[OSM-newbies] How to (awesomely) map a small Northern Ontario town

[Richard Weait]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Stewart C. Russell <scruss at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm spending a few days next week in a town in Northern Ontario. It has
>> all the roads in, thanks to the import of Canada's map data by dedicated
>> OSMers. What it doesn't have is the trails, museum(s), hotels,
>> restaurants, shopping mall, donut shop ...

> http://walking-papers.org - gives you a map in pdf format, intended
> for precisely this purpose.

As the chorus has sung, walking-papers.org is a great place to start.
Sometimes paper and pencil and X marks the spot is just the way to add
a Tim Hortons.

You can add some great local colour to the map while you are there,
but you can leave an even better gift if you can share your enthusiasm
for OSM with others while you are there.  If you can map cool stuff in
a couple of days, imagine what a new local mapper can do over the
course of their residence there.  Consider reaching out to the local
community; there might be a potential mapper there who has never
mapped because the editors scared them?  You could take an hour to
meet them, enjoy a coffee and ten minutes of coaching on an editor and
"create" the next Vespucci of Northern Ontario.

Given a limited time and a good road network as a "skeleton", perhaps
mapping a smaller area, in more detail is better than adding "all the
gas stations"?  Perhaps mapping the town community centre, with its
park, ball diamonds, soccer pitches, curling rink, hockey rinks, and
the surrounding businesses will provide inspiration for a local
potential-mapper?  Perhaps mapping all the businesses on one side of
Main Street will encourage a local to do the other side of Main
Street.

So in short (too late) if you can't finish building the map, try to
start building a mapper.  ;-)