Hi, First, let me introduce myself. My name is Matthew Landauer. I'm the founder and one of the directors of the OpenAustralia Foundation [1]. We're a charity that build online digital democracy projects. Some of the things that we've built to date are:
http://www.openaustralia.org - OpenAustralia.org is a website that enables people to keep track of what politicians are doing and saying on our behalf in Parliament. http://www.planningalerts.org.au - PlanningAlerts.org.au is a free service which searches planning authority websites for development applications in your area and then emails you their details. http://www.electionleaflets.org.au - ElectionLeaflets.org.au is a new kind of election monitoring website focusing on election leaflets, one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in Australia. I'm a software developer as well and have had done a little bit of OSM mapping of walking trails around where I live in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. So, why am I mailing this list? All of our projects have involved some kind of geo lookup, where we find out where something is, or the user is and we map that back to some kind of government area, either and electoral boundary or a local government or some such thing. We've had a number of ad-hoc approaches to this over the years but now we we would like to make this all simpler. Recently, mySociety, a UK based charity and one the worlds pioneers in online digital democracy released a web service called mapit: http://global.mapit.mysociety.org/ What it does is slurp administrative boundary data from OSM and present and republish it in a really easy to use (and free) web service. What I would like to do is help the Australian OSM community in whatever way I can get the administrative boundary data in OSM up to date and complete. My personal focus really is on the local government area (LGA) boundaries. Since I'm a virtually complete newbie in the OSM sphere I don't want to just blunder into something that I know little about, tread on peoples' toes and generally create havoc. I see that 2011 LGA boundary data is available on data.gov.au: http://data.gov.au/dataset/local-government-area-asgc-ed-2011/ and according to this post http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2011/09/24/odbl-data-gov-au-permission-granted/ data from data.gov.au can safely be included in OSM. Is this something that has already been done, or is already in progress? If not, what can I do to help? I'm happy to learn and get myself up to speed in whatever technical way is required. I just need a little guidance. ;-) Thanks! Matthew [1] http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/ -- Dr Matthew Landauer Director, OpenAustralia Foundation _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
