Open Street Map at Manchester Free Software

Our friends at Manchester Free Software invite all loiterers to a meeting at Manchester Digital Development Agency Portland Street at 7pm on 17 June

John McKerrell gives an introduction to the collaborative mapping phenomenon that is Open Street Map, the project that aims to generate a streetmap of the entire world. John will also explain the workings of the OSM editors and show how to map your own area.

The full announcement is on their web site

http://manchester.fsuk.org/blog/2008/05/28/openstreetmap-17th-june/

OpenStreetMap aims to provide map data that gives people the freedom to use and distribute it. Google let you use their maps, but they don’t give you permission to customise them without restricting you to their tools. People can contribute new map data GPS, or by tracing aerial photography such as that from OpenAerialMap (another related projectaiming to provide open data), and fix errors in existing data.

Manchester Free Software is a group that started up last year with the aim of promoting free software, giving people the freedom to examine,use, modify and redistribute it, as defined by the free software definition of the GNU project.

Useful links:

http://openstreetmap.org/

http://openaerialmap.org/

http://manchester.fsuk.org/

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

http://www.gnu.org/