[OSM-talk] Partnership between OSM and local government?

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Mon Sep 20 21:48:16 BST 2010


Hi,

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> That is why I would like to hear from cities that are between 
> 100,000-500,000 population on what projects have they collaborated on 
> with their city council.

[...]

> City council doesn't care too much about maps of restaurants, and we 
> aren't such big city that we need that such specific kind of map because 
> there are maybe 5-6 decent restaurants any everybody knows them.

5-6 decent restaurants for 100.000 people? Are you in England or what?

Jokes aside, here in Germany mappers have cooperated with the government 
on various scales. Almost always this was done by local groups without 
involvement of FOSSGIS (our would-be national OSMF chapter) or OSMF 
themselves; only where the government wanted a contract to be signed we 
sometimes involved them. That should answer your initial question 
(whether you need permission) - no you don't, but please make it clear 
that you are not "the OpenStreetMap project" but "the local 
OpenStreetMap group".

One successful example, albeit with a smaller city, is the aerial 
imagery we received from Lauf. They made their images available for 
tracing, and now they've got a very good city map on their web site, 
much better than the old one, more current, and free:

http://lauf.de/index.php?mid=9

We've also received data sets of buildings from the city of Rostock in 
Germany, and some other places have made aerial imagery available as 
well. I don't know how things are in your country but one thing that 
many city councils are after here is specialist maps for cyclists and 
specialist maps for the disabled, especially wheelchair users. OSM 
offers an attractive path to get there; while medium-sized cities will 
often have the money to license ready-made maps, their money doesn't 
easily get them something with wheelchair info in it, or even something 
where they have a chance of adding wheelchair info other than having 
someone paste symbols onto a standard map with Illustrator.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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