[OSM-talk] Maps and names

Russ Phillips russ at phillipsuk.org
Fri Sep 1 12:02:37 BST 2006


On 01/09/06, Andy Robinson <Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> Russ, your comment about being a postman in the past really made me think
> that there must be a huge number of retired post men and women, bus and taxi
> drivers, milkmen and the like who all have a really good memory of what
> street is named what and where certain points of interest are located. Give
> them a printed OSM map missing the names (even if they are present now in
> the data) and they would be a great resource for gathering correlative data.
> It might also be a very stimulation exercise for them.
>
> Question is, how do we find them? Is there a journal for retired postal
> workers for instance?

Not that I know of. When I was a postie (about 13 years ago now) there
was an internal Royal Mail magazine, and I think that may have gone to
retired posties. I'm not sure, though - I didn't retire, I just got
another job ;-)

I'm not sure how typical it is, but the posties in my sorting office
knew most of the local retired posties. That was in a mining village,
though, so it may not be true of more urban areas.

It's occurred to me before that if you could get each postie in a
sorting office to carry a GPS for a day, then you'd have traces for
virtually every road covered by the sorting office. Not sure how you'd
go about persuading the Royal Mail to co-operate, though.

Russ




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