Volunteer Mapping

Thanks to Christine Egger for pointing the way to this video from the CloudMade guys describing openmapping volutneering. This really cool part at left shows a time lapse of volunteer mapping parties with mobile phones and GPS transmitters spreading out across the city, generating valuabe data the whole way. 

A couple of weekends ago, we tasked the Stanford Hackathon guys with building out a GPS ping function for The Extraordinaries app - and now it's in there... and we're very excited about using The Extras for open source mapping. See this post about Route Tracking. Here's how I described the potential of open mapping to a friend the other day:

The most committed of urban-geeks can tag and rate their city as they move through it. Come to a dangerous intersection? Tag it with "danger" and take a photo. Or record yourself talking about why the intersection is dangerous. Create a living narrative of the city. This approach is reminiscent of Christian Nold's work - but requires no special gear. 

Go further and cover the buildings, sites, and sounds of your city. Tag, rate, photograph, record audio. Create urban folksonomy. Turn it into the best damn tour guide system in the world... heads and shoulders above the likes of Frommers:

* Give me a walking tour of 3 miles or less that focuses on architecture.

* Give me an architecture tour narrated by architects only

* Give me an architecture tour narrated by by artists

* What is this building? 

* Show me the 10 happiest places in the city

* What does this street look like at night? 

* Am I safe here? 

* Show me the best taquerias

So, clearly, we're outside the domain of The Extraordinaries, which would serve only as a data gathering mechanism... but the potential for an iPhone app in this domain is extraordinary. Does anyone know of any existing apps? What's out there and what's in development? 

Here's the cloudmade video: 

and a hot visualization of one year of open mapupdates:

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

thanks to Michel Bauwens for the post.

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In case you don't know this other volunteer mapping initiative, you may be interested by http://openstreetmap.org/. No mobile client I am aware of, though.