Harry Wood Blog

I started cycling to work about four weeks ago. Yes. I took the plunge and became a “London cyclist”.

Cost was the first thing putting me off. I considered a dodgy Portobello road market £50 bike, or a more ligit second hand one for about £100 from Camden cycles. Then pondered whether it’s worth spending that much when the bottom end new bikes (e.g. halfords or decathlon) start at about £150. Then I realised that the bike is only part of the cost. There’s the padlock, lights, hi-vis clothes, and helmet to buy. So does this mean I might as well spend a bit more on the bike? I probably would have ummed and ahhhed about that forever, but then I found an old cobweb-covered brown bike in Grandma’s garage. Problem solved!

Of course, as long as you use the bike to commute, saving tube fares, even quite expensive biking equipment pays for itself within a few months. I really wasn’t sure if that would actually happen though. There were a few other things I was worried about:

Death, and the danger of it. I always perceived cycling London streets to be quite a dangerous undertaking. I think most people do. I’m cautiously learning how to do it, having only ever cycled on the hilly country roads of Holmfirth half a lifetime ago. I now have a more first-hand appreciation of cyclestreets.net and their very nifty display of three levels of cycling routes: quietest, fastest and balanced (try it!) My journey to work has plenty of options, and I can mostly stick to quiet roads, but in fact that’s probably true of most London journeys.  I was nervous about crossing big junctions like on Holloway Road here, but actually traffic lights usually allow a little rest, and then saftey in numbers as a whole flock of cyclists make the same crossing. Meanwhile more minor junctions like at Offord Road have yielded my closest encounters of a near-collision kind. I haven’t died yet, and on the whole it feels a lot safer than I was expecting.  Plus the exercise will be doing my life-expectancy some good.

Punctures. So far I’ve had none, but my cycling buddies have talked a lot about them, so I guess it’s just a matter of time. I imagine this will be a big pain in the ass, but as long as I can go a while without it happening…

Oily Brokenness. So far I’ve had none of this either, although my handlebars seem to be coming slightly loose. I noticed London bike shops don’t seem to sell a full “toolset for cyclists”. I found one during a trip to Amsterdam (along with a cheap padlock) So yes. I have tools. I think I’m ready for some oily brokenness, as any man should be right?

Sweatyness. I don’t have shower facilities at work, so I though this might be a problem, particularly in the summer. But again, not as bad as I had expected. I guess you never really get the heat of the sun at commuting times, and fortunately my route to work is vaguely downhill (cyclestreets.net shows nice altitude profiles too)  I change into a fresh T-shirt when I arrive, and hopefully don’t smell much.

Drunkenness. I imagine having a bike could be a bit of a drag when I want to have a spontaneous after-work drinking session. I don’t seem to be doing that much these days (open to invitations), but I’ve noticed my cyclist friends have developed a knack for drinking sensible numbers of pints. Not really something I’m known for.  Bah! …surely I can ditch my bike somewhere safe enough (or I could drink sensibly I suppose)

Bad weather. Will I just be a fair weather cyclist? This also remains to be seen. I wasn’t a fair weather cyclist on the way home last night. In the gathering darkness and rain (and perhaps even a bit of an autumnal cold wind) it felt pretty miserable. It wasn’t even raining hard, but I got absolutely soaked. But I kind of enjoy facing the elements. The rain made me day-dream about kayaking as I cycled along, and I made it home well enough. I guess it gets harder as the weather gets more severe. If it’s too miserable I will give up and take the tube.

But let’s not forget the people cramming onto tube carriages would’ve had a fairly crappy journey too. This is the best thing about cycling to work. For most people (millions of people) the commute to work is dead time. Sure you can try to make use of time spent on the tube. I got really organised about making sure I had a good book to read, but even so, the daily drudge of “mind the gap” and “move right down inside the carriage” was really starting to grate. It feels fantastic to have escaped it. Journeys to work feel like a lively and invigorating time now. Not only that, but I can actually get into work in 30 minutes instead of 45!

Becoming a London cyclist is a bit of a leap into the unknown, but I now feel stupid for not having tried it earlier.

