Indoor Mapping at events with Django - CCC and FOSDEM's mapping webapp is a django app 👍

[mrchrisadams]

Hi folks, I discovered fairly recently that the Indoor Mapping web-app used by FOSDEM and CCC is an maintained open source Django app!

You can see the code below here:

GitHub - c3nav/c3nav: Indoor navigation for the Chaos Communication...

It’s pretty cool! Here’s the app giving routing directions to get from one building on the campus at FOSDEM to another. There are even ways to route it to make sure stairs are avoided, for accessibility, and so on, and there’s a Progressive Web App, that’s very slick too.

This is so cool!

Has there ever been a talk at a DjangoCon about it? Or has there ever been a DjangoCon or similar Python focussed event that has deployed an instance of it to make it easier to navigate the venue?

FOSDEM and CCC are sprawling beasts of events with loads and loads of tracks, so I can see why it would be really helpful to have maps built for them.

You might not need it for a single track conference like a Djangocon for example, but I can see the appeal if finding workshop venues is awkward.

Anyway, it’s appears to have been in active development, for a few years now, and I’m looking over the codebase because I’d like to figure out how to extend it, to link to real time views of indoor CO2 for rooms at events.

I figure this would at least give folks a bit of info to make a decision about joining the rooms, and based on how cramped rooms can be at confs, it seemed worth looking into (as an aside for the terminally curious, I’ve written another blog post about indoor CO2 at FOSDEM.

But back to the original qn. Has the c3nav app been presented, or used at DjangoCon and similar events? I’d love to know, and if there would be interest in using it in future.

[mrchrisadams]

The next Django conference in Europe is in Dublin - DjangoCon Europe 2025

Here are the floor plans for the hotel that the DjangoCon Europe would happen at, I think, based on the venue’s page.

The Shelbourne Suite looks like the logical place for the presentations to be at. Here’s the pic from the website:

That would map to the Shelbourne Suite on the first floor of the map below

Workshops

I’m less clear on where the workshops would be, and the it wasn’t so obvious from the photos.

My guess would be the Merrion Suite room. It might be the Caryfort ones, or rooms on the first floor though, if there are loads of workshops.

But from previous experiences there have rarely been more than 2 or 3 rooms in use.

Anyway, here’s the map for the second floor:

If you have a floor plan, then I think the C3Nav stuff is actually able to provide routing guidance, but the usefulness of this is pretty proportional to the size of the venue.

In CCC and FOSDEM, which are sprawling, multitrack events, where it’s easy to get lost it makes a lot of sense, hence the map. In a single track conf, you’re not running from place to place so much, so it’s less of a factor, and it’s if CO2 levels are high in a given room, it’s not like you have loads of alternative talks to go to. I guess you might end up in the hallways or elsewhere instead.

That said, it might be useful for creating the data for a data informed conversation about public health and ventilation at events (possibly future Djangocon events), because “conference flu” is a thing, and there enough people miffed about at FOSDEM to make the website FluConf.

Using it to link to stuff in the real world

The other thing that I think might be useful for is making it easier to have hyperlinks to stuff in the real world, where existing publicly accessible mapping isn’t quite so hot.

Going back to the FOSDEM example, using this, let’s say i wanted to meet you by a specific place inside the food track area.

I can do that because the mapping tool let’s me generate links for anywhere on the map, and even generate a QR code for it:

This QR code correspond to this specific point within a region (and from memory, it was where my favourite frites truck was selling various comestibles).

https://nav.fosdem.org/l/c:1:311.37:212.39/@1,312.08,213.83,5

This is arguably more precise than i can share using Google Maps for example, which at maximum zoom offers this view:

If I use Open Street Map (OSM) after looking up the venue via their Nominatim search service fairly similar - I see a fairly zoomed out view.

Here’s the link on OSM to the hotel.

So the point being able to link to indoor maps is kind neat, especially if like recent CCC events, you’re able to surface live data (this was a thing CCC was doing recently, to give visibility about occupancy in rooms, but I don’t have any a screenshots of it yet).

Anyway, I found this interesting, and I figured others might too. Maybe it’ll make lightning talk fodder as I learn more.