Hi all, It would appear that the amount of OSM'ers here in Canada is a little limited. especially in the rural areas. The bigger cities have be more or less mapped out from the high resolution aerial photography, however many of the street names are missing and there is very little detail on the ammenity front.
The only way this is going to be resolved is if we can get more locals involved in the project. I was contemplating putting up a small OSM poster on the local community notice boards. Is OSM ready for a flood (ever optimistic ;-) of newbies? Text could read something like: --- Put your community on The Map! The work has started, volunteers at OpenStreetMap.com have been logging the roads and rivers in your community, but now they need your help to add details of street names and local ammenities (resturants, gas stations, etc.). So why not just use Google Maps (or the like)? Although Google makes it's maps available on the internet, it is a company that is more interested in charging people and companies to license it's data. This "look, but don't touch" means that you can't reuse the maps they provide (without paying), and should anything be wrong good luck with trying to get it corrected. OpenStreetMap.com is different in that the data is available to everyone, for whatever purpose they want. It is based on the 'Wiki' concept where anyone can edit the maps marking the location/names of roads, ammenities, resturants, etc. In fact you can add the location of anything you want. The resultant maps are available to browse on the internet (just like Google's maps), but they are also available to download and use how you want to. If you don't like the way they look, you are able to download the source data and render your map however you like. It has been said that even the most recent map is always out of date. With OpenStreetMap as soon as a change is made on the ground, local volunteers can correct the maps and the results will be (almost) instantly available to the world. So what is needed to partipate in OpenStreetMap? For advanced mapping tools such as GPS recievers and digital cameras are useful, but simply having access to the internet will allow you to contribute by checking/editing the maps and to add that all important local information. The only real requirement is that the information is 'first hand' and is not copied from copyrighted sources (such as Google maps). --- Any comments/suggestions on the concept or the wording? Mungewell. PS. I'm not an artist, so don't expect anything too fancy. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
