Open Street Map - Haiti

Maybe you have never heard about it so I am gonna explain a little bit about what Open Street Map (OSM) is first. Open Street Map is maps for open source where anybody can join and create a portion of maps and use it for free.You might wonder if it is the same as Google Maps but it's different. Google maps is actually NOT open source, you can use it for free as well though. The whole contents of Google maps are licensed by Google and you have to pay certain amount of money if you want to use it for the purpose that Google may want that to happen without being paid (i.e. for commercial use).

So real open source map is only Open Street Map not Google maps, Yahoo, Bing maps and any other online maps. First I got to knew OSM is time when I participated in Open Source Conference Tokyo 2010 on August 11th. I joined a session about OSM and the guys out there got me interested by the following awesome video.

OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The video illustrates how the maps for Haiti was created over time right after the earth quake occurred. From what I've heard, one of the community members of OSM came up with that idea in oder to help Haitian people. The best part is not only lots of people in the community participated (what we call Mapper) but ito made awesome video to encourage more people get interested in the activities. Here is another video.

Open Street Map 2008 Map Edits from Peter Dunn on Vimeo.

I got soooo interested in OSM and came to think what I can do something for them. I've heard it's so easy to become a mapper so I am gonna register the OSM user and draw some maps around my place for starters.