14k.be

This weekend we organized a session with some OSM-enthousiasts (like myself) and Africa4U. Africa4U does very small-scale development projects in several african countries and they did a mapping experiment exactly like HOT does/did in Haiti but without knowing about OSM or HOT (how is that even possible!). We wanted to set the record straight and introduce them to OSM and HOT!
 
We introduced OSM in a technical sense, showed what the project was all about, what HOT does and teached the Africa4U volunteers to use Potlach2 and some JOSM. 
 
An important part of the introduction, that became more of a discussion after a while, was about copyright and using existing map data in OSM. We made it very clear it was not an option using sources without permission of the authors! This introduced another problem; asking for example the cartography department of Kinshasa would pose no problem (maybe after paying an "administrative fee") but would this be a legal source to use? Where did they get the data? Do they own the rights to the data themselves? A solution was not found for this problem and this remains open.
 
At least we hope Africa4U learned some usefull stuff, maybe even recruted a new member and that they will start to contribute to OSM with their development projects. We suggested asking for aireal imagery for specific regions but we have yet to recieve a list of regions to focus on.
 
We did a small presentation with slides taken from some HOT presentation(s):
http://www.slideshare.net/xivk/africa4u
We also showed these videos:
Geospatial Revolution / Episode Four, Chapter Four: Mapping Power to the People
Evolution of European OpenStreetMap coverage