(photo Copyright All rights reserved by SINFOGEO)A few weeks ago we had a big OpenStreetMap conference, the annual “State Of The Map”. This year it was in sun-baked Girona. “State Of The Map 2010 felt like a coming together of all my OpenStreetMap friends from around the world” Read my more detailed write up over on my user diary. There was a diverse variety of talk topics, from OpenStreetMap technical nitty-gritty, to big business GIS uses, to worldwide travels and humanitarian mapping. The full list of sessions is here. My talk this year was part of the “community track”.

Party Time! Good and bad ways to run OpenStreetMap mapping parties

UPDATE: Video of the talk is now available

I seem to have become the chief event organiser for OpenStreetMap in London, not because people massively admire the way I do it, but because it’s actually fair amount of effort, and I’m the one who got suckered into doing it. So this talk was mostly about my experiences of running these regular “mapping party” events, which we do every two weeks as a “mapping party marathon” (Sounds interesting? Check out when the next one is!)As I stressed in my talk, my approach is not ideal. There’s lots of things I don’t get around to doing. In particular I haven’t really tried to drum up press coverage of events. For one reason or another we never have very much luck at attracting new poeple. Although we try to be welcoming to new faces, it mostly ends up being a fun social meet-up where people know eachother. In the questions I was asked “what are my ideas for attracting new people?” to which I gave a hand-waivey response, but the truth is I don’t really know.

So I thought it counterpoised my talk quite nicely when Thea Clay got up and talked about outreach to non-technical communities and spoke about some of the successes she has had reaching out to local community groups and attracting new people to mapping parties in the U.S. This seems like a direction we need to go in, and I hope to find time to try this more in London. But then again…

Ultimately I think the most important message she had, was that OpenStreetMap is too difficult for non-techy people. They get the idea of creating open maps. They enjoy the outdoor aspect of data gathering, and they will have a lot of fun when you first take them out to do this, but the minute they sit down and take a look at our map editing tools “you can see the look on their faces change”.

Perhaps then the most important role of OpenStreetMap events, is to foster the existing OpenStreetMap community in an area. I would even go as far as saying that most outreach work at the moment should target boring old techy people and developers.

This is not the end game. We absolutely want to attract young people and old people, mothers and grandmothers, but getting techy people excited about OpenStreetMap is easier and actually far more effective than anything else at this stage. They’ll learn the tools quicker. But more importantly, these are the people who will go out and embed OpenStreetMap in their websites, taking it to new audiences, or if we’re really lucky they’ll go on to help solve the technical problems of OpenStreetMap and make the next useabilitiy break-throughs.

Obviously any publicity is good publicity. Any mapping party is a good mapping party, but I’m trying to consider where effort is best spent. Are we getting ahead of ourselves to try to engage with local community groups? Maybe I’m just working the geek angle, because that’s what I know best. As I said in my talk, press is important, and press (or PR?) is something OpenStreetMap needs to get better at.

Ruby code for converting to UK Ordnance Survey coordinate systems from WGS84? It’s one of those things I’d assumed would be a five minute search -> cut-n-paste job. But no. Well now you can cut & paste from here.

Using Proj4 and the proj4rb bindings

You can do all manner of coordinate projecting using Proj, and this is available within ruby code via proj4rb. To get set-up, install proj. On ubuntu you can do:

sudo apt-get install proj

download the proj4rb gem file (the ruby bindings), and install the gem:

sudo gem install proj4rb-0.3.1.gem

To use in a plain ruby script:

require 'rubygems'

require 'proj4'

To use in a rails app, add a line to your environment.rb file

config.gem "proj4rb", :lib => "proj4"

Probably all obvious to any pro-rubyist, but I got stuck at various stages of that. Anyway once you’re set up…

This code will do a conversion from WGS84 lat/lon to eastings and northings:

lon = -0.10322
lat = 51.52237

srcPoint = Proj4::Point.new(Math::PI * lon.to_f / 180,
                            Math::PI * lat.to_f / 180)

srcPrj  = Proj4::Projection.new("+proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +no_defs")
destPrj = Proj4::Projection.new("+proj=tmerc +lat_0=49 +lon_0=-2 +k=0.9996012717 +x_0=400000 +y_0=-100000 "+
                                      "+ellps=airy +datum=OSGB36 +units=m +no_defs")

point = srcPrj.transform(destPrj, srcPoint)

puts "http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=" + lat.to_s + "&mlon=" + lon.to_s + "&zoom=16"
puts "Converts to:";
puts "http://streetmap.co.uk/grid/" + point.x.round.to_s + "_" + point.y.round.to_s + "_106"

Originally I was trying just the ‘destPrj’ string, and calling the ‘forward’ method, but this seemed to be skipping the datum conversion, resulting in everything being 100m out. It seemed to be necessary to use the ’srcPrj’ string and the ‘transform’ method, to get the datum conversion happening.

