[Talk-us] Night of the living maps 07.02.2012 - a 'virtual' global mapping party

[Matthias Meißer]

Hi US community,

since a few weeks, we had the idea for a global action, that we'd like 
to announce today: www.nightofthelivingmaps.org
At Thursday, the 07.02.2012 we stay awake a whole night long, to trace 
aerial imagery for the areas, that where we currently lack a lot of 
informations: the countryside. Outside the big cities of your counties.
Sadly we have no real big international events here at OSM, maybe we can 
change that with this 'LAN party'?

So we please you, to ask your local OSM community, if they doesn't want 
to start a small local party. It's not that much work, usually you can 
get a room by univeristy/Hackerspace/local goverment/... for free. Then 
you just need a few notebooks and Coffee to get the party started ;)
We thought that it would be great, if you submit your changesets with a 
comment starting with '#notlm...', so we are able to select them for 
animations or just view where all of you are working.

Even if it's not the main goal to promote OSM and to attract newbies, it 
would be great, if you could present your event to others. You will 
find/can upload flyers and social media contacts right here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Night_of_the_living_maps/promotion
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Night-of-the-living-maps/163865540386200
https://twitter.com/NightOfTheMap


But there is still enough stuff to do, for all of us:
-setup animation rendering/statistics
-maybe we can get a webcam wall or something similar?
-add a tips&tricks page for your tips on good productivity and how to 
surround the usual aerial tracing pitfalls

Of course we know, that using just Bing, is only #2 choice for adding 
details to our database and that survey is what we all realy like. But 
in this case, we believe, that it is a good compromise (see hints in 
Wiki). Currently there seem to be no definitive answer if this technique 
is right or wrong, maybe we can decide on this when years passed and we 
can take a look back. So for now, let's just do what we are good at: 
Create together a real good map :)

bye
Matthias
(user:!i!)