Mapping the (Open) Future

OpenStreetMap goes from strength to strength:

Earlier this week the project surpassed 50,000 registered users with over 5,000 actively contributing data each month. Historically the contributor base has doubled every 5 months. That means there will be around 50,000 adding data monthly by the end of 2009. That’s a ten fold increase from today.

Right now on each and every day, 25,000km of roads gets added to the OpenStreetMap database, on the historical trend that will be over 200,000km per day by the end of 2009. And that doesn’t include all the other data that makes OpenStreetMap the richest dataset available online.

It's also growing in other ways:

Until very recently we talked about OpenStreetMap being a global project but the reality was that outside of Europe and the TIGER-Line fed USA the pockets of OpenStreetMap activity were sporadic, often just one contributor in each place, or the devoted work of one or two burning the midnight oil tracing over the Yahoo! imagery layer in far flung places. Even that’s changing though. The OpenStreetMap community itself is growing and one of the best examples of that is the proliferation of national websites acting as local language portals for the project. Already there is openstreetmap.ca, .ch, .cl, .de, .fr, .it, .jp, .nl, .se, .org.za and that’s probably missing a few that are on the way.

OpenStreetMap is clearly fast becoming one of the open world's signal achievements. (Via James Tyrrell.)

Mapping the Power of People

Leaving aside Terminal 5's little teething problems today, and independently of the fact that the only way they will get my fingerprints is if they cut my fingers off, here's a heart-warming tale of how the people beat The Man/Men when it comes to providing up-to-the-minute maps:

Heathrow’s terminal 5 is a major high profile new development. On it’s own it is bigger than any other airport in Europe except Frankfurt. It will generate, from today, more car journeys than a decent sized town. Yet most of the on-line mapping sites don’t seem to be capable of having a decent map ready on the day that it opens.

It’s examples like this that demonstrate how well OpenStreetMap can produce accurate and timely maps. Further vindication of the effectiveness of the OpenStreetMap approach.

(Via James Tyrrell.)

Open Designs

Although Web pages are usually regarded as content, there can be a fair amount of code behind them too in the form of scripting and cascading style sheets (CSS). This means that there is a need for shared code in these areas, and the Open Design community aims to help out on the CSS side.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that the majority of stylesheets there use a Creative Commons licence, rather than the GNU GPL, say: this suggests people think of the code more as a form of content in this context. (Via James Tyrrell.)

Croats Have a Go at...OSS Policy

It seems that Croatia has joined the Euro-club of OSS enthusiasts. At least that's what I'm told. I really must get around to learning Serbo-Croat....

Update: More details in English here (with thanks to James Tyrrell.)