You can look up the mystical proj strings on spatialreference.org

A pure ruby implementation

Like many naive developers who have gone before me, I started out thinking that these coordinate transformations should be acheivable with a few simple formulea, and was expecting to be able to copy & paste a block of ruby code from somewhere to do it without installing any gems.

I didn’t find any such code, but frustration with proj problems (before I got that working) led me to create a pure ruby solution, by porting this pure javascript code by Chris Veness into ruby. So there we go:

osgbconvert.rb - Conversion to Ordnance Survey coordinates in pure ruby

You can run it to see an example conversion with the output:

wgs84 lat:51.52237, wgs84 lon:-0.10322

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.52237&mlon=-0.10322&zoom=16

Converts to:osgb36 lat:51.5218609279112, osgb36 lon:-0.101610123646581

Converts to:easting:531691, northing:182090  As a grid ref:TQ31698209

http://streetmap.co.uk/grid/531691_182090_106

This includes ported code for Convert co-ordinates between WGS-84 and OSGB36 and ported code in one direction for OS Latitude/Longitude to OS National Grid (coordianate systems explained below) Also I haven’t faithfully stuck to what Chris’ functions return.

There is a bunch of maths, but it was quite a straightforward syntax conversion, and it comes in at about 150 lines of code. Somebody should do this for other languages. I’m sure other languages offer more beefy libraries equivalent to proj4. The main benefit of this is for quick copy & paste coding.

Mind you, if you are copying and pasting this, be sure to worry about the fact that it is LGPL licensed by Chris Veness… Credit me too if you like. I don’t care. I also came across another implementation, license unknown.

About Ordnance Survery coordinate systems

Chris Veness’s page is well linked because the code comes with a comprehensive description of what’s going on. However I misunderstood a few things even after reading it several times. Here’s my noddy guide to Ordnance Survey coordinate systems:

WGS84 is what I would call the “normal” latitude and longitude coordinate system. These days web developers passing around latitude and longitude values are normally using this. It’s what OpenStreetMap works with if you want to point to a location with a URL such as : http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.52237&mlon=-0.10322&zoom=16 (the placr.co.uk office).

Ordnance Survey OSGB36 - Involves coordinates which are also called “latitude and longitude”. The numbers look very similar, and in fact if you get them confused and use one in place of the other, you’re generally only ~100 metres off. At this point I could mention “datums” and “ellipsoids”, but who cares? How do we fix it? With the above ruby code, use the function convertWGS84toOSGB36 (or convertWGS84toOSGB36 in the other direction)

Couple of formatting things to note: Both WGS84 and OSGB36 latitude & longitude values can be expressed in degrees and minutes rather than decimal, and with N S E W letters on the end. For example 51°31′20.53″N 000°06′11.60″W If longitude has a W on the end it would more “normally” be a negative number. The letters on the end do not make this an “Eastings/Northings” coordinate. That’s a different system…

Ordnance Survey National Grid Reference Eastings and Northings look totally different. For the placr office the easting is 531691. The northing is 182089. On these numbers the first digit is special. It’s identifying which “grid” square we are in, counting from zero. Everything in London is in grid square 5,1

National Grid References with letters are the older more human friendly version of that. So “TQ 3169 8208″ is the equivalent. The 5 and 1 are removed, and instead we represent the grid square separately at the front. Everything in London is in grid square “TQ”. Just to munge things together a bit more, we might drop one digit of precision and drop the spaces to give “TQ316820″.

Don’t ask me how Landranger sheet numbers fit in. I’m going back to my WGS84 thankyou very much.

Last Wednesday was London wiki wednesday again. We struggled a bit with organisation this time. The usual to’ing-and-fro’ing around finding sponsors and hosts was confounded by a problem with the website. SocialText foolishly switched it to be hidden from… well the web… which really doesn’t help when you’re trying to promote an event. Despite these difficulties, enough people came together at NYK to make for a decent gathering, with some interesting presentations. Actually the low attendance makes for some nice face-to-face group discussions.

