Nieman Foundation at Harvard
In the Guardian, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Lucy Chambers compares the for-profit Goliath of mapping, Google Maps, to the open source comer, OpenStreetMap, in how well they map Sarajevo and environs.
The stark difference between these two images of Sarajevo really brought home the impressive coverage of OpenStreetMap and more importantly it really shows the power of open data, open software and communities of people driven to solve problems. Giving people the tools to solve problems is really powerful.
I wasn’t aware there’s a nice tool to compare, side by side, how Google Maps and OpenStreetMap cover a particular area. Here’s my hometown, for instance, and here’s our office. (Google Maps, for reasons unknown, has long argued that Harvard’s president lives on our front lawn. She doesn’t.)
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