OpenStreetMap does for maps what Wikipedia does for Encyclopedias.
Many social projects have a need for maps and geo-data that can be expensive to fulfill. OpenStreetMap provides an unrestricted and free alternative to commercial maps.
OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.
Openstreetmap enables social change by providing the tools and the geodata to enable other community projects, whether they are international, such as disaster relief, or regional or local initiatives, to create maps of any type to help achieve their goals.
Our current objective is to accelerate the take-up of OpenStreetMap in North America and to build a sustainable community of volunteer contributors that can care for and augment the map data.
The OpenStreetMap community is supported by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a UK registered non-profit organization. The foundation is funded by voluntary donations from individuals, grants and small corporate sponsorships. Additional funding is required to accelerate expansion of the community in North America.
OpenStreetMap's financial needs are modest in the long term, but to continue the project's rapid growth additional funds are required to expand our infrastructure and build the contributor community.
There are no fundamental obstacles to the success of OpenStreetMap. However, the adoption of OpenStreetMap in the United States is lagging significantly behind Europe. It is believed that many contributors in the US are holding back until the US Census Bureau's public domain TIGER/Line data has been loaded into the OpenStreetMap database.
The TIGER/Line data-set covering most of the United States is basic data. This data-set is very large and requires an increase in our computing and storage infrastructure and development of the tools to import it. There will also be a need to augment this data import with community contributions to produce rich and useful cartography.
We need financial support, donated hardware and volunteers to:
Financial support from NetSquared will bring OpenStreetMap to the next level in North America so it can benefit communities and facilitate social change here in the same way it has in Europe.
With the support that NetSquared can provide this will kick-start the OpenStreetMap community in North America. The following milestones will be achieved in the first 90-days:
OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world which anyone can help to build.
OpenStreetMap, which was started by Steve Coast in 2004, allows anyone to create and edit geographical data in a collaborative wiki-like manner and use it for any purpose.
The project was started because most maps that you might think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back those that wish to use them in creative, productive or unexpected ways. All OpenStreetMap software is GPL, and content is published under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA).
The project has four major components:
Resources for creating the data include:
OpenStreetMap uses a variety of community and social collaboration techniques to achieve its goals. These include methods such as forums, mailing lists, blogs, RSS feeds, IRC, podcasts, wiki-like collaboration, tagging and, in the real-world, the highly innovative and successful mapping parties.
The project has active communities in more than 40 countries with currently 6,000 registered users. Over 500 individual contributors add map data every month and this number is doubling every 4 months. Many cities in the UK and Europe have already been completely mapped and it's one of our goals to map the whole of the UK by mid-2008.
OpenStreetMap can help change society directly by producing relevant and useful maps that contain features that matter to local communities. But more importantly, the availability of maps and cartographic data is a key enabler for many other projects that seek social change. Amongst the NetSquared nominations, WiserEarth, parkscan.org and Map The Van are just three examples of projects that could benefit from the free availability of our tools and data.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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Comments
Thanks for the description
Thanks for the description of this great project. More enhancements and improvements are needed though. http://www.bottoroff.com/
This is one of my top 7
This is one of my top 7 proposals. Good luck!