Building the Map
Whether you saw it at State of the Map or in the posting below, many of you have seen and commented on Mapzen, CloudMade’s upcoming web-based mapping tool. We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from people on what they like and what they’d like to see. I am pretty excited about it. We hope that it will introduce more people into the OSM community, accelerate the growth of the map worldwide and also improve the quality of the map by making it easier to add the attributes that sometimes aren’t seen but really make the map work.
CloudMade is committed to helping the OpenStreetMap community build the best map in the world. That goes right to our roots and our founders’ passion for OSM. With Mapzen we are building the next generation of mapping tool, that will greatly improve mapping for existing mappers and make it easier for new mappers to get started with mapping. This will help ensure the best of community mapping, rapid response and map quality. We think Mapzen is a great step in that direction and offer it to the community in that spirit.
As many of you know, CloudMade’s Community Ambassadors have been working very hard to build the map through outreach to local groups, holding mapping parties and working on behalf of OSM at trade shows and conferences. This has helped spread the word on OSM in selected regions in the US, but in the process we have learned that we can get a wider reach by working with larger national and local community groups. Based on this, we have made the decision to dissolve the ambassador team and build a team that will focus on partnering with national and local groups, support finding and importing public data and communicating local success stories.
Going forward, CloudMade will be actively working with national and local groups to promote OSM and community mapping. We are working with the Geo-Georgia group on a very cool project to map the city of Atlanta in a weekend (September 11-13, if you want to help). The goal is to make Atlanta a showcase city for the OSM map and there’s a great team of people working on that. You’ll hear more about that as the time gets closer.
Our goal here is simple: Build the Community. Build the Map. We hope that our efforts can make a difference, but the community will build the map. If you know of ways you can help us in that, or ways we can help you, let us know. Send a message to community@cloudmade.com.
Building the MapJuly 23rd, 2009 - Posted by Marc Prioleau in Uncategorized | | 6 Comments
on July 24th, 2009 at 4:54 am
[...] критика CloudMade таки достала. Верное решение, послы из Cloudmade никому не нужны, поддержка местных [...]
on July 24th, 2009 at 7:32 am
Marc, you need to dance with the one what brung you! Cloudmade is a UK company, and so you should be using the british term: “made redundant”. “Dissolved” sounds too much like the scene with The Cleaner from Point of No Return.
on July 24th, 2009 at 8:33 am
That sounds very sensible! Just a quick question: which countries will this team be working in?
I ask for two reasons. First, just to see if it will happen in the UK where I live! And second, because you might want to be careful about saying *you* are going to map a showcase city when lots of other loose volunteers and groups have created showcase cities all around the world, as found on bestofosm.org for example. I think you guys are great, but you could help smooth things over by saying you’ll create *another* showcase city, or a city that showcases some particular new idea.
Oh, and Mapzen looks great, good work!
on July 24th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Cloudmade lays off Ambassadors…
In a prosaic statement, Marc Prioleau announced on CloudMade’s blog …
(…) to dissolve the ambassador team and build a team that will focus on
partnering with national and local groups, support finding and
importing public data and communicati…
on July 24th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Hi Tom. Thanks for the comment. I didn’t intend to say that Atlanta would be the first or only showcase city. There are obviously a lot of those already, although fewer on this side of the ocean. And the process is the same: Local groups and volunteers.
Glad you like Mapzen. Feedback is always welcome, good and bad.
on July 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Marc,
We here in Atlanta working with the GeoGeorgia Initiative greatly appreciate the cooperation with Cloudmade. The GGI’s goals are to grow the geospatial community and industry in Georgia. We are also trying to push the virtues of free and open source digital data. If we’re successful in becoming a showcase venue, it will be by following the lead of our colleagues in the UK, the rest of Europe, and Africa by working together.
Frank Howell