[Freegis-list] Cooperative mapping project proposal

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Hello Brett,

On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 09:37:34PM +1000, Brett Matson wrote:
> Any questions, comments or advice would be greatly appreciated.

first of all: I am happy to see that many people around the
globe like the idea of free geographic data collection.

A project like the one you proposed brews in my brain since over
two years now. And appearantly it brews in many other brains
as well :-)

Some of my thought on such a project:

- the availability of Free GI Data is different for some
	areas in the world. While for the US there plenty
	of data released as public domain we have a desolate
	situation in Europe. Thus European people can
	easier be convinced to contribute to a free data project
	just because they might be (later) able to have at least
	some free GI data of Europe (better than VMAPL0).
	To my mind you can't motivate US people to collect data
	which already are available in the public domain.
	Conclusion: think about where is the aimed source
	of motivatable contributors.

- sampling any point in the world is a too diffuse mission.
	It would be better to start with some most interesting
	(ie. useful) datasets. 
	Personally I think that river networks would be a quite
	nice theme to start with.  This type of data is scalable,
	not too comprehensive and allows interesting use in science.
	Conclusion: think about what people can be motivated to
	collect. What do they need? Perhaps you should involve
	people to discuss needs in order to find some ranking.

- starting with an empty layer will create lots of discussion
	and perhaps confusion within the group of first
	contributors. While this is certainly good, a profound
	base data set would help to increase motivation from the
	very first beginning.
	Conclusion: do you have some money available to collect
	a datasset to start with? If you can find a small dataset
	to sample which will directly be used for some project
	that would be a perfect PR hook.

thats all for now.

Please keep posting your progress, thought etc. - I am very
interested in your project!

BTW, there was a project (currently seems to be abandoned)
that had the similar goal, FREEMAP:
http://www.freemap.nett.org/english/index.html

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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