I gave a talk at the April SydPy meetup: Taking Back the Streets: The Fight for Open Navigation.
The talk was a shorter version of the open navigation work I presented at PyCon AU. NaviLens is a commercial system for resolving visual navigation tags in public spaces. It is useful technology, especially for improving navigation for people with vision impairments, but it also gives one company a lot of control over a physical namespace that should probably be open.
I talked through what an open alternative could look like, how the community dataset started during PyCon AU 2024 fits into that, and where Python is useful for the indexing, lookup, and prototyping parts of the problem.
The meetup was held near Wynyard on Thursday 30 April 2026, alongside Anton Black's talk on running a bug bounty program.
Event links: SydPy April Meetup on Luma and LinkedIn post.