For me the highlight was chatting with Paul Downey. I’ve run into him once or twice before, and was familiar with tiddlywiki, which he presented again. This is a somewhat wacky animated javascripty tool which is quite different in it’s interface and behaviour compared to “normal” wikis. Surely the work of an evil genius…

But it turns out Paul Downey is also responsible for this remarkable creation:

see it bigger to read the funny labels. Also with annotations on flickr.

A fascinating cartoony metaphorically abstracted representation of web technologies. I came across this a couple of years ago, while I was still an integration consultant, and I found the “SOA tower of babel” particularly amusing (and accurate)

I’m at the Aid Information Challenge day watching the final hack presentations. This seems to be part of a series of hacking events happening at the Guardian offices, following on from rewiredstate National Hack the Government day (where I made the find my nearest registry office/hospital thingy).

The idea is to get techy types to meet with people from other areas, in this case aid organisations, and look for ways to bring their skills to bear, preferably in the form of super-quick super-agile thrown-together-on-the-day “hacks” which get presented at the end. I probably should have got more involved in a mapping hack. There was a fair bit of this going on, and I got into a few conversations. Lots more potential for OpenStreetMap hacking and promoting OpenStreetMap by getting it into projects.

Instead though. I mostly busied myself with throwing together this slide deck “OpenStreetMap For Aid Information” which I then presented:

OpenStreetMap For Aid Information

I originally thought I’d have two minutes to talk at the end of the day, but I actually talked for 20 minutes as a side-line talk during the day.The main emphasis of my talk was on two nice recent aid information examples Haiti and Kibera. Some related links:

• OpenStreetMap.org homepage
• Haiti earthquake maps and resources
• mapkibera.org
• Donate to OpenStreetMap

I also mentioned London events.

For the past few months I’ve been doing some work for placr, and this week I’ve joined the team full-time.

I’m working on a new transport related API *, with some interesting geolocation and realtime dimensions to it. Currently this is all aimed at partner projects and B2B type clients, so I’m afraid there’s nothing fun to show you yet. Hopefully we shall go public with an API at some point, but it’s not the priority at the moment.

The work is very interesting, and now that I’m not splitting up my week with other things I can try to build up a bit more momentum. We’ve been starting from scratch.  A fresh subversion repo! I wanted to build a RESTful API outputting both XML and JSON, so I’m doing this in Ruby on Rails. I settled on this after doing some experiments with django piston first. Some interesting problems encountered with both though (despite this being very much core to what these frameworks are supposed to be good at)  Still plenty of framework details to work out, but it’s all good fun. I’ve also been using various libraries for HTML scraping.

The team is following (and getting involved in) the various open government data debates, because we’re looking at making use of some of these datasets. These are a moving target at the moment though, so as we look to develop on top of these things, agility is going to be important.

* What’s an API?

These days I’ve been socialising far too much with techy people, and was rather taken aback when someone (might have been my mum) interrupted me in the middle of my well rehearsed little job description to ask “What’s an API?”. It stands for Application Programming Interface.

I rather liked the way Richard Boulton described it as he demo’ed his API at last weekend’s rewired state event. Pointing at a this screen full of data he said “It may not look very nice to you, but to a developer this is beautiful”. That particular screen full of JSON formatted registry office data did look beautiful to me, so I developed this thing last Saturday. An example of an API and an application built to use it.

WhereCamp.EU was pretty mind-blowing. I wrote a few posts to the official site during the event:

• Day 1 sessions complete. Now geo-beers
• Day 2 in progress
• Wow! That’s a lot of sessions

From a personal perspective it was massively enjoyable and rewarding, but the whole thing flew by too quickly. Preparations started months ago, but suddenly on the day there was so much to do, and at the same time so many people I wanted to chat to and fascinating sessions I wanted to see.

It got off to quite a blurry-eyed start due to geo-curry with the team the night before, followed by staying up late to prepare slides. As organisers we decided we would need to seed the unconference “wall” with some post-it notes in the first session slot, to get things going and spur other people to participate by setting an example. This meant I was feeling stressed and tired from the off, but it worked well, and despite a lot of people being new to the unconference style, a great atmosphere of participatory buzz carried the proceedings forwards at an alarming pace.

You can read more about my session “The State of the States in OpenStreet Map” on the WhereCamp.EU wiki

This got a pretty small audience because I was up against some awesome sessions from the other organisers, but I guess I’ll get the opportunity to re-use some of these slides on some other occasion. I might change the background colour. I’d had a few beers with the geo-curry, and the purple-green gradient seemed like a good idea.

I also contributed to the OpenStreetMap Q&A Session (mainly by asking the first question)

On the Saturday I ran another little session called “OpenStreetMap Practical - Never edited OpenStreetMap? Bring your laptop and we’ll show you how”, which kind of worked, although it clearly needed longer than the 15 minutes we had.

The event left me completely shattered, and I was quite surprised when I popped into the pub for a quick pint afterwards to be confronted by a massive crowd of geo-people all enthusiastically continuing the discussions.

I’ve just been checking out some blog responses and write-ups of the event: Gary Gale (vicchi.org) , Guardian Open Platform blog ,  Ed Parsons , Steven Feldman (giscussions) , jokru , Eamonn Neylon , James Cheshire (spatialanalysis.co.uk)  As I say, from my perspective the whole thing flew past very quickly and it was quite difficult to know whether the event was actually going well, so it’s gratifying to know that people enjoyed it, and found the format successful.

WhereCamp EU is tomorrow! I’ve been organising the posters:

We have a small team of organisers who are all people from the London geo-conference/meet-up circuit. In particular we have Chris Osborne who frequently puts together the very popular #geomob events, and Gary Gale who seems to live his entire life at geo conferences. These combined with a team of five or six others (including myself) have come together to plan two days of geo-map-technology goodness.

We were very successful with our marketing of the event before and during release of the tickets. Maybe a little too successful. It’s a limited capacity venue, and it is very much at its limit. Some people were slow to book their place. These people …well you can’t come (especially Steve)   Sorry about that

The posters involved lots of fun playing around with sponsor logos (In truth it was only fun at first, and quickly became a big hassle. But anyway)  We are of course hugely grateful to these organisations:

Gold sponsors: GoeVation & OS OpenSpace, and Guardian Open Platform.

Silver sponsors: Axon Active, bing maps, ERSI UK, Google Maps, data.gov.uk.

Bronze sponsors: DBVU, ito, nestoria, SVGOpen, and Yahoo! Developer Network

Being an “unconference” we haven’t actually planned the content of the conference in a lot of detail. This is where we’re relying on the imagination and motivation of the attendees.

“The attendees drive the content of the sessions on the day instead of having a prescribed schedule and set of content. Therefore, the event is what you make of it, and is only as fun as the people who attend. So be prepared to speak and contribute.”

This may sound chaotic, but I’m reliably informed that it does actually make for an fun and fulfilling event. Looking down the list of attendees, I can see that there will be plenty of amazing ideas. Should be a fair amount of OpenStreetMap related stuff hopefully. I’m excited to see what kind of sessions people come forward with.

Last week we had a London Wiki Wednesdays event, and this time I was involved helping to organise and promote it. You can read what happened here (including lots more pics) The event was hosted by NYK line thanks to Alek Lotoczko.

Alek along with me, Gordon, and Andrew managed to prod David Terrar enough times to get things moving in advance and get the event off the ground. I did some facebook messages and also created a twitter account, @LondonWikiWed, and went on a mass-following mission. All standard web2.0-social-media-promotion tactics. Sadly we’re still failing on a web1.0 level with google still sending people to a stale site which David Terrar is in charge of, and needs to sort out. The biggest thing we need to do for next time though, is sort out hosting and sponsorship in advance. As well as being the backup option for hosting, Alek very kindly forked out for some beers on the day, but we should try to find different sponsors next time. I set up some Sponsoring London Wiki Wednesdays information. A good promotion opportunity for someone I think.

The event itself was great! Lots of interesting talks. I was particularly interested to learn a bit about Pfizer using semantic MediaWiki for a patent database (but I’m still not convinced that the added complexity is a good idea as part of a normal wiki).

