Let's not loose sight of a few facts / trends w.r.t. sub Saharan Africa: 1. The continent is not experiencing the same demographic dividend as other emerging economies. Birthrates will remain high for at least another 50 years. AIDS is decimating the economically active population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
2. African governments are simply not building the required infrastructure. 3. The mobile phone has increase productivity in Africa more than all previous inventions combined. Farmers no longer need to make slow and expensive journeys to find out what price the market will pay for their crops. Migrant workers can send money to their families over long distances. 4. A dismally small percentage of Africans can read maps. But augmented reality-type applications will completely change that. 5. OSM is simply not successful enough in Africa to cover the tremendous opportunities presented in points 3 and 4. Lack of cheap Internet access on the African continent should take most of the blame. But it doesn't help that so many OSM apps are not available in Africa (Skobbler, ORS, OSM-3D etc). So I'm really glad about Google's efforts. -- Note that if you use Google to search for "Mapping party", the top hit is the the OSM wiki. So it's public knowledge that we invented and perfected the concept. Regards, Nic On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Mikel Maron <mikel_ma...@yahoo.com> wrote: > http://brainoff.com/weblog/2011/04/11/1635 > > == Mikel Maron == > +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk > > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
