MapStory.org is the free atlas of change that everyone can edit. We are a community, not a company, working to organize humanity’s shared knowledge about how the world evolves geographically over time, and to make this knowledge easily accessible as an open educational resource.

The MapStory community’s work breaks down into 3 big tasks. We call them the “3 Cs”. First, once you’ve created a profile, you can collect spatio-temporal data and import it. We call each dataset imported into MapStory.org a “StoryLayer”. Second you can compose MapStories that provide nuanced understanding of historical change by combining StoryLayers and other narrative elements, like images, text, or video. Finally, you can curate the accuracy and quality of content presented in MapStory.org by adding ratings, checking metadata, making comments and committing version edits to the actual StoryLayers themselves, much like you might edit a Wikipedia page.

This guide assumes you are using a UNIX based operating system such as Linux or OSX and have the below installed.

git
docker
docker-compose
gmake

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. Start by forking the mapstory repository to your own Github account, and then cloning that repository to your local development environment.

git clone https://www.github.com/<your-username>/mapstory

Add the following to your /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1       docker
::1             docker

Run the following commands in the checked out git repo to start up the docker containers.

git submodule update --init --recursive
make pull
make up

Your local site should now be available at http://docker/.

Additional information about using the docker build is available at our Docker README.

• Python 2.7 - The primary backend development language.
• Django 1.8.7 - The back end web development framework.
• AngularJS 1.6 - The front end web development framework.

Please read How to Contribute for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Please review our Contributor Guides for best practices and style guides before contributing to the project.