As regular readers of this blog will know, a few weeks back we started an interview series with people doing interesting things in the open geo (particularly, but not only, OpenStreetMap) space. It’s one of many small things a start-up like ours can do to try to promote the ideals we support - and the datasets we build our business on. 

If you are doing something interesting in open geo, be it building tools, engaging with the community, freeing existing data, or even just spending time in the field collecting data, we’d like to hear from you and use our blog as a forum to help your innovation become known.

Specifically we would love to hear from anyone doing the following

1. Tool builders - how do we make it radically simpler for “normals” to share their data with the world?

2. Country specific voices - it used to be at SotM there would be “The State of X” talks about the OSM situation in a given market. I almost always found these talks very interesting as it was a chance to learn about a different country and culture. In many cases different countries came with different solutions to getting their country mapped and building a community around it. While a blog can never replace the learnings of a conference, I see no reason not try to revive this tradition here. We recently interviewed Sajjad about the state of OpenStreetMap in India, and we’d love to do the same for other countries. 

3. On the topic of events, if you’re planning a major event around geo innovation, we’d be happy to hear from you and lendyou our platform as a way to convince people to attend. See for example our recent interview with Jan, one of the organizers of wherecamp.de. 

4. While our focus is and always will be on open geo there’s also innovation happening in the traditional closed world. Let us know if you see someone doing something particularly creative that we should explore. 

5. Several years ago I abandoned the OSM mailing lists, I just didn’t have the time ad work happily supplies me more then enough email. I don’t regret it at all, but there is the occasional topic or discussion I learn of only after the fact. Such is life, and I suspect there are many people like me. If you’re engaged in a constructive debate around OSM (ie not a flame war) and would like to broaden the audience, feel free to get in touch and perhaps we’ll use an interview to draw the topic out.

Finally, please don’t feel constrained by these suggestions, if you’re doing something interesting around open geo we would like to hear from and chat with you.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Ed (freyfogle)