The
group gathered at the Bloc 11 Café on Saturday morning, Feb.14th for an
information and demonstration session about this new, dynamic worldwide
system of map making that anyone who wants to, can contribute data.

With
the aroma of good coffee in the air, Russ Nelson of Pottsdam, N.Y. gave
info/demo on his laptop to the curious bunch. Nelson travels the
northeast spreading the word to communities about this exciting
invention.

Open Street Map is a free and editable map system of
the entire world which allows participants to view and edit
geographical data in a collaborative way.

"About 90,000 people have contributed worldwide," Nelson said.

One
of the fascinating features of the four foot square map was it showed
the shapes of the buildings in all areas of the maps. Observers could
see the shape of any home or apartment or business.

"Part of
what's exciting about this is someone's gonna do something really
amazing with this. Someone will think of something totally amazing and
everyone else will say 'holy—-, I never thought about that'", said
Jason Woofenden, 28, of Cambridge, a fan and regular contributor.

Ben
Schwartz, 23, of Cambridge, picked up were Woofenden left off, adding:
"For example, think of the One Lap Top Per Child Program. It's
remarkable with kids in Africa being given computers with Wikipedia
already built into them. The reason they can do this is the open free
licensing that Wikipedia (and Open Street Map) has. Without that, those
programs could never afford this. Probably the same sort of thing will
happen with these maps."

Woofenden explained "the free he's
talking about means it's free to download, change and publish. Open
Street Map is the same way."

About an hour later, one of the
group with their GPS unit returned and gave their collected data to
Nelson, who entered it into the computer and new changes and additions
were made to the living/changing map.

Shankar Viswanathan, 33,
of Arlington, returned excitedly: "I recorded as many names of
businesses and house numbers as I could on the way to Porter Square and
back…I've always been kind of a map geek, if you want to call it
that. The problem with commercial GPS units is you can't really change
anything or edit information. I like the open nature of this. You're
free to edit, within some restrictions."

Christopher Schmidt,
24, of Cambridge, a regular contributor, stood over the impressive
large map laid out on the coffee counter. He said it was made at the
MIT media lab, printed by "Mapnik" software.

"I think this is
a pretty map," he said. Pretty impressive might be more accurate.
"Getting this printed out and seeing it come out of the printer is fun.
I do this because I love to do it."

Nelson said there are also
potentially very useful tasks for serious situations like another
Hurricane Katrina. People with GPS units could map out very current
situations of damaged roads, bridges, buildings, etc. and quickly
report them back to update emergency maps.

Explaining OSM's
history, he said: "It's grown organically. It started about four years
ago with one guy making one map of one park. Now there's been almost
100,000 contributors."

"I've always loved maps, but I also developed a frustration with the quality of the existing commercial maps," he said.

The
culture of Open Street Map is different than the corporate culture,
according to Woofenden, who works professionally with computers. He
explained that the maps are always works in progress. "We're more
interested in our community being valuable rather than a product being
valuable" he said, referring to the imperfect creative process of the
organic multi contributor network. He said, "This really means we want
a reputation for a vibrant (contributing) community, rather than
necessarily a perfect product."

The website Open Street Map is www.openstreetmap.org