Bangalore: Two months back, when D. Alagesa Pandian decided he wanted to map his hometown, Hosur, some 40km from Bangalore, he started organizing a party around it. Pandian sent a party invite on the OpenStreetMap mailing network and six people turned up.
Mapping network: OpenStreetMap member B.V. Pradeep says he maps for fun and because he wants to contribute towards society. Hemant Mishra / Mint
The group that got together at 8am at the Hosur bus stand some days later was part of the OpenStreetMap network, which aims to map the world.
The group split into three and biked their way through the congested town armed with global positioning systems (GPS), pen and paper. They helped put faces to email addresses and even introduced two Hosur localities into the movement.
“What is important is mapping the skeleton of the city like the arterial roads, major landmarks, temples and shopping areas,” says Pandian, who treated the bunch to a sumptuous meal prepared by his wife at his house in Hosur.
After an afternoon siesta, the bunch set out again, this time on foot, to map Manjusree Nagar, where Pandian resides. That over, they collated all the gathered data and uploaded it on to the digital world.
“I made a couple of friends that day,” says the 34-year-old Pandian, a doctor of botany who had joined the mapping network just a month earlier. “I hope to meet them and some new people at the next party in August.”
Steve Coast, a software entrepreneur currently based in San Francisco, founded OpenStreetMap, or OSM, in the UK in April 2006 to create free, digital maps. The not-for-profit foundation uses the crowdsourcing model, on the lines of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, urging global communities to translate satellite images into roads dotted with bus stops, offices and footpaths. It has 130,000 registered users globally.
There are no formal editors for OSM but at least 2% of the users act as reviewers, says Arun Ganesh, 21, an engineering graduate who aggressively mapped parts of Chennai in three-four months on to OSM. “As (the) number of users grow, number of edits also go up and increase veracity.”
India boasts of hundreds of users today, with active mappers spread across Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and even Ludhiana. Just a year-and-a-half earlier, there was nil activity on OSM from India.
Culturally, Indians don’t have a habit of using maps but this is slowly changing, especially among the younger people in technology companies.
“Whenever there is some planning involved, I see people using maps but not when they are stuck in a traffic jam,” says Pandian of his friends and peers. Pandian himself runs a technology company, Bangalore-based Mapunity Information Services Pvt. Ltd.
Indian mappers, mostly male and tech-savvy, are also catching up with mapping parties, a concept popular in Germany and the UK.