Mapping Hacks

Friends and supporters of openstreetmap, the grassroots collaborative GPS mapmaking effort in Europe and worldwide, may be interested to read this excellent email that Steve Coast sent to the discussion list earlier today.

The geospatial web boom is driving a lot of idle-handed free software enthusiasts like Rich, Schuyler and I to need sources of free, publically accessible data to make our own maps with. The subscribers contributing to OSM, using the site and the web mapping services it provides, are more or less doubling monthly, and the increasing accuracy and coverage of the map data it’s collecting are augmenting that trend. OSM’s performance - currently running off privately donated lower-end machines on a university network - is struggling to keep up with the tremendous demand for public geodata.

Steve’s looking into various sources of community-oriented funding to help bootstrap OSM into a better space, where the great tools it can provide are really useful for more people. His email to the OSM-discuss list explains the situation and outlines the current needs in more detail.

I particularly enjoyed the following aside that it contains, and hope Steve won’t mind my reproducing it here. It makes a nice, cogent and well-phrased contrast to my own frequent essays into bloody-minded rhetoric concerning the impact that the Ordnance Survey’s commercial licensing policy is having on suppressing the growth of the geospatial web and the amazing next generation of civic services that can be built on it, in the UK and in Europe, creating a pressure worldwide that runs counter to what all open source geospatial hackers want and need.

As an aside… I want to communicate to you the way geo companies in the
UK generally feel about OSM. They tend to love it and want to support
it. They’re terrified of the Ordnance Survey though. The OS is the sun
to which companies, education establishments and charities face. Without
the OS, they don’t have any data.

I’m not an expert. There are people on this list that are. There are
people from the OS on the list, too. My experience is that people are
_extremely_ reluctant to support anything which would jeopardise their
license and relationship with the OS. I’m not sure whether this is a
real or perceived threat, but I’d tend to the former.

So I, personally, keep running in to people who say something like ‘well
I would help you, but..’ And that’s frustrating. It was also surprising
to me just how widespread that feeling is, from PhD students to
cartographers to massive companies.

I don’t like to paint the OS as a big evil monster, it’s not true or
very constructive and I’ve always found Ed Parsons to be a top
bloke. It’s just the situation I find OSM, and hence myself, in.

Hats off, Steve, for such calm and candid words.

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