The quality of OpenStreetMap's work speaks for itself, but it seems that we need to speak about it too - especially now that Google is attempting to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as "citizen cartographer" that they rob of its meaning by conveniently forgetting to mention the license under which the contributed data is held. But in the eye of the public, the $50000 UNICEF donation to the home country of the winner of the Map Maker Global Challenge lets them appear as charitable citizens. We need to explain why it is a fraud, so that motivated aspiring cartographers are not tempted to give away their souls for free. I could understand that they sell it, but giving it to Google for free is a bit too much - we must tell them. I'm pretty sure that good geographic data available to anyone for free will do more for the least developed communities than a 50k USD grant.
I answered this piece at ReadWriteWeb and I suggest that you keep an eye for opportunities to answer this sort of propaganda against libre mapping : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_announces_map_contest_50k_for_adding_school.php#comment-175013 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk