[Talk-gb-westmidlands] Announcement: Second City, Birmingham, and its surrounds completed

[Andy Robinson]

It is with great pleasure, and not just a little excitement, that I can 
announce that the mappers in Birmingham having set the task of 
completing the whole of the city by Christmas have achieved just that.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.4708&lon=-1.8972&zoom=12&layers=0B00FTF

Birmingham and the area inside the major motorways which has been 
mapped, including Solihull and Sutton Coldfield, has a population of 
approximately 1.25 million. The achievement is somewhat similar to that 
of Hamburg, announced a few weeks ago. The major difference is that 
Birmingham does not have any Yahoo! aerial imagery, thus the whole of 
Birmingham has been mapped by GPS and many hours of cycling, walking and 
driving by the major contributors.

About 100 mappers have been involved in completing the whole work, 
although the vast majority has been contributed by just a handful of 
OSMers. The list of the major contributors can be found on the mappa 
mercia wiki page. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mappa_Mercia

I'd like to say a specific thank you to Brian Prangle (brianboru) and 
Christoph Böhme (Xoff) who joined me over the last weeks to complete the 
Christmas target, they weren't the only ones, but without their efforts 
we would never have made it!

As a group (the OSM Midlands User Group (MUG)) we are planning how to 
promote the Birmingham map and will be meeting at our monthly social to 
discuss ideas on January 15th. We have jointly lots of interesting ideas 
to explore, some of which are on the wiki. After the 15th Jan we plan to 
put out a wider media release.

Of course the mapping work doesn't end here. We still have plenty of 
POI, verification and address data to add in Birmingham plus there is 
still much work to be done in the coming year to complete the "Black 
Country", Walsall and the area to the west of the M5.

Cheers and Happy Christmas

Andy (blackadder)