It is with great pleasure, and not just a little excitement, that I can announce that the mappers in Birmingham having set the task of completing the whole of the city by Christmas have achieved just that.
"http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.4708&lon=-1.8972&zoom=12&layers=0B00FT F" Birmingham and the area inside the major motorways which has been mapped, including Solihull and Sutton Coldfield, has a population of approximately 1.25 million. The achievement is somewhat similar to that of Hamburg, announced a few weeks ago. The major difference is that Birmingham does not have any Yahoo! aerial imagery, thus the whole of Birmingham has been mapped by GPS and many hours of cycling, walking and driving by the major contributors. About 100 mappers have been involved in completing the whole work, although the vast majority has been contributed by just a handful of OSMers. The list of the major contributors can be found on the mappa mercia wiki page. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mappa_Mercia I'd like to say a specific thank you to Brian Prangle (brianboru) and Christoph Böhme (Xoff) who joined me over the last weeks to complete the Christmas target, they weren't the only ones, but without their efforts we would never have made it! As a group (the OSM Midlands User Group (MUG)) we are planning how to promote the Birmingham map and will be meeting at our monthly social to discuss ideas on January 15th. We have jointly lots of interesting ideas to explore, some of which are on the wiki. After the 15th Jan we plan to put out a wider media release. Of course the mapping work doesn't end here. We still have plenty of POI, verification and address data to add in Birmingham plus there is still much work to be done in the coming year to complete the "Black Country", Walsall and the area to the west of the M5. Cheers and Happy Christmas Andy (blackadder) _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
