[OSM-talk] Some time ago ...

[Ulf Lamping]

Am 04.01.2010 18:25, schrieb Aun Johnsen:
>
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com
> <mailto:ulf.lamping at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Now ...
>     In this area we have a lot of mappers, activities like mapping parties,
>     fair booths, local press contacts, ... in other words: we have a
>     community.
>     On the software side: We have good aerial imagery from Yahoo! (and
>     others), Servers are pretty stable, tools are usable, ...
>
> I see a lot of activity from the German community, I know that Brazil is
> somewhat behind in the track, and we will probably continue to be behind
> for quite some time. We have still not been able to get any good press
> coverage even though we as a community have sent out two press releases
> (from the entire community), I guess that will come as the community
> grows and we get more on the map. Maybe the German community have some
> advice to how we can do it better?

Maybe that's partially because there's a vital computer geek community 
here in germany, that helped with the start ;-)

I'm really not an expert on press contacts, I'll try anyway to remember 
the story and correlate it with the OSM state in germany at that time - 
because I think this is important here. Please correct me anyone if I 
remember it wrong.


IIRC ...

a) The first german press article I've seen (beside some blogs) were on 
a geek computer magazine, the "Linux Magazin". This magazine 
concentrates on free and open source themes, so it was natural for them 
to report about OSM. At that time a lot of germany was still "almost 
empty" with the "exception of a few spots".

b) Later on, the more general purpose computer magazine "c't" (and 
"iX"), reported about OSM. Some cities were already well mapped/usable, 
e.g. Karlsruhe.

c) Then general media "Spiegel", regional TV, ... made stories about 
OSM, which resulted in a big rush of new mappers and new map data. At 
that time, several larger (especially university) cities were already 
mapped well.


Looking at the brazil map (Rio, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte), I guess you 
are somewhere between a) and b) in brazil.

Hopefully this gives you an idea which kind of media to contact [1].

> P.S: A few of us are working on translating the wiki to Portuguese, in a
> hope that this can attract more mappers, I have in that work noticed
> that there are some pages documented in German only, if the German
> community could be so helpfull to give English translations, than we
> would be able to translate more pages to Portuguese (the few words I
> know in German is not worth mentioning in public).

A lot of people here in germany are at least able to read an english 
wiki article. However, there are enough that won't, so there are some 
german pages :-)

Several years ago when I went to brazil, I was confused how little the 
number of english speaking people really was. Even the reception of one 
of the larger hotels in Juiz de Fora (population: ~500000) wasn't able 
to speak english - resulted in funny conversations ;-)


If you have a list of articles in question, I can post it on the german 
list and ask for help. No promises though.

Regards, ULFL

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Writing_a_press_release