I know this is preaching to the choir but I just wanted to mention how increasingly impressed I am with the open street maps project. Check out just how amazingly gorgeous this example is - and think about what it means to have collected and liberated all this data:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Sutton_Coldfield So many things we do are so fleeting and ephemeral; often the challenge is to find something of durable persistence; something that can be an anchor for other projects, and an anchor to guide what we choose to do in our lives. OSM is clearly the first oscillation of the seismograph; if I were NavTek I'd start to diversify right now. It is one of those few durable things that will be an anchor for future work by many other people. In some ways this project is more vital than wikipedia because it connects to our physicality in a much more intimate way. It is not about the abstract space but about connecting the web back to real space. As I've ranted about before... what we think of as government and mass media might even becomes obsolete because we'll be able to directly see each other and signal to each other without the need for intermediaries that we do not control and that have separate agendas. The role of government increasingly may become like that of any deposed power structure - such as say the monarchy; relegated to representing intangibles such as tradition and propriety. By way of an actual example; one can imagine in the near future driving down a street, right past the big superstore with the neon lights, into a suburban neighbourhood, stopping at a new friends house, and borrowing their ladder... instead of having bought one. It is a simple example but by extension whole classes of behavior shift and this can mean cultural, social economic and political change. The need for dollars, our sense of community, the power of advertising etcetera... little shifts accumulate and create a self induced criticality that leads our civilization in new directions. It might even mean what we think of as national boundaries start to dissolve; when we have a clear awareness of how much we are intertwined... Good work guys, - a _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
