I believe from the bottom of my heart that we live in one single planet having varied geographical and cultural terrains. The magic of OSM is that it has given the common man the ability to map their own territories and share their data with their fellow beings. I’m new to this idea of OSM and l’m very excited about it.
Considering my location as can be seen in the blue dot on the map, l am hereby proposing to create a joint Indo-Bangla Mapping Project, where we can collaborate and contribute and have fun.
Obviously this is going to become a cross boundary project. And since mapping parties can be organised online, l call upon the mappers from both the countries to facilitate the project at a local level, where more people would be involved and would be given the power of OSM.
I think this community forum is the best place where we can kickstart a discussion if it interests anybody.
I’m definitely looking forward to some brainstorming on this proposal.
You’re correct technically. Although since l’m from lndia, l certainly had expected your active facilitation in this kind of international project. I’m yet to get any kind of response from @Sawan_Shariar .
I thought about the project area more elaborately. Here’s the map area l wish to cover in this project. Can you make a rough guess regarding the type of topography we can cover in this selected region ?
First of all, the area is simply too big and culturally far too diverse, just WB, Tripura, and Bangladesh will do.
Second, at least on the Indian side, we need way more contributors, as well as do more outreach to make folks aware about OSM, and to get newbie contributors to map features accurately in enough. Kolkata, for instance, is flooded with beginners attemping to map features, make several mistakes without any attempt to look into the wiki, read the documentation, and fix things (which is a problem I’m also to be blamed for, as I’ve never really taken much of an initiative to guide beginners outside of North Bengal).
However, there are a lot of mapping goals we can share, like mapping shared infras (power lines, railways, roadways, land borders), bordering villages on either sides, adding names in English and Bengali, linking with Wikipedia articles & Wikidata entries (wherever needed and possible), which is where I see and believe the Mapping Project can see some success.
I’d advise you to join the OSMWB and OSMBD groups on Telegram, and start discussions for the same.