I gave a quick talk about crisis commons wiki, and about the kinds wiki mess which have built up there. I pointed to out-of-date information, duplicated information, and other structural and cosmetic problems. This was as a kind of case study in wikis going wrong, but I wanted to stress that these problems are solvable through clean-up work. I showed my initial efforts to do so, but this wiki is open for anyone to help with the clean-up effort, so this was an invitation for people to join in. I also put in a plug for Crisis Camp London (Something I’ve been along to a few times. When I get round to it, I’ll blog about that too)

(photo Benjamin Ellis CCBYSANC)

Slides on slideshare

In last week’s blog post I casually mentioned the Haiti earthquake, and how we had a little project going on, to improve the map of the area on OpenStreetMap. Since then the scale of the disaster has become clearer to me. 200,000 feared dead, and the story has been top of the news headlines all week. In keeping with this, the response by the OpenStreetMap community has been impressive, with massive mapping progress in a very short space of time. What started out for me as a little casual doodling in of streets in Yahoo! imagery, has rapidly turned into a collaboration of hundreds of mappers using post-quake aerial imagery.

 Within 48 hours we had a very complete looking map of Port-Au-Prince and Carrefour. Mikel Maron drew attention to this progress with a classic before and after map comparison, and I’ve seen and heard several people expressing surprise and amazement at the speed of the OSM response. Knowing how the community works, I actually didn’t find it that surprising. In fact next time we respond to a disaster, now that people get the idea, I’d hope we could turn around this kind of mapping progress within 12 hours. (or within 12 hours of accessing good imagery).

For me the exciting thing about this past week, has been an increase in recognition of OpenStreetMap as a valuable source of map data. In a scramble to help by providing GIS expertise, many organisations have come to OpenStreetMap as the best source of data. More exciting than that (so amazing!), is to get a message of thanks from some people running search and rescue teams, who have loaded our data onto Garmin units to use on the ground. See Uses of OpenStreetMap data by crisis responders for more examples.

The important point to stress here is that OpenStreetMap is offering map resources covering the Haiti Earthquake in a variety of formats. You can browse the map as conventional fluid web interface, but our open data allows us to do so much more than that.

• We can offer downloads of raw OSM XML data, ESRI shapefiles, Garmin img. These are listed at the top of that page. Well done to GeoFabrik for responding quickly with their specialised hiati downloads service
• Mobile devices across many platforms can make use of our data or map images. See this section and the main ‘Software for mobile devices’ list. People heading to Haiti for rescue and recovery missions, should juice up their devices with this good stuff!
• We can render the map in different ways. User:Ldp set up haiti.openstreetmap.nl as a custom Mapnik rendering showing building damage and refugee camps. These are special tags invented for the purposes of recording this information using OpenStreetMap’s open tagging approach
• We can provide rendered maps tiles for use in online apps. Anyone setting up a website e.g. to help with the earthquake response, can display OpenStreetMap maps in much the same way as embedding a google map. (It’s a little known fact that you can even use Google Maps API to display OpenStreetMap tiles. See Google Maps Example)
• We can offer maps files for printing. The list of printable files includes vector formats (SVG and PDF) and high resolution raster images offered by me! This was my main technical contribution over the past week (assuming you don’t count wiki link fiddling as technical!) I set up some hi-res map images of Port-Au-Prince and Carrefour and a script to rebuild the image with updates every hour. At the time I hadn’t noticed GeoFabrik had done the same thing, but they’re covering different areas and larger images, so it’s all a good variety of offerings.
• We can set up other types of customised geo services for Haiti using OpenStreetMap’s raw data. Check out Open Route Service Haiti and Nominatim Search for Haiti

A lot of these things were possible using the collective expertise of the OpenStreetMap community who, uniquely, have become fully accustomed and experienced with having access to raw map data.

I mentioned 48 hours as an approximate measure of how long things took, but as ever with OpenStreetMap, things are never really complete. The mapping efforts in Haiti are very much ongoing, and you can help! Check out the Haiti project page for details. We’re mainly looking at mapping more outlying country roads, anything new you can find to sketch within the various imagery sources, but also making use of some other sources e.g. street naming from U.S. military maps. If you’re new to OpenStreetMap mapping you’re very welcome to get stuck in, but be prepared to climb a bit of a learning curve with the editing software (set aside an hour)

But we need to get the message out about the map resources I’ve listed above. I think that’s more important than encouraging people to join in with mapping at this stage The Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team in their message said “Please be assured that we are using your data - I just wish we knew about this earlier”.

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UPDATE: I’ve written about OpenStreetMap and Google MapMaker in Haiti in relation to the wasted duplication of effort split between the two communities (and relating some other blog posts on the topic here and here and here)