Vanuatu and OpenStreetmap
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Meet Hervé Soksok, Vanuatu’s first GPS-toting, creative-commons-licensing community cartographer.
I ran into Hervé at Wan Smolbag’s computer centre a few weeks ago and we swapped email addresses. He’s been attending daily computer classes there, where he spends an hour each day learning basic computer skills and — I suspect — finds the time for a bit of self-directed study. He’s a smart guy, with excellent English, but he can’t afford the commercial computer training available in town, nor the courses at the university, and he’s otherwise unemployed.
Meanwhile, Vanuatu has no street maps. Sure, there’s a dinky little thing in the tourist guide, but it shows little of use to locals. Google Maps and Yahoo Maps have nothing beyond the shapes of the islands.
When Kurt at Metaweb heard me talking about trying to find a handheld GPS to map Port Vila, he said he’d ask round his gadget-toting friends. In the end, he donated his own handset, a Garmin eTrex. Now Hervé’s going to be using this to walk the streets of Vila, noting important places (schools, churches, nakamals) and uploading the results to OpenStreetmap.
OpenStreetmap is the wiki version of Google Maps. It accepts GPS tracks recorded anywhere in the world, and provides an online editing system to tweak and annotate them. With luck, in a little while, you’ll be able to see Vila’s streets there.
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