to places. What we hope to achieve is to make the Colonia Nebula feel less sterile and more like ‘home’ as a bubble 2.0 (just better!).
Names in particular help us to quickly recognize a place and to form bonds with it through a past incident or story. Naming and cartographing are also tools to mark those places for posterity where history was written or where the Pioneers gathered on more or less special occasions.
Out here at the frontier of humanity every explorer currently has the opportunity to put his mark on the maps of this wild and untamed country. The highest mountains, the deepest chasms, the largest craters and the meeting places can be cartographed and named by you!
Join the Colonia Citizen Network Discord Server today to get in touch with fellow explorers and cartographers. The role of Geographic Surveyor can be self-assigned by asking the Colony Bot Jeeves using the command @Jeeves join Geographic Surveyor.
Trello is used to submit locations for the Atlas. Detailed instructions about the surveying process and current priority targets will be pinned to the #Exploration-Wing channel on Discord. Completed surveys will be published in the Colonia Geographic Survey Atlas. The submission of event locations around Colonia like planetary racing tracks for publication in the Colonia Geographic Survey Atlas is also encouraged.
Here is an example data card of a feature on Colonia 2A called Barnacle Basin. No Barnacles have ever been found around the Colonia Nebula so far, but a number of colonists is relentlessly searching sandy areas on candidate planets. The name is thus merely homage to these explorers and their efforts.
Community polls to name some of the most prominent features of the Colonia system, which is the first priority target of the GSP will follow shortly.
We are looking forward to seeing you out there with sharpened pencils and cameras to help us with the creation of the Atlas of the Colonia Nebula area!
