[talk-au] North Star Award

[John Smith]

--- On Sun, 23/8/09, Liz <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:

> Another Eurocentric Award ??
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Awards
> North Star
> The North Star has been awarded to people who have either
> completed all the 
> roads within a District, Small County, Large town or City;
> or for people that 
> have solved a big problem for everyone within OSM.

These things can go a number of ways, while they might inspire some people they can also cause division if people get sour grapes for not getting the recognition they think they deserve.

> I would think that a lot of Australian mappers have
> completed the equivalent 
> of a large town singlehanded

At least those of us in rural areas :)
 
> and as we don't navigate by the North Star, we could
> self-award ourselves 
> Southern Cross Awards, and we'd be happy for Southern
> African and South 
> Americans to join in too

Getting away from stars, well at least distant ones you also have the 'aurora australis' :)

> we could be more precise and suggest that a mapper has put
> in 90% of the roads 
> in an area of so many square kms??

By GPS or by sat imagery?

> Owing to the lack of OSM I've actually been reading some
> books and found one 
> writer noting that even the use of a Mercator projection is
> Eurocentric and 
> they weren't talking about OSM.

Which Mercator projection and why is it eurocentric?

Spherical Mercator is used by google and others because it's much simpler calculation than some of the other projections from lat/lon to x/y