> 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). >
To argue the other side of the coin, however, OSM is already the most successful mapping platform in Africa; Ivory Coast, for example, is best catered for by OpenStreetMap. Leaving Africa, OSM has been fantastically successful in Haiti - if you want maps of Haiti, you go to, without exception, OpenStreetMap. In Haiti, for example, local people are being trained in how to map for OpenStreetMap; this is people in the developing world mapping for themselves. The important thing with Ivory Coast and Haiti is that OpenStreetMap has provided an amazing resource that you can't get from elsewhere, certainly not from GMM. That's one of the products that I was alluding to in my previous email: spatial data. The problem is that this amazing work on the OSM front was done by a small a group of people working under the HOT banner; Google has endless more resources in this respect. OSM can provide the most amazing mapping resources for the entire planet, but we lack Google's money and person-power to get it done as much as could be. The problem with welcoming Google into the world of user-contributed spatial-data is that you dilute our available resources even further by encouraging potential users to lock up their data with the big G. I couldn't agree more with Mikel's original point; if we want to provide mapping resources to the wider world and to the benefit of the most people, we should turn our backs on Google and give our support to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Cheers, Joseph On 11 April 2011 20:12, Nic Roets <nro...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
