[OSM-dev] finding OSM users by their home locations

[Russ Nelson]

The OSM webserver will tell you the ten people with home locations  
closest to your home location.  It would be useful to be able to get  
more than that, for the purpose of inviting people to attend mapping  
parties so they can become more effective and enthusiastic OSM  
contributors.  If you move your home location to the location of the  
mapping party, you can get ten people, and if you move it around some  
more, you can get more than just those ten.

So, being intolerant of boring, repetitive activities, I've written a  
program to find OSM users by their home location.  You give it a  
lat,lon, and the radius in degrees of the circle in which you want to  
find people, and it repeatedly changes your home location until it's  
gotten everyone.

Is this program a good thing or a bad thing?  If it's a good thing,  
then great, I'll use it.  If it's a bad thing, then how do we stop  
other people less cooperative than myself from writing the same program?

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson