[talk-au] MS open maps

[Jubal Harpster]

Hi Alex,

You’re correct, we are mostly based in Seattle with one person currently based in Belgrade. And fair question on the armchair mapping from the other side of the world.  We picked Australia for a number of reasons 1) Important geography for Microsoft, 2) active OSM community, 3) Open-Data friendly government policies, 4) common language, 5) warm and sunny beaches.

Without going to much in to our longer term plans, Microsoft has been investing in OSM for a while from imagery, to sponsoring events, and open sourcing data.  Given the level of interest and the growth of the project as a whole, now seems like a good time to accelerate the effort.

-Jubal


From: Alex Sims [mailto:alex at softgrow.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2017 5:06 PM
To: Jubal Harpster <jubalh at microsoft.com>
Cc: OSM Australian Talk List <talk-au at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [talk-au] MS open maps

Hi,

It looks as though you are all based in Seattle, rather than Australia, is that right?

The big question for me is why are you armchair mapping Australia from the US.

How can you be sure that your edits are correct and what is Microsoft’s secret plan for Australia :) ?

Alex


On 22 Dec 2017, at 10:24 am, Jubal Harpster <jubalh at microsoft.com<mailto:jubalh at microsoft.com>> wrote:
You may have noticed some Microsoft folks present on the mailings lists and Australian Slack channels in the past few months.  Microsoft have convened a small Open-Maps team that is starting to work on the OSM data in Australia. Our team is not importing data, using algorithms or robot edits to improve the map, we are using iD & JOSM to make improvements.

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