Liz wrote: > On Mon, 8 Dec 2008, Darrin Smith wrote: > >> Futher thinking about this had me wondering just how much latent >> interest for these kinds of maps there might be out there and whether >> one could setup a 'map a town' register where people pledge amounts to >> get the town mapped on OSM and then when it reaches a threshold to fund >> someone you call in the donations and do it. More of an issue here than >> overseas I think due to our very sparse population, if there's 1 >> serious mapper every 100,000 people then that's only about 200 to cover >> all of .au and 1,500 for the .uk. And it's so far for many of us to get >> to areas relatively unmapped. >> > > This is an interesting idea, but my other half has mentioned a potential > problem here which I would express in terms of the variation of mapping > skills evident on OSM so far. So you would need to have a method which would > not produce fiction but good quality results. > Some sort of targeted approach is probably needed now as it is - I don't know how many mappers there actually are in AU (and how many of those are actually active). I was thinking about this the other day, while trying to find ways to get Naracoorte mapped (I can't exactly make it a romantic weekend away with the girlfriend if I'm going to spend the w/end mapping...). Would there be any sort of benefit in starting up a more official OSM-AU body (a la a chapter of the OSM foundation) to provide some sort of legitimacy for a sponsored approach, and also for general co-ordination of various activities.
I was giving the good news about OSM to a couple of guys at work the other night over beers, and we got into a discussion of how to get my company involved in OSM (I run a small software dev outfit), on the assumption that we could find some way of extracting a dollar or two out of the services that would be provided. One thing that popped up was hitting up our existing client base to use the data, for both the exposure, but also to enable funding to be made available for improvement of the data. Still not sure how it would all work, but I though I'd run it up the flag pole anyway... What I didn't say in the earlier emails about Naracoorte is that my clients in the regional areas are all newspaper publishers, hence the publication of the maps. But additionally, I reckon a few of the advertisers would like to use a map in their ads (not uncommon if the paper is distributed in multiple towns). The other thing that might be worth pushing is actually getting some editorial in the local paper for the mapping being done in one town - someone goes to map Naracoorte for example, and we arrange for a quick happy snap other them /avec/ GPS and a few column inches to run in the local paper (and even across the various titles, as most of the publishers have 3-4 regional titles). Good for exposure, might get a few more regional people involved in mapping the towns, or at least get people in the town we've just hit to continue to improve the map. Lastly, hit up the real estate advertisers to use the maps both on there web sites and in print advertising as a location overview - google maps is all very nice, but it often lacks all the amenities, parks, wlaking paths etc that OSM can provide. Could also run some consultancy services writing custom slippy map implementations for there wesite that are more improved over the default google map. Just some random thoughts... Matt _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
