[OSM-dev] Request for PHP programmers for TWISST project

[Nick Austin]

Hello,

I'm a user of TWISST, a free service run by volunteers that sends
tweets notifying the best viewing times for overhead passes of the
International Space Station. Earlier today they put out a request for
help via their web site:
http://twisst.nl/timezones

In summary they need volunteers to help program in LAMP (Mysql 5.1, PHP 5.2).

If your too lazy to follow the link here's the first few paragraphs
from the web site:

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"To send people correct ISS-alerts, we need to know in which timezone
they are. We need a script to tell us that."

"To find out their timezone, we send peoples coordinates to the
Geonames server. Geonames is an awesome service. However, sometimes
Geonames is swamped with requests and then we don't get timezones (we
could opt for a more stable paid subscription, but we don have any
money to invest here). New followers then are left with UTC as their
default timezone, which leads to confusion."

"Also, sending requests to Geonames all the time causes a lot of data
traffic. We would like to cut on our diet of data traffic."

"So, we would like to figure out ourselves which timezone to use for
certain coordinates. From what we gather, this is not impossible. It
takes a map with the timezones of the world as polygons and a script
to find out in which polygon a set of coordinates lies.:"
---

It occurs to me that because OSM uses GeoNames that this would improve
the chances of OSM requests succeeding, so everyone benefits.  For
further details see the link above.

Once again, I am just a user of their service, I have no connection at
all with TWISST.
Nick.