User:Ewmjc
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Mike Collinson
It is OSM Foundation election time, and I'm just completing a one year term on the board and am standing for re-election.
My concrete "platform" is to continue contributing back to OSM by performing un-glamorous but necessary administrative tasks as membership secretary and StateOfTheMap conference organization. Specifically, I'd likely to be more timely with membership processing and to provide news on activities, something which one member has rightly pointed out that we lacked in our first year. I am writing a Perl-based membership system to track membership and to allow members to opt in or out of news letters from the Foundation.
A wider motive for standing is to help broaden OSM from its UK starting point to a genuinely international organisation. We've made great progress in European and western countries and need to keep going. Recently, Etienne and I have launched the GPS2Go program to donate GPS devices to developing countries where they can be unaffordable to most would-be contributors.
I've enjoyed working with the current board members and hope they all get re-elected. Andy and Etienne have been both energetic and diligent in their respective roles as Secretary and Treasurer. Mikel has also been very proactive in internationalising OSM with road trips to India, Myanmar (Burma) and Egypt.
And now the real stuff:
The Boy Scouts taught me about maps and even today I can get almost as much enjoyment looking at a map as visiting a place. In a past life I used to be a geophysicist which gives me just enough knowledge about surveying and cartography to be dangerous. My interest in OSM started with some research into the field of geo-referenced information and, well, it just sucked me in.
I map on foot, bicycle and car though find cycling the easiest to cover areas in detail. A few trips on cross-country ski and snowmobile have also been great fun.
I now log with a recently bought Garmin ETrex Legend HCx since I can very conveniently load and display the latest OSM map for the country I am in. I still sometime use HP iPaq with built in GPS device as I wrote an MS Windows Mobile application that allows me to enter waypoints that are automatically converted to OSM nodes. I edit using JOSM and, increasingly, Potlatch.
I'm now living in Stockholm where I'll be based for a while. I'm concentrating on mapping the island of Lidingö and the nearby mainland and cleaning up and completing the entire Baltic coastline. I've also made a start on Vilnius, Lithuania and added to the centre of Tallinn, Estonia.
- 2005-2006. I used to be based in Sydney, Australia and did the majority of initial mapping of that city, along the NSW coast, Toowoomba in Queensland and made a start on Brisbane. You can see general Australia east coast progress here.
- 2006 - 2007 Philippines. I also spend time in Manila and started mapping there and the Clark Special Economic Zone. I believe I've mapped OSM's first tropical island - Borocay - tough going on all those beaches, but someone had to do it. I've also done a wee bit of mapping of Marina del Rey, Los Angeles from Yahoo images and local knowledge.
- Summer 2007 UK. Mapped my home town area, Otley, Yorkshire, UK and surrounding villages in detail and have put in definging roads and features for Wharfedale from source to the River Ouse. Made a start on the town of Skipton and also the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. I'll be back there off and on ...
- Oct 2007 Sweden: *Västerås OSM Mapping party and mapped cycle routes to Stockholm and Enköping.
- Dec 2007: Completed Baltic main coastline.
- Dec 2007: Digitised Russian Arctic coastline.
- Feb - June 2008: Motivated by Andy Allan's great Cycle Map, I've been out mapping the national and regional cycle routes that criss-cross the Stockholm area.
- June 2008: Some more work on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
I look forward to hearing from any one else mapping in these areas.
In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use my contributions for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
Miscellaneous Offerings
GNS Placenames to OSM Conversion Script(offline version, Perl, 0.5 API)
Country Bounds - a list of 249 countries and dependencies with rectangular bounding and centre lat/lon coordates. Generated by taking the maximum and minimum values for each country from the US government GNS Placenames database.
PGS Coastline to OSM Conversion Script (offline version, Perl, 0.4 API - OUT OF DATE)
Awards
MegaStar
Ewmjc is awarded a MegaStar for uploading one million track points.
