[Talk-gb-westmidlands] Time to put Kings Heath Village Square on the Map

Brian Prangle brian at mappa-mercia.org
Fri Nov 4 11:18:01 GMT 2011


Dear Councillors

This new major development in the civic landscape deserves to be
represented on maps of Kings Heath  to show yourself as a community to the
world.

Help is at hand - local volunteers from OpenStreetMap took *2-3 days*  to
have this  major change to Birmingham's cityscape surveyed and displayed on
a globally-recognised online digital map. You also have the base data
available for producing maps in any cartographic style and highlighting any
geospatial data you choose for any community publicity you want.  *AND IT'S
FREE* of all royalties. See
here<http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.432885&lon=-1.893418&zoom=18&layers=M>for
our map

It's a great example of what citizen volunteers can achieve
who passionately care about how their neighborhoods are portrayed. Kings
Heath organisations can demonstrate how up to date they are in
the digital world by making use of this resource.

You'll search in vain on the big mapping providers for this change: none of
Googlemaps, Bing, Mapquest, the AA, the Ordnance Survey,or Multimap had
this change on their maps today as I write this email.

TIME TO PUT KINGS HEATH ON THE MAP: OPENSTREETMAP  TAKES DAYS; COMMERCIAL
MAPPING PROVIDERS TAKE MONTHS IF NOT YEARS

Several dozen volunteers, including residents, UK and global visitors have
achieved an incredibly rich and up-to-date map of our city. If we could
collaborate with Birmingham City Council and community organisations in a
structured way, together we could achieve far more and really put
Birmingham on the map! In fact we could lead the world in community-based
digital city-mapping where a City administration, community organisations
and its population work together to produce something faster,cheaper and
better than what's available commercially.

We are favourably identified as a successful "Big Society"project in a research
paper written by the Office of Civil Society in the Cabinet
Office.<http://www.arnaudriegert.com/wp-content/uploads/international-examples-big-society.pdf>
(Appendix
A1)

I look forward to  putting even more of Kings Heath on the map with you

Regards

Brian Prangle
Mappa-mercia Community Co-ordinator
0121 604 1141
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