A quick overview of what is happening in the open source mapping world:
We recently interviewed Ed Parsons on this blog.
It was a while ago but OpenStreetMap now have permission to use the Yahoo aerial imagery to plot roads onto – see their entry on it. This will prove particularly useful in cities, where the imagery tends to be good and GPS reception tends to be bad.
Steve Coast (from opengeodata.org) has reached day 16 of his ‘Month of OSM’. This is an interesting approach to funding open source projects where Steve worked out what he would need financially to support his working on OpenStreetMap for a month. He put out a request for this amount to the community and it was raised pretty quickly. If you sponsored him and want to check that he is working you can use the ‘Stevecam’ (if he is not working you get some tasteful curtains instead).
This weekend (27-28 Jan 2007) OpenStreetMap are having a mapping party in Central London. If you are around and want to help please do, no GPS required (due in part to the Yahoo imagery).
