Everybody loves Burning Man!
Well I don’t, but then I’m grumpy like that. Anyway, imagine my excitement waking up this morning knowing that Burning Man 2008 had just started. Here’s where the photos will start appearing as people get re-hydrated and find an internet connection …
Imagine my excitement even more when I saw on Mikel’s blog that OpenStreetMap (OSM) had pushed new map data (and tiles) out the door for this years burning man, see Burning Man Earth Information Release for no more information what-so-ever ;) Hopefully Mikel will update soon with all the work that went into it.
A quick tile shuffle later, like what we did for Beijing, and we once more have OSM live in Flickr …
So when all those burners come back, it should be easily for them (you know, relatively) to drop those photos onto the map. Why not go see the new map for yourself, it’s rather pretty.
George summed it up well when she said …
“That’s part of what appealed to us so much about a fantastic project called OpenStreetMap – a free, editable map of the world, made by the people in it. What an exciting prospect to be able to see maps that are alive and have been lovingly created by citizen cartographers all over the world.”
It’s the power of The Creative Commons (and even more importantly, people) that make stuff like this work, and obviously we’re hoping to continue to do more. The glib answer I give for why this this sort of thing is important is so I can say “If you’re upset that we don’t have map coverage for where you are, you can grab some friends, go out, and make some”.
As sort-of true as that is, probably a better answer is to read Mikel’s posts on Mapping the West Bank and Ups and Downs Mapping the West Bank (once his server recovers from whatever is hitting it, not us!). Which will hopefully illustrate far better than Burning Man why user created mapping data that can be used by anyone willing to use the CC Attribution-Share Alike license, is important.