Last week at the Ignite Spatial: Boston event I gave a short talk – 5min, 20 automated slides, 15sec each – about OpenStreetMap and why I think it can be interesting for town administrations to look at the OpenStreetMap model. In a nutshell:
- OpenStreetMap is successfully based on open crowdsourcing, a horizontal multi-directional work-flow model, to build and maintain the world’s largest free geospatial database.
- Open crowdsourcing helps to collect local knowledge across your residents, improve local geospatial data, engage residents and provide a 24/7 feedback loop for them.
- Wide variety of data and information distribution: OpenStreetMap allows output from raw data access for developers to print map renderings for tourists.
- Built-in data interoperability: no matter how many or in what part of the world people are contributing to the project, it all fits together to one piece.
Bottom line: towns should take a serious look at OpenStreetMap and the underlying model. It’s proven to work in many places and provides some valid points town administrations can benefit from.
There should be videos of all presentations online at some point. My colleagues Holly and Chris talked about our 3D video game/planning participation project in Chinatown and about the 10 most wanted data sets (and one state GIS department at stake) we would like to see to for better planning decisions in the Metro Boston region.
Update: Videos of Ignite Spatial: Boston are now available on YouTube. That’s me, struggling through the format 