[OSM-talk] Some time ago ...

[Aun Johnsen]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

>From the top of my head I know for a fact that historic=manor english
page is a link to german page, I have posted a request of translation
on the discussion, also several power tags are well documented in
German and mostly stubs in english, I'll see if I can make a more
complete list tonight, it is not really the desired activity during
business hours.