This month, Schuyler Erle and myself will hold a series of multi-day workshops in several India cities. Researchers, students, programmers, activists and members of the community are invited to participate, learn, and take stewardship of their city. These will be very practical, hands-on days, covering the entire toolset of OpenStreetMap and empowering participants to lead the growth of free and open mapping in India. We will map India!

This kicked off by just idly chatting about bringing together Mumbai Free Map and OpenStreetMap. Schuyler had worked with CRIT over the past couple years to bring extensive geographic data of Mumbai online, and spread the word of open source geo. Why not share with OSM? Well that quickly spiraled into an idea for a continent wide month long trip. And it would have remained just an idea, if not for the amazing organizing that has taken place in just a few months. We’re now geared up to visit six cities — Pune, Mumbai, Trivandrum, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkotta — and educate, and learn, and discuss, and MAP! If anyone reading is based in these cities, or has connections there, and are interested in participating, please do get in touch.

We’ve been organizing on the FreeMap wiki, and will also be bringing the OSM India wiki page up to date. You can find full details on the workshops there. There’s a Google Calendar for the OSM India events and dates in the OSM Current Events calendar as well.

So I will be blogging, obsessively if there’s time, on Brain Off, posting photos to flickr with tag freemapindia2008, making animations and other artifacts, and of course, maps.

Thanks everyone who has helped bring this to reality — I can’t quite believe this is actually happening. Fantastic!

Check out Richards post on using OSM to make cycling maps for your GPS (you can’t do this with Google BTW).

Nestoria, has long been a friend to OpenStreetMap. They were the first commercial usage of OpenStreetMap, using the Isle of Wight data.

Now they have launched a pure OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria. Anywhere you search for property, in the UK or Spain, this version uses OpenStreetMap. They’re still using Google on their main site, but we’ll see how long that lasts ;).

A year and a half ago, only the Isle of Wight was complete enough to use with Nestoria. Today OpenStreetMap is good enough for an entire site. Impressive progress.

And there’s another way to use OSM Nestoria. Browse around and find a place to live without good OpenStreetMap coverage .. and you’ll have some mapping to look forward to after your move!