[talk-au] Need help wording flyier

[John Smith]

--- On Fri, 31/7/09, Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm guessing you've already checked out the links from
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Recruitment_Poster
> ?
> 
> e.g. http://ajr.hopto.org/osm/pr/OSMFlyer-English.pdf

Yup, but I've sort of have 2 conflicting goals here, on one hand I need to explain what OSM is, on the other I need to tell them that there is a mapping party in Nambour on the 15th in the most terse way possible, so that people will actually read it.

I pieced together the following, but it is much too verbose at present.

=======

We would like to bring to your attention, an informal social meetup for GPS and OpenStreetMap enthusiests on the 15th of August at Nambour.

This is an informal social event, there is no hard and fast rules about what you can and can't talk about but there will be people on hand if you wish to ask questions.

Until recently the coverage of Nambour in OpenStreetMap was very poor so a meeting was proposed to try and rectify the situation.

So why do we do we go to the trouble of making street data when google maps is free?

There are many free maps on the Internet,most of them are only for private use and must not be re-distributed. They are often not up-to-date and incomplete or contain errors which are only corrected slowly.

In all those maps you don't have the original data to create them, only images of the data. There are all kinds of fantastic things you can do with map vector data but unfortunately mapping companies usually stifle this kind of innovation due to restrictive licensing of the data.

OpenStreetMap has people like you and me collecting raw data themselves, all over the world, sometimes as a team. With our own data an our own software we are independent from commercial providers. As in Wikipedia, everybody can